A basketball pro turned chef plays a new game: Feeding Olympic Village

Presiding over the whirl of activity was Mazzia, who at 6-foot-4 towered over the room. The 47-year-old former pro basketball player has a disarming smile and the demeanor of a coach. He talked frequently about the importance of teamwork in the kitchen, and — like a good coach — he seemed aware of everything happening around him. At one point, he jumped up from our interview with an “excusez-moi” to open the door for a sous-chef carrying metal trays and plastic tubs.

The bustle of the restaurant is a good fit for the frenetic atmosphere of Marseille, an ancient port city more than 400 miles south of Paris whose varied reputation in France includes its stunning natural gorges, fresh fish and drug trafficking. (Marseille is often described simply as “gritty.” Or “sulfurous,” according to one French radio station.)

The Mediterranean Sea is a short walk from AM, and Mazzia’s signature style includes lots of local seafood and vegetables, often spiced, roasted and smoked. His fresh, clean approach — coupled with his background in professional sports — made him a natural choice for his next challenge: cooking for the athletes descending on Paris this month for the Olympic Games.

He and two other French chefs (Amandine Chaignot and Akrame Benallal) are designing and executing menus for 15,000 athletes in the Olympic kitchen, which is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition to the chefs’ menus, a caterer will provide 40 entrees daily, plus a salad bar, a grill, a cheese cart, a boulangerie, a hot bar, a dessert bar and a fruit stand. All told, the Olympic kitchen expects to serve 40,000 meals per day for the Games. It’s a unique challenge, especially for a three-star chef such as Mazzia, who’s used to cooking for people who live to eat, rather than people who eat to compete. There’s an added challenge for the Paris Olympic Games: France is renowned worldwide for its cuisine, so serving the dry chicken breast and brown rice of athletic training meals would be seen as a kind of national shame.

“These people think of food as fuel, that’s for sure, but fuel needs to be fun,” Mazzia said. “For me, it wasn’t a question of constraint, but of playing the game and thinking, ‘How we can bring something joyful and fun to the athletes?’”

The way Mazzia talks about his menu for the athletes almost makes it sound like a sport, one in which he’s trying to perform his best while also representing his country to the world. “The challenge was to highlight the products of our local region, in our own way — but above all, to bring in the imprint of our kitchen to the athletes.”

Mazzia’s style is not old-school French, with its focus on butter-heavy sauces such as the classic béchamel or hollandaise. For the first 15 years of his life, he grew up in what is now the Republic of Congo, where his French parents lived as expats.

The area he grew up in is called the Côte Sauvage, which translates to the “Wild Coast,” and it lived up to its name. Mazzia remembers seeing surfers riding massive waves and hammerhead sharks swimming in the turquoise water. He and his school friends sometimes played with stingrays. Because of the oppressive midday heat, classes were held in the morning and in the late afternoon. In between, Mazzia went to the beach, where he liked to watch the fishing canoes hauling in their fresh catch each day.

Food is woven into his memories. On weekends, his family would head to the coastal village of Diosso, outside the city. After a full day of playing in the water, he and his family would eat grilled and spiced meat and fish or mafé, a thick tomato-peanut stew of chicken or beef, spiced with chile peppers and aromatics. Even now, he says, a good barbecue takes him back to his childhood. And then there was the fresh fruit: perfectly ripe mangoes and papayas to pair with meals or to eat raw as a dessert.

When his family returned to France, the culture shock was extreme for 15-year-old Mazzia. He had gone from school days spent partly at the beach to the strict regimen of a Jesuit boarding school outside of Paris. As he was tall for his age, he started playing basketball, which became a safe haven. “It was more than a refuge,” Mazzia recalled. “I got to know a brotherhood of some pretty incredible people.”

Mazzia said he loved the accountability of being on a team, how he found himself being relied upon by others and being able to rely on them in the same way. “You had this responsibility to make baskets, not for yourself but for the team. So you’re quickly in this system of work, of performance.” After finishing school, it was an easy transition to start playing professional basketball as a shooting guard, first for a team in Marseille and then in nearby Avignon.

Mazzia likes to clarify that he’s not a basketball player who became a chef; he thinks of himself as a “cook who played some basketball.” Incredibly, for many years, he was doing both. He landed his first restaurant job at the Vénitien Prestige in Paris suburb Rueil-Malmaison in 1995 at age 19, before going on to train at the Parisian establishment Fauchon under the legendary pastry chef Pierre Hermé. “I was lucky enough to meet chefs who listened to me, allowing me to do both,” Mazzia said. “It was intense. I didn’t get any special treatment from either side.”

Since then, he had trained in other Michelin-starred restaurants but also cooked in retirement homes and for corporate catering. By 2007, he left his basketball team in Avignon, and in 2014, he opened AM in Marseille, racking up three Michelin stars over the following decade. It is Mazzia’s ability to straddle both worlds — haute cuisine and professional sports — that made him such a natural choice to cook for the Olympians.

Mazzia has spent nearly two years researching, brainstorming and consulting nutritionists and sports medicine doctors to devise his menu for the Paris Olympics. He, of course, focused on lean protein and nutrient-rich vegetables, but there were also surprises along the way. Rice, he learned, isn’t necessarily the best fuel for athletes, as its nutritional quality depends on its origins and the way it’s processed, which is too difficult to control on a large scale, he said. So he chose to avoid rice and flour for his Olympics menu.

He asked himself almost existential questions in his research and drafting of recipes. For instance: “How can we make green beans, which are not very rich, more gourmet — but, above all, have a more exhilarating depth of taste?” The resulting dish is a green bean risotto of sorts, with a blackberry and black currant vinaigrette.

The menus Mazzia landed on put a twist on some of his favorite ingredients in the restaurant, such as white fish and chickpeas. One recipe is adapted from a classic dish served in AM, tweaked to be healthier for the athletes. It’s a spiced hake with tapioca in a vegetable broth, cooked to keep the juicy, nutritional qualities of the fish intact.

There’s also an herbaceous chickpea pomade with peas and smoked fish milk. It’s similar to a hummus made with verbena water, as well as peas and beets reduced for their residual sugar. He’s also planning a mackerel dish, a fatty fish rich in iron and vitamin B, served with grilled broccoli shoots.

In brainstorming his menus, Mazzia said, he was thinking about food as fuel and food as part of the recuperation process — after all, some of the athletes will be eating his meals after they’ve competed. (In any event, his meals sound infinitely tastier than the late-night pizzas Mazzia would eat after big basketball games.) There’s also the fact that a runner’s nutritional needs are different from those of a wrestler or a gymnast. It’s a tall order, especially considering the 200 nationalities represented at this year’s Games, each coming with their own food cultures and personal tastes.

As France’s second-largest city, Marseille will play a special role in the Games, hosting the Olympic sailing competition and some of the soccer matches. In May, when the Olympic Torch Relay arrived in Marseille from Greece, Mazzia was part of the all-star lineup of torch bearers.

The chef talks about his menu as a good host would: in terms of joy and comfort. Many of the athletes likely won’t get to visit much of France other than its stadiums, and Mazzia’s cuisine seeks to bring out his personal terroir, he said. The word shares the same root as terre, meaning earth in French, and it signifies not just what grows in the ground in a certain region but also the local flavor. For Mazzia, that’s the fresh seafood and vegetables of southern France as well as the spiciness and smokiness of the food from his childhood in Congo. “Above all, it was a question of trying to make people happy,” he said.

That shines through in his cooking — and in the way he talks about food. Despite all the lavishness and artistry required to earn one Michelin star — much less three — it’s clear that Mazzia is thinking about more than Jackson Pollock-ian plating. He spoke often of trying to communicate something to the people who eat his creations, whether it’s the diners in the 20 seats at AM or the 15,000 athletes eating from the Olympic kitchen.

The Olympics set out to promote “excellence, respect and friendship” in the world, and Mazzia’s approach includes an aspect of friendship, even family. He spoke warmly of what he ate at his grandparents’ house as a kid: the first fresh eels of the season, caught by his fisherman grandfather, the French toast made over the heat of the fireplace, or the comfort food his grandmother cooked at the brasserie she ran on Île de Ré, an island off the western coast of France. There’s a hint of that homey feel to his Olympics menus.

When I first asked him to describe his signature style, he struggled for words. Eventually, he settled on a simple definition.

“It’s really a cuisine of the soul,” Mazzia told me. Soon enough, several thousand of the world’s best athletes will get to take a bite and see for themselves.