Introducing Sétoise Snackery

A glutton’s guide to southern French food + wine

At some point in 2025, I came back to France after a frenetic few weeks of work—exhausted, stressed, and oddly discombobulated. After years in restaurants, tied to services and being present “on the floor,” all this movement in the name of wine and work should have felt like a dream. And often it did: I got to drink Grand Cru Riesling in Alsace, chiseled Chenins in dark Loire cellars, and partake in long lunches in Provence. The fact that any of this was ever paid still feels wild to me.

But the constant movement began to slowly take the shine out of the adventure. Leaving home every two or three weeks left my life weirdly untethered. Routines disappeared, my fridge was rarely stocked, and I would pre-emptively grieve my little life here in Sète before I was even gone.

One evening, returning from another stint away and feeling particularly scattered, I decided to cook my way out of it. I latched onto a recipe for pot-au-feu from Victor Coutard’s Substack, How to Get Lost in France, drawn in by his promise of a long afternoon watching meaty morsels melt into a fragrant, wintry broth. I went to the market, then to the butcher in Les Halles, where the pot-au-feu very nearly became a horse stew—an error only corrected when the woman behind the counter clocked my accent and decided to intervene. I had somehow missed the array of horse motifs and the word Chevalier emblazoned on the front of the stall.

Pot-au-feu: scenes from my almost horse stew

That day felt like a small revelation. Purposeful and absorbing. I learned how to cook something I had never eaten, let alone cooked before, and took great pleasure in the gastronomic instruction to skim off the scum as the meat gently simmered. My mind was occupied by nothing other than my concern for this pot-au-feu, and my body was resolutely nowhere else but the kitchen—cooking, drinking wine, and waiting (slash panicking that I wasn’t sufficiently scum skimming).

But as is life, the months charged on, and by the time I was ready to bid goodbye to 2025, I’d barely cooked any more French classics, but I had made the wild decision to quit all of my work and cut loose the men in my life.

So what comes next? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. But as I said last month, I do want to finally get to know where I am living. Like in every part of France, there is a very real sense of pride and appreciation for food and wine, and all of the cultural heritage that comes with it. And so, while I figure out some bigger things, I thought it might also be a good opportunity to eat very well and become just a little less ignorant along the way.

And so, Sétoise Snackery is my pet project that will bask in the glory of southern French cooking and plentiful wine. So much of life down here is about enjoyment and conviviality, and that is all this really is.

I’ll be working loosely from Jacques Rouré’s Recettes Sétoises de Bouzigues, with inevitable detours via Elizabeth David, Rick Stein, and whatever local advice gets thrown at me along the way. The dishes will be borrowed, misremembered, occasionally butchered, and—if I’m lucky—sometimes shared with lovers and friends.

Last Wednesday, I decided to cook a bourride de baudroie à la sétoise (rolls off the tongue, I know)—Sète’s unapologetically garlicky fish stew, thickened with aioli and often eclipsed by Provence’s more famous bouillabaisse. I had never eaten it, never cooked it, and until recently hadn’t even clocked its existence. But starting off with a local underdog of a recipe felt like a fitting start. Plus, nobody died, so that is good.

The full lowdown of this ridiculously delicious dish, and the wine I (sort of) quaffed with it, will be dropping into your inbox this Sunday. The Sètoise Snackery will drop mid-month (ish), with my regular Substack coming at the end of the month (ish), as per usual!

If you feel like cooking along, I’d love that. Try the recipe, ask questions, tell me where it went wrong (or right, because I love praise), and share what you drank with it. Consider this an open invitation to live a little bit of this southern French life with me.

Bisous bisous bisous x (we do three kisses in Sète)