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.
