Alexandre Mazzia

The Path

Professional sport can leave a cook with useful habits: timing, stamina, trust, and a feel for pressure shared by a group. Before the kitchen became his main workplace, Alexandre Mazzia was a professional basketball player, and that formation remains relevant to how the later cooking is described: responsive, rhythmic, dependent on coordination rather than display. Private cooking in Japan asks for a different register of attention: ingredients observed closely, gestures reduced, balance judged without noise. As a private chef in Osaka and Kyoto, Japan, Mazzia worked outside the conventional restaurant route, gathering experience through motion rather than a fixed institutional script. That background later fed a cuisine described as depending on feeling as well as technique. The meeting point between elite sport and kitchen practice became explicit when Mazzia was selected to create a menu for athletes at Paris Olympics in Paris, France. Today, Alexandre Mazzia is chef of AM par Alexandre Mazzia, where those accumulated references — sport, travel, discipline, instinct — are organized into restaurant form.

The Work Today

Creative cuisine, as practiced by Mazzia as chef-proprietor of Restaurant AM in Marseille and chef at AM par Alexandre Mazzia in the same city, is not treated as novelty for its own sake. The stated materials of the style are African childhood influences, French tradition, spices, smoke and instinctive cooking. The craft lies in making those elements function as one language rather than as separate references. Smoke, in this cooking, is described as atmosphere rather than garnish. Spice works as structure, not just seasoning. French tradition provides frame and discipline without closing down the more personal register of heat, aroma and memory. The result is personal cooking held in a precise format: authored, but still built for service.

Signature

Crystallised seaweed with bottarga shows the attraction to contrast in Mazzia’s cooking: marine against rich, brittle against dense, delicacy against persistence. The named signature points to a plate where flavour, aroma, texture and memory are handled as a combined field rather than as separate effects.

In Their Words “My passion for cooking was not immediate. I was first attracted by the solidarity present in the kitchens, which I could relate to as it is very common in team sports.” “So I opened AM with my loyal team and went for an open kitchen style because cooking is all about sharing.”

Acclaim

Alexandre Mazzia has received three stars for AM par Alexandre Mazzia. Recognition for the work includes Three MICHELIN Stars for AM par Alexandre Mazzia (2021).