La Villa Madie: Dimitri Droisneau's first book is out on 7 October 2026

A book born facing Cap Canaille

Some kinds of cooking could exist anywhere. Not La Villa Madie's. It was born here, in this Cassis cove lapped by the Mediterranean, looking out at Cap Canaille as it catches fire at dusk. That is precisely what this first book is about: the impossibility of separating a dish from the landscape that gave rise to it.

For the first time, Éditions du Chêne devotes a book to the world of the three-Michelin-starred chef. More than a collection of recipes, it offers an immersion into a house, a region and a vision of haute cuisine — that of a couple of "innkeepers" for whom cooking is inconceivable without a place, and without the women and men who bring it to life.

Forty-five recipes, forty-five stories

The book brings together forty-five of Dimitri Droisneau's creations. But each one tells far more than a technique or a pairing of ingredients.

Written by food critic Thibaut Danancher, the texts reveal the intimate side of each dish: a memory, an encounter, an emotion, a walk, an inspiration that fed the chef's imagination. Among them are the baguettine de rouget and l'écosystème, built afresh each morning around the day's catch — two signature creations of the house.

Marie-Pierre Morel's photographs accompany this journey. They capture both the dishes and the land that produced them: local sardines, Mediterranean fish, glasswort, rock samphire, shellfish, favouilles. A maritime Provence, alive and deeply rooted in the seasons.

The book unfolds as a succession of stories, in which cooking becomes a way of telling of a landscape and of those who inhabit it.

A house suspended above the Mediterranean

Set in a former bourgeois residence built in 1922, La Villa Madie seems to rest against the side of the cove. The restaurant deliberately steps back behind its surroundings to give the Cassis landscape full prominence. Here, the view, the light, the sea and nature are not a backdrop: they are at the heart of the experience and of the chef's inspiration.

This intimate relationship with the land runs through the whole book, just as it runs through every service.

Dimitri Droisneau, from the great houses to a great table

Born in Normandy, Dimitri Droisneau trained in Alençon before working in some of France's finest kitchens: La Tour d'Argent, Lucas Carton, Bernard Pacaud's L'Ambroisie, and Le Bristol alongside Éric Frechon. He met Marielle at La Réserve de Beaulieu, where he became head chef, before joining Eden Rock in Saint Barthélemy.

On their return, the couple settled in Cassis and took over La Villa Madie in 2013. Within a few years they had turned the address into a house in their own image: elegant without ostentation, exacting yet warm, deeply attached to its surroundings. The Michelin Guide awarded a second star as early as 2014, then a third in 2022. That same year, Dimitri Droisneau was voted Chef of the Year by his peers at the Trophées Le Chef.

Cooking between memory and the avant-garde

Dimitri Droisneau describes his cooking as a waltz in three beats: the present, that of pleasure; the past, that of memories and of the memory held within ingredients; the future, that of a resolutely contemporary vision. It is this tension between heritage and invention that gives the house its identity — cooking that is legible and generous, nourished by local produce yet able to take it somewhere else.

Behind all of it lies a human story. He imagines the cooking, the dishes, down to the smallest details of the house; Marielle embodies the welcome, the relationship with guests and the soul of the dining room. Around them, a team of devoted professionals brings this vision of hospitality to life. The experience of La Villa Madie never comes down to what arrives on the plate: it is born of the meeting between a kitchen, a place, a team and a landscape.

Practical information

La Villa Madie – La grande table de la Méditerranée

Dimitri Droisneau, Thibaut Danancher, Marie-Pierre Morel

Éditions du Chêne — 256 pages, colour

Price: €79

Publication: 7 October 2026