Maset London invites you to the coast of France, particularly to the Occitanie region. Set on the buzzy, sophisticated Chiltern Street and founded by Melody Adams, restaurateur of Donostia and Lurra, Maset brings French food with a modern difference. Offering a lighter, brighter style of cooking, synonymous with the region and gently influenced by North Africa, Italy and Spain. The menu marks a clear shift from traditional French restaurants, reflecting Melody’s time spent in Occitanie and celebrating seasonality and British locality.
Dishes unfold over five sections: Merenda, starters, les plats, sides and desserts. The menu highlights we enjoyed:
- Pâtes au Pistou – Fresh spinach linguine made daily with a regional basil-based sauce from Nice. A lighter take on pesto: more herbal and fragrant, with a bolder flavour.
- Bouillabaisse croquettas – Maset’s take on the famous Marseille dish: distinctly marine and rich, there is also a hint of rouille that pulls everything together.
- Monkfish – Whole tail, marinated in preserved lemons, cooked on the bone and served sliced with a lardo veil and sea beets; the preserved lemon lifts the mild white fish beautifully.
- Camargue rice – Nutty whole rice from the salt flats south of Arles, mixed with capers, olives and seasonal herbs, dressed with fruity olive oil and verjus.
- Preserved Lemon Martini is a cocktail of choice and wines sourced from small vineyards across France, Italy and Spain, curated to stand out from the usual selection. The cocktail is punchy and complex: strong, sour and sweet all at once. Worth trying.
Walking through the cream and gold striped awnings, you step into a deliberate escape, not merely from London’s sometimes grey streets but into the relaxed, sun-soaked world of the Occitan coast. The space whispers rather than shouts: cream columns, natural light filtering through glass, wooden chairs that belong in a countryside farmhouse. It’s almost too refined, except it isn’t; it’s honest.
When a restaurant captures a place this authentically, you’re not just eating somewhere inspired by the South of France, you’re actually there. The menu reads like someone who understands why preserved lemons matter in Arles and why herbs grow the way they do. You taste the Mistral winds in the food, that strong air that shapes everything from grape to fish.
The culinary experience at Maset London
We started with Panisse with anchovy, little morsels of chickpea-filled batons with the most intense and interesting anchovy paste. No preamble, just the South of France saying hello.
Then the Bouillabaisse Croquettes. We passed them around the table, and they disappeared quickly, each one a small, perfect argument for why this restaurant understands the sea.
The Beef Tartare with pickled shiitake and marjoram arrived next. Raw and precise. Not the obvious choice of ingredients, but the right ones for this kitchen. The pickled shiitake adds an umami undertone, an earthiness that grounds the raw meat.
Then came the Pâtes au Pistou, spinach linguine so fresh it tasted like it had been made that morning, which it probably was. The basil sauce from Nice is herbaceous without being showy, fragrant but restrained. It’s the kind of dish that explains why people in the South of France don’t need complicated food. We passed forks around the table, each person understanding without speaking that this was meant to be shared.
The Côtes d’Agneau arrived tender and confident, needing almost nothing but a whisper of salsa verde and crisp mesclun. Alongside it, the Monkfish with lardo and preserved lemon was bright without aggression; the sea beets brought the necessary oceanic touches. The flesh stayed impossibly moist, each bite carrying a subtle minerality.
The Camargue rice was nutty and slightly chewy, mixed with olives, peppers and capers from the salt flats where flamingos live. The verjus cut through with clean acidity, balancing the richness of the fish and lamb perfectly. We kept reaching back to it throughout the meal.
Dessert, design and the verdict
By dessert, we were past hungry, past full. Just present. The Tarte aux Figues with thyme, the Fougasse d’Aigues-Mortes with orange blossom, and the Choux profiteroles with chocolate were small, purposeful punctuation marks, each one finishing the meal with clarity. Maset is an attempt to bring the grammar of Occitan cooking to London, a restaurant that speaks of place through ingredients, technique and restraint rather than pastiche. Interiors by Studio Haddou Dufourcq favour a pared-back, sunlit aesthetic that complements the food, warm, welcoming and quietly confident.
Maset sits on Chiltern Street in Marylebone, a street that has been enjoying a lively period of new openings. It is an all-day restaurant with an unfussy approach to service and a menu that encourages sharing. Sitting there in London with family, the irony wasn’t lost; you’re in the city, but the restaurant has brought the countryside to you, not through decoration or nostalgia, but through the actual grammar of Occitan cooking. Every dish feels like a conversation about a place. It was the kind of evening that makes you want to sit longer, and when you finally leave, you’re already thinking about coming back.
For more information, visit Maset London
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Photo credit: Courtesy of Maset London / @maset.london.