KEY POINTS:
The minute you hit Marseille, the oldest city in France, you know you're in for fun. It's sizzlingly different from the rest of the country and there's no city like it.
It was once tough, rough, dangerous, a sailor's port town full of Arabs and goodness knows what exotica. Now it's more sophisticated and a lot of money has been spent fixing it up. I like a city with guts, independence, sex appeal and a strong personality.
Marseille hits you between the eyes and it's addictive. Marseille would be the man you had a passionate affair with.
So it was quite hallucinatory finding myself in Carot, Marseille's biggest professional cooking school, with an All Black on either side of me, telling some of the top French chefs and sommeliers how to suck eggs _ or, more precisely, how to wrap nuggets of New Zealand venison in grape leaves and throw them on the barbie. For the benefit of those readers who, like me, don't follow rugby but who often wonder about this alien All Black species, I can tell you that they are like the lamb racks and venison I was cooking _ properly aged with no extra condition, no fat and are deliciously sweet and tender when you bite one on the arm.
The whole of Marseille is hopelessly in love with les Blacks and the feeling is mutual.
The French newspapers say they are loved not only because they are super-sportsmen but because they are polite, nice and open to everyone they meet. So there I was, showing French journalists and chefs how we cook mussels, lamb, venison and apples - with one of the most famous chefs in the south, Francis Robin, as my assistant - when these two beefy blokes front up wearing toques (chef's hats) and black aprons.
Their arrival at my workspace coincided with an extraordinary power surge of flashing cameras.
Every time we tried to stuff a mussel, we had to smile.
The purple Maori potatoes, which they call vitelottes in France caused a tsunami of approval, and the strict French chefs got tight-lipped about our casual attitude and the fact that Isaia Toeava and I threw parsley over our shoulders. But they did manage a smile when Anton Oliver and I did the three-kiss thing.
When the journalists asked Anton about his favourite meal he said New Zealand lamb and a simple salad.
Isaia, much to his great credit, confessed his favourite was corned beef and taro.
Some of the French turned up their noses at my Asian-inspired salad dressing, but I explained that in New Zealand we borrow from a lot of cultures, so to have Mediterranean sumac on the lamb, and nuoc mam (fish sauce) and sesame oil in a salad which included purple potatoes and mangetout (snowpeas) was not out of the ordinary for us.
Vivre la difference.
- Detours, HoS
