AM par Alexandre Mazzia

AM par Alexandre Mazzia is a fine-dining restaurant on rue François Rocca in the 8th arrondissement of Marseille, run by its chef. It holds three Michelin stars.

Mazzia was born in Pointe-Noire in the Republic of Congo and grew up facing the Atlantic, where the smell of fish grilled by the sea stayed with him. Summers with his grandfather Michel, a fisherman at Rivedoux on the Île de Ré, added another coast to those memories. Before cooking full time he played basketball at a professional level in Marseille and Avignon. In the kitchen he passed through Fauchon under Pierre Hermé, the test kitchen of Martín Berasategui and the restaurants of Michel Bras and Alain Passard.

He first cooked under his own name at Hom Art in Avignon, then at Le Ventre de l'Architecte inside Le Corbusier's Cité radieuse. Prize money from Gault&Millau, which had named him a young talent, helped him open AM in 2014, and it was full from the first services. The first Michelin star followed within months, Gault&Millau later made him its cook of the year, and the third star came in 2021. He has also appeared on Top Chef.

Michelin calls him a virtuoso of spice, roasting and smoke, and the tasting menu runs to a long series of small, striking bites. Courses carry names such as Les sticks, Le sucre de plancton and Marseille, l'Afrique et sa symbiose, and pairings like eel with chocolate or raspberry with harissa show how freely he combines sweet, bitter and heat. The kitchen keeps a library of more than 400 house vinegars. His food truck Michel, named after his grandfather, was rebuilt after a fire, and his recipes are collected in the book La Flamme.