Here's a plate of black humour. It's the Erika Oyster in Alexandre Couillon's La Marine, a restaurant on Noirmoutier island off the west coast of France. The Erika was an oil tanker that sank just north of here in 1999, the year Alexandre and his wife Céline opened La Marine. In one of France's worst environmental disasters, 30,000 barrels of heavy fuel oil contaminated 400km of coastline. And the young couple had just opened a seafood restaurant.
When chefs become storytellers they tend to serve up pretty fantasies, sparing us disasters and grit. If food is art or memory then it’s usually on the sunnier side of life, hiding the painful stuff like a ballerina’s bunions.
Not here. The Erika Oyster comes covered with a black slick of squid ink marinade. A white dusting of lardo-like wind-blown foam is grated over it, while a disc of clear curved sugar that looks like it’s made of plastic represents the pure pearlescent inside of an upturned oyster shell.
It is bleak, beautiful and wryly funny, the rarest of things in a fine dining restaurant where the jokes are typically kept backstage.
La Marine survived the oil spill, and now Couillon is about to become one of France’s best-known chefs when he and Céline feature in the third season of Netflix Chef’s Table.
I'm having lunch here with a press pack and Chef's Table's young American director, David Gelb. The third season is devoted entirely in France. Couillon is the least known of the lineup, partly because he is in such a remote setting. His two Michelin stars draws diners the five hours from Paris west of Nantes and over the bridge linking Noirmoutier to the mainland. But a whole new audience will be making the journey after the season airs.
This island of big skies, cool pine forests, campsites and Famous Five coves is all on the menu, which starts with potatoes like the ones I saw being harvested earlier. They are served three ways as a doll-sized ice cream (Mr Chippy, anyone?), a lone thick crisp and a hot mousse more comforting than a fleecy dressing gown. Seaweed is blown into a crisp and topped with an oyster cream.
Seaweed features again in exquisite sourdough and flecked through a cube of creamy butter. Thick slabs of glistening smoked mackerel are served on cartoon-style fish skeletons. A beetroot tartlet is topped with a mussel cream. The snacks end with a bonbon that delivers its liquid centre in an astonishing gush of a mackerel, coffee and truffle.
There’s a china white bowl with a bobbled rim, like a beach shell filled with meltingly-soft shards of octopus, and juicy clams dressed in a toffee-brown crab sauce. It’s the food from a wild Atlantic island cooked with the purity and precision of a Japanese kitchen. A featherlight and delightfully green parsley foam is served over squid with beets from Couillon’s garden, where they grow 200 varieties of vegetables.
A lobster tail is curled up in a bed of carrot. Whiting is served steamed and so muted it needs a sprinkling of the Noirmoutier salt that they skim by hand from the salt marshes on hot days. The savoury courses end with guinea fowl, a spring onion with its ends charred to chewy strings and a single potato placed like a precious jewel on each plate.
For desserts, we move to the cool space of the thick stonewalled communal bakery. It houses one of three communal bread ovens that were used by the villagers 200 years ago.
Alexandre Couillon comes in bearing a bowl – "an exclusive": the first honey from his five beehives. We pass it around the table, dipping individual spoons into its gluey golden depths.
There’s a beautiful, elaborate pine and forest floor dessert, hay ice cream and a roll of marshmallow in a bowl, with perfect coffee in finger-scalding handle-less cups. But it’s the honey I’ll remember from an extraordinary lunch cooked by a resilient islander who found his voice and his audience in this lovely remote place.
Lunch starts at €68. Dinner is €72 for four plates, rising to €150 for the full menu. Catherine Cleary was a guest of Netflix.
