[oqeygallery id=9]slideshow photos by Paul Winch-Furness

One of the great satisfactions of writing the cookbook Made in Marseille was getting to work with Lionel Lévy, who I immediately recognised as one of the most inventive or, rather, re-inventive young chefs in France. The protégé of Alain Ducasse and Gérard Garrigues revisits classic dishes and shakes up their traditional formats. A decade ago he unnerved conservative diners with his salmon crumble, a savoury starter inspired by a classic British dessert, and his tomates farcies (stuffed tomatoes) with caramelised fruits and nuts, a dessert riff on a classic Provençale appetiser. The diners were confused. No one could figure out which end was up.

These days Lévy would upset diners at Une Table, au Sud, his now Michelin-starred restaurant, only by removing from the menu the milk-shake de bouillabaisse, his radical transformation of Marseille’s world-famous fish stew.

As my guest chef at the 23 May BurgerMonday pop-up dinner at the Gray’s Inn greasy spoon Andrew’s Lévy performed cover versions of not one but two American classics, the burger and the BLT sandwich. He merged the two, replacing the customary burger bun with slices of toasted sourdough rubbed with garlic and brushed with olive oil. He had planned to use Poilâne bread from that legendary Parisian bakery’s London outpost until, less than 24 hours prior to the pop-up, our late Sunday supper at the new St John Hotel restaurant altered his thinking. He found the bread superior to Poilâne and wanted it for his burger BLT. I sent an urgent text to St John baker Justin Piers Gellatly, who rounded up 12 sourdough loaves.

Lévy prepared most of his burger accessories in Marseille, vacuum packing them as if for sous-vide cooking and stashing them with ice bags in his hand luggage. He also packed the garlic, ginger and nut topping for the salmon crumble, but sourced British strawberries for a strawberry soup garnished with a lovely lemon curd made by London’s Beas of Bloomsbury. (Starting the menu with a crumble and finishing with a soup was, if not classic, then classic Lévy.) For the burger meat he asked O’Shea’s of Knightsbridge for a coarsely ground mince with a minimum fat content of 30 – yes, three-oh – percent fat. Darragh O’Shea obliged by “enriching” his already fatty beef chuck with plate rib, plate rub fat and rib fat.

Burger BLT Provençale

1. Sourdough
2. Garlic rub
3. Extra virgin olive oil
4. Tapenade
5. Iceberg lettuce in citrus olive oil
6. Beef patty
7. Piment d’Espelette marinade
8. Streaky bacon
9. Pistou
10. Tchoutchouka
11. Slow-roasted tomato

Lévy assembled his burger BLT Provençale with the top slice of toast facing up, revealing bright bands of green and red representing the colours and flavours of the Mediterranean. It was as if this unconventional burger were carrying a Marseille flag, with a slow-roasted tomato as its emblem. Impressive though this literally over-the-top presentation was it resurrected an old Lévy problem: The diners were confused. They couldn’t figure out which end was up. Some conquered their burger by deconstructing it. Others attacked it head-on with a knife and fork. But at nearly every table there was at least one visionary who figured out you could flip your lid and eat the burger BLT in its entirety, with your hands. Lévy’s ingenuity soon became apparent: He and chefs Ludovic Turac and Romain Maunier had left this, the closing touch in the creation of this re-inventive burger, to us.