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Coming the Raw Prawn*:  Mauro Colagreco's Mirazur – a slice of paradise on the Riviera

The raw prawns at Ventimiglia

* A quaint Australian expression which suggests that someone is a con artist and thinks the listener is a credulous fool ("Don't come the raw prawn with me, mate - if your brains were gunpowder, they wouldn't blow your Akubra off") Definitely not the case here.

By Bruce Palling

Recently, I visited Mirazur (www.maurocolagreco.com), a Two Star Michelin place in Menton on the French Riviera, within crawling distance of the Italian border. It has been getting quite a bit of publicity, usually on the back of the connection it supposedly has with New Nordic Cuisine (more on that later).

Mauro in his kitchen garden - it's the ingredients stupid, not the recipe..

It was while eating the second course of raw prawns that I suddenly realised that Argentinian-born Mauro Colagreco should be taken very seriously indeed. How do you recognise a great chef? To be certain, it takes more than reputation, word of mouth or stars in guidebooks. After all, too often places that people rave about can let you down with boring or unimaginative food. For me, it is quite simple – the ingredients have to be greater than the sum of their parts. That is why all it took were a quartet of tiny discs of courgettes for me to understand the exceptional talent of Chef Mauro.

One of the most memorable dishes served to me was simply called tendons. It was slow-cooked veal tendons in a highly reduced veal jus that had an extraordinary intensity that lingered for minutes.

The food establishment like him too – he is rated No 24 in San Pellegrino’s World’s Top 50 restaurants Awards. This year he received his second Michelin-Star and earlier, he was awarded chef of the year, by Michelin’s rival, Gault Millau, the first time a non-European has won such a prize.

It is too simplistic to brand him a “New Nordic” chef – he uses quite a few herbs and edible flowers, but he doesn’t go overboard with them. It might be more accurate to brand him as a “New Naturalist” – a chef who has his own vegetable and herb garden and is fanatical about only using the freshest produce. 

One thing that also marks Mauro out is his devotion to these products. He explains it quite well by saying that when he is in his main garden, which has more than 250 different herbs, spices and vegetables, it is the message he gets from there that determines what he cooks, not what is written down on a recipe back in his kitchen. 

“I actually make up my plates while I am in the garden – I need direct contact with my products.” The same applies to the extraordinary range of products from the Mediterranean – if the local fisherman in Menton catches an exceptionally fine specimen, he telephones Mr. Colagreco from the boat on his mobile so he takes delivery while it is still flapping.

He took me on a tour of some of his producers,




starting with the sole commercial fisherman left in Menton Harbour. 

Mauro was buying palettes of live fish, ranging from 

Then we drove across the Italian border to Ventimiglia, a bustling seaside city just 10 minutes drive away. (En route, don’t forget to drop off at the amazing Giardini Botanici Hanbury (www.giardinihanbury.com/hanbury4) – one of the greatest English-inspired gardens in Europe) Just off the main square, Mauro was greeted as an old friend by the numerous small traders in the main market, patiently trying their exquisite strawberries


and cherries before taking me to the fish market to try the San Remo prawns.

These delicate reddish-coloured crustacea are renowned partially because they are too fragile to make the long journey to Paris. He cheerily plucked a live one from the stall, stripped out its gut and offered me the tail to try, which was beautifully sweet and fresh. Then, I was obliged to finish the experience by sucking out its brains, which had an intense earthy flavour.

Mauro started off working in restaurants in Buenos Aires after doing a business degree at the University of La Plata. Asked why he departed for France at the age of 24, he simply said, “I came to Europe because the level of cooking in Argentina is not high enough, so it was because I wanted to learn more. He went first in 2001 to Bernard Loiseau, the Three Star in Saulieu and was there for 18 months, which co-incided with the time when Bernard blew his brains out with a shot gun (“For me a big loss”) after he was downgraded in the Gault Millau guide.

In 2003, he started in vegetables at L’Arpege – this was year after Alain Passard had changed his approach to cooking to exclude red meat and focus on the flavours of vegetables. Mauro worked on vegetables for eight months and then went to fish (“We cooked an eight kilo Turbot in one piece – a great experience”). At this moment the sous chef was David Toutain (now chef at Agapé Substance) so I took the third post after a year and a half, then became sous chef myself and left in 2005 for Ducasse at Plaza Athénée. 

“I only stayed for five months because it was not an interesting kitchen for me, having 40 people in it. I didn’t like it because I was not accustomed to work in such a big kitchen. Then I worked briefly for Guy Martin of Grand Vefour before opening Mirazur in April 2006.”

He freely admits that Alain Passard was the most inspirational chef he worked for. “What I learned was a total respect for vegetables and also the power of imagination. I once saw him go to the refrigerator, pick out an onion and make an entire dish from it.” This time with Passard (who I personally consider the most inspirational – and influential chef on the planet) was critical for the evolution of Mauro’s style. “Through Alain Passard, I learned improvisation through contact with the products. 

Alain doesn’t have a single method to work with a product – he wants to see each item separately. He would never take a carrot and say – this is the way I always cook it. That was the most beautiful experience in the kitchen – he broke the classic approach with all kinds of plates. 

He completely believes that the dish starts with the product , not the recipe.” What is interesting is that the only chefs he worked with in France in that five-year period all held Three Michelin Stars.

It has to be admitted that Mauro’s location in Menton is worth shouting about too. Menton, or originally Mentone, when it was part of Monaco and an Italian protectorate, became famous in the Nineteenth Century almost as a hospice for wealthy foreigners to recover in the winter. Queen Victoria was also a frequent guest and it was so genteel that by the 1880s it could only boast of having two brothels, though the fisher boys were not safe from the occasional incursions of Oscar Wilde.

Menton was known as the English sanatorium, because many of the winter visitors were sufferers of tuberculosis, which lead to the local saying that Cannes was for living, Monaco for gambling and Menton for dying. One English guidebook described Mentone’s residents as “being of a bronchial nature, suggestive of Bournemouth, apt to cough and spit in a manner that does not act as a gin-and-bitters to your next meal.”

Queen Victoria, accompanied by her Scottish attendant/confidante John Brown, sketched in Menton with her ailing son, the Duke of Albany. She made the journey in her seven carriage Royal Train under the non de plume of the Comtesse de Balmoral, though one doubts that there were many other comtesses touring France in their own train. One of the more famous invalids was Aubrey Beardsley, who came here in 1897 and died five months later.

Getting there now is simplicity itself but it wasn’t always so easy. The railway only arrive in the 1860s’ which led the local English Doctor, James Henry Bennett, to suggest that people willing to undertake a “cannon-ball style of travelling” could leave London early one morning from London Bridge on the mail train to Paris and be at Mentone for supper the following evening.

In the past, it was not known for the quality of its food, with Augustus Hare commenting, “There is a difficulty in procuring good food of any kind, and the charges made by hotels for sending out dinners are very high for Italy. Good cooks, may, however, be engaged at Nice early in the season, and will make arrangements for obtaining provisions from thence. The meat at Mentone is essentially bad, the sheep being fed on lemons and the scanty herbage on the sea-shore.”

Menton still has a quiet charm generally lacking in the rest of the Mediterranean. The site of Mirazur was re-designed by American architect, Rick Mather and looks like a two storey riverboat from behind, with its broad decks and its sweeping semi circular staircase at the entrance.

 Then there is the view – perched above the Bay of Menton, which is still one of the less spoilt Riviera seaside villages. There are high cliffs looming over the site, which provide an interesting microclimate, as they radiate the days heat during the night, which means this is the only site in mainland France where bananas will grow. Right next to the restaurant itself is a giant avocado tree, said to the largest in mainland France.

There is also a serious herb garden surrounding the restaurant, which is constantly used.

Mauro is fortunate to have the backing of Michael Likierman, an English entrepreneur, who not only owns the freehold on Mirazur but also the organic garden’s site - a staggering two and a half acre estate behind the restaurant with the ruined Villa Rosemarino on one side and terraces going right up to the cliffs behind.  

Villa Rosemarino was originally constructed by the Duke of Sutherland but then fell it disrepair until a seedy developer started pulling it down in the expectation that he could replace it with an enormous block of flats. This process was halted but has left an amazing creeper clad ruin, like a local version of a Piranesi.

Mauro actually lives in a charming house on the side of the property, which was probably once the gardeners cottage. The microclimate here has enabled Mauro to grow 43 varieties of tomatoes, 10 of carrots, six of zucchini and five of eggplant. These varieties have now been whittled down by half and he will look around for other species to experiment with, though he says it takes three years before new species are in optimum condition. Everything is of course organic, with the restaurant itself providing a lot of the compost.

He devoted one year to exploring different algae, then another on the impact of citrus fruit (Menton is famous for its lemons) and this year it is texture. We have only just begun to hear the buzz about Mauro. This dedication to exploring new products and techniques is what drives him onwards and makes him a strong candidate for even more recognition in the future and inevitably that ultimate Establishment culinary accolade of three Michelin stars. And I almost forgot to add that in the context of astronomic gastronomic French prices, Mirazur is a bargain, with a set lunch for a mere E35 and a menu degustation for E95 per person.

A shorter version of this story first appeared in The Age in Melbourne
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/restaurants-and-bars/mauro-please--20120618-20jvp.html