Valentin Raffali’s cooking is poetic—think Arthur Rimbaud—but there’s also a little bit of Rambo in the 28-year-old Marseillais. “I’m obsessed by the energy of cooking. I just abandon myself to it,” he says. “I grew up with Star Wars and the Jedi mindset.”
The previous evening, he and his guest-chef colleagues Loïck Tonnoir and Clément de la Jonquière fed 100 people at Livingston, Raffali’s vest-pocket-size restaurant. It’s on a side street just off the Cours Julien, a colorful, graffiti-scrawled square frequented by young creative types from all over Europe and even the United States. And Livingston is part of the reason why Marseille has now usurped Lyon as the gastronomic rival of Paris.
Fortunately, I was among his guests. My meal began with the best fish soup of my life, served with focaccia that was streaked with melted cheese and dotted with garlic purée. Next came a boned skate wing in a beurre noisette with capers, tiny cubes of pickled cherry, and broccoli flowers. And then the dish that took my breath away: poulet de Bresse, the finest fowl in France, in a camel-colored pool of sauce Albufera (Madeira, chicken stock, cream, butter, and foie gras). One of the most elegant sauces of the French culinary canon, this one was on par with the first Albufera I ever tasted. And that one was made by the late, great Paul Bocuse.
I was stunned by the precision and succulence of this food, and I wasn’t the only one. At a neighboring table, another guest was dabbing her eyes. “This cooking is just so beautiful,” she said, smiling and shaking her head. “And such a surprise from Valentin, a guy who made his reputation with grilling and ferments and spices.”
Raffali describes his regular menu as “grilled pizza cooked on the barbecue, two raw-fish dishes, one naughty fried thing, and two vegetarian plates. But for me it’s all about breaking the rules, because I get bored … I have this urgent need to create, and I do that through cooking.”
He learned some skills from his French mother, who texted him dinner instructions while she was finishing up at work. “I lost my dad, who was Moroccan, when I was eight,” he says. “My mom worked at a travel agency and took care of me and my three siblings. She saw that I liked cooking, and she fed my dreams. She gave me a recording of Le Petit Prince, which I listened to on my Walkman when I rode by bike, and she supported me by setting me free.”
Raffali started working in restaurants at age 14 to earn money for skateboarding equipment. “Where I come from, if you wanted something, you had to get up early and work for it,” he says. “I was good at it, too.”
After four years, he moved to Australia and sold knockoff perfumes on the streets of Sydney. He perfected his English, but eventually returned home feeling lost. “My mom asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, ‘Cook,’” he says. “And she said, ‘If you learned that from the year in Australia, it was a success.’”
Raffali worked briefly in England before landing in the kitchens of the InterContinental Hotel in Marseille. Then he met English chef Harry Cummins, Quebecoise sommelier Laura Vidal, and Nova Scotian entrepreneur Julia Mitton, who were just about to open their bistro, La Mercerie. (Cummins and Vidal met while working at Frenchie in Paris. With Mitton, formerly an executive at the Experimental Group, they pioneered a nomadic series of pop-up meals in restaurants and hotels around the world.)
“For me it’s all about breaking the rules, because I get bored.”
When La Mercerie opened, in 2018, Raffali joined the team. But after spending a few months in New York, “everything changed,” he says. “It just busted everything open for me, going to restaurants like Roberta’s and Wildair. The city is so intense, which made me feel that I belonged there. I felt so free.”
Ultimately, Cummins, Vidal, and Mitton helped him launch Livingston, in 2021. “They’re investors, but it’s my place,” says Raffali. “The restaurant looks like my bedroom, with graffiti and art and posters.” An immediate hit, it won a top prize from Le Fooding in 2022: Meilleur Bar à Delices (Best Bar for Delights).
Raffali and some friends recently made a short film about pizza. Raffali loaded up his motorbike with his portable grill; vacuum-packed stracciatella cheese, tomato sauce, yeast, and charcoal; and traveled from Marseille to Tunisia, where they filmed against a backdrop of discarded sets left over from the making of one of the Star Wars films. Called Des Enfers et des Anges—of hell and angels— it can be viewed on Raffali’s Instagram account.
But the restlessness that makes his food so sublime comes with a cost. “I wish I had more friends,” he says. “I wish I had a girlfriend, but I don’t have time right now.... What matters most to me is that I am creating all of the time, with no limits, man. My dream is that someday I’ll cook at the MoMA in New York City. I don’t want to just look at the paintings on the walls. I want to be a part of that energy.”
Alexander Lobrano is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. His latest book is the gastronomic coming-of-age story My Place at the Table: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris