Chez Etienne

If you ask locals from Marseille what their culinary speciality is, the answer might surprise you. Forget about bouillabaisse, Marseillais are obsessed with pizza. Here you can follow it just by the smell. Pizza is everywhere, from trucks, which are still plenty around the city, but slowly disappearing due to delivery to home services to restaurants, but no place is as special as Chez Etienne. They say that if you haven’t been to Chez Etienne, you haven’t been to Marseille.

Opened in 1943, this family-owned pizzeria is always packed with regulars who have been frequenting it for years. They take neither reservations nor credit cards. When we arrived on an early summer evening, there was already a crowd in the street waiting for their table. 

The humble cantine-like restaurant is owned by a third-generation pizzaiolo Pascal Cassaro, an athletic and animated man of clear southern Italian heritage with closely cropped hair yet something vaguely regal about his gaze. It was his Sicilian grandfather who founded it and father Etienne Cassaro who transformed it into an institution. The ambience Chez Etienne is quintessentially Marseillais. Here you will find anyone from families with children, to young hipster couples,  Marseille football club OM fans from the suburbs or local politicians.