The road to rouille

Krishna Léger’s restaurant is headed for Michelin stardom - not surprising for a graduate of Paris’s most prestigious cookery school, until you learn that he commuted to class from his prison cell

- LAURA SPINNEY

Krishna Léger is confident he is the only person to have smuggled fresh fish into Les Baumettes in Marseille, one of the most notorious prisons in France. With the fish he made bouillabaisse, the famous Marseil-lais soup. One of his fellow inmates – also from Marseille – said it was the best he had ever tasted.

These days, Léger serves bouillabaisse on the first Sunday of every month at his restaurant, Volver, just outside the pretty medieval town of Uzès, in the southern French département of the Gard.

The setting is a little different from Les Baumettes, with its once high walls and watch towers (the old prison buildings were demolished this year, to be replaced with new ones): Volver is set in a lemon-coloured stone farmhouse with shutters as blue as the Cévennes mountains visible in the distance, and a terrace shaded by a pergola. In 2021, only two years after it opened, Léger was awarded an “assiette” – the first rung on the Michelin ladder. And though he is discreet about his past, once the service is done, he can sometimes be persuaded to recount how he, an ex-con, conquered the world of French “bistronomy”, or casual fine dining (“quality ingredients … superb cooking”).

ON THE AFTERNOON OF 27 FEBRUARY 1994, Léger, then a 24-year-old firefighter, flew from Paris to Nîmes. His girlfriend, Karine, and another friend met him at the airport, and the three of them got into Karine’s car.