Dalloyau Marseille

Our party of three stumbled on the Marseille location of Dalloyau quite by chance one very hot Summer Sunday. Our criteria were quite straightforward (as dictated somewhat regally by my 76 year old mother): 1. No seafood (after 5 straight days of a steady diet consisting almost exclusively of croissants, baguettes, raw oysters and the local catch); 2. Nice views; 3. Must be air-conditioned; and 4. An easy walk from car to curb. As our readers familiar with the South of France in Summer will no doubt know, this is not so straightforward a task as it might first appear — especially on a Sunday. In August.

Wandering around the palatial glass-and-steel mega-mall that is Les Terrasse du Port, we stumbled upon Dalloyau. It turns out that this chain of bakery-and-coffee-shop-cum-white-tablecloth restaurants is owned and operated by the eponymous, oldest caterers in France, founded in 1682 by Charles Dalloyau, victualler and royal court baker to none other than King Louis XIV.

With this royal provenance in mind, I was grateful to find a traditional sounding steak au poivre on the menu, and ordered it a point. While plated and visually presented well — if not quite fit for an emperor — the meat tended toward the tasteless; almost like a minute steak purchased from the local Monoprix wrapped in saran. The texture however was clean and consistent throughout, although one side of the steak, I discovered, was cleverly doubled over to give the appearance of being a more substantial pave than in actuality. The sauce however gave satisfaction: a very peppery and brandy-forward sauce of substance, it nearly made up for the disappointment of the corpus of the steak. Served with pomme roti rather than frites, the seasonable vegetables were well prepared and unobjectionable.

Perhaps the only real disappointment in a Sunday luncheon served efficiently and courteously by the staff was that the steak left no room for the coffee-and-chocolate Opera Cake, invented and served by Dalloyau since 1955. Several tables around us, containing a wide range of diners, from elderly well dressed ladies enjoying their post-Mass treat, to young families of vacationing Europeans, did seem to savor their Opera Cake however; and our party rose from our sea-facing, indoor table, satisfied, to “… let them eat cake.”