The French Riviera & the Maritime Alps:

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CANNES: Wherever you find celebrities and businessmen with expense accounts, you are bound to find the kind of restaurants that gather galaxies of stars and toques from all the best foodie guides. Cannes is that kind of place and it doesn’t disappoint. Two of the best restaurants on the Riviera are within a few blocks of each other on La Croisette. A third is in nearby La Napoule.

DINING PRICE CHART
Prices are for a typical prix fixe menu of two courses and a glass of house wine for one.
	€14-€19
€	€21-€34
€€	€35-€49
€€€	€50-€69
€€€€	€70-€140
€€€€€	The sky’s the limit

La Palme d’Or at the Hotel Martinez reflects the champagne standards of the Taittinger family, who own the hotel (73 La Croisette, 06406 Cannes, ☎ 33 04 92 98 73 00, fax 33 04 93 39 67 82, martinez@concorde-hotels.com, www.hotel-martinez.com; lunch and dinner, Tuesday to Saturday, €€€€€). Arranged in a series of rooms and on a terrace overlooking the promenade and Mediterranean, the restaurant is decorated like a plush, Art Deco club. Imaginative and luxurious dishes include pumpkin soup with a poached egg and black truffle, gnocchi of baby carrots and lemon, wild Mediterranean sea bass, fillet of beef with a mustard sauce flavored with vanilla.

At The Villa Des Lys in the Hôtel Majestic Barrière, diners can choose wild rice risotto with zucchini flowers, lemon and thyme, wild sea bass with chorizo and coconut cooked with sweet peppers, crayfish quenelles and tails in shallots. The cool, sunny room is all dark wood and coral banquettes, with plenty of glass. (10 La Croisette, BP 163, 06407 Cannes, ☎ 33 04 92 98 77 00, fax 33 04 93 38 97 90, villadeslys@lucienbarriere.com, www.lucienbarriere.com; Tuesday to Saturday, dinner only, €€€€.)

In La Napoule the three Raimbault brothers run L’Oasis – Stéphane heading the team, François in charge of desserts and patisserie, and younger brother Antoine just recently joining the business. (L’Oasis, Rue Jean Honoré Carle, 06210 La Napoule, ☎ 33 04 93 49 95 52, fax 33 04 93 49 64 13, oasis@relaischateaux.com, www.oasis-raimbault.com, €€€€).They offer a fusion cuisine, combining traditional Mediterranean dishes with Oriental and Asian-influenced menus. Dishes include oysters marinated in horseradish, with puffed rice petals and seawater sorbet, Mediterranean crayfish roasted with Thai herbs, sea bass in a tarragon crust. The dessert list is worth saving room for – hazelnut macaroon filled with anis, tarragon and raspberry cream, ‘Spice Route’ iced nougat.

Cannes has its fair share of modest restaurants as well. Mi-Figue Mi-Raisin is a comfortable restaurant on the hill of Le Suquet, where the dishes feature strong Provençal flavors. (27 Rue du Suquet, 06400 Cannes, ☎ 33 04 93 39 51 25, fax 33 04 93 39 51 25, dinner only, €€.) The brasserie-style restaurant also serves pizza. It’s a good choice for a relaxed, low-key meal.

La Mère Besson has been around forever and is always reliable for traditional Provençal cooking – especially a generous aïoli and fragrant boeuf en daub. (13 Rue des Frérés-Pradignac, 06400 Cannes, ☎ 33 04 93 39 59 24, lamerebesson@wanadoo.fr, €€-€€€). Try Gaston-Gastounette for very good seafood, apparently fresh from the sea. (7 Quai St-Pierre, 06400 Cannes, ☎ 33 04 93 39 47 92, fax 33 04 93 99 45 34, €€-€€€. ) The restaurant has terrific views of the Vieux Port. Not everything is traditional – there are Japanese influences to some of the fish dishes. If you’d like to try bouillabaisse but are intimidated by the rigamarole connected with the dish, this is a good place to dip your spoon in. The restaurant serves a small, starter-sized portion.

La Cave is the very model of a casual bistro, crowded, buzzy and relaxed. The menu is enormous, full of comfortably familiar dishes and reasonably priced, with changing specials chalked on the blackboards around the room. Zucchini flower fritters, soupe au pistou, grilled sardines, aïoli, magret de canard are among the options. (9 Boulevard de la République, 06400 Cannes, ☎ 33 04 93 99 79 87. www.restaurant-lacave.com, €€).

MOUGINS: A lunch or dinner date in Mougins makes a complete change of pace from the hustle and bustle of the nearby coast. Even at the height of the summer season, when its little lanes are packed with visitors, the village seems to maintain a discreet serenity. There are about 60 restaurants tucked here and there around the town, several of them serious foodie pilgrimage sites.

Many consider Roger Vergé the man responsible for the blossoming of restaurants in Mougins. There were only a handful here when in the late 1960s he established Le Moulin de Mougins (Notre Dame de Vie, 06250 Mougins, ☎ 33 04 93 75 78 24, fax 33 04 93 90 18 55, reservation@moulindemougins.com, www.moulindemougins.com, restaurant and four-star Relais & Chateaux hotel, lunch €€€€, dinner €€€€€) and the less expensive L’Amandier (Place des Patriotes, Mougins Village, ☎ 33 04 93 90 00 91, fax 33 04 92 92 89 95, www.amandier.fr, €€).

The two restaurants are considered to have put Mougins on the map. In the 1970s it had more Michelin stars than any other town in France. Vergé’s handpicked successor at Le Moulin, Alain Llorca (formerly head chef at the Hotel Negresco in Nice) has recently introduced an innovative light menu and a tapas menu – a full meal of little bites (for €160 per table). Dishes include a Nice-influenced stew with spinach ravioli and chickpea pancake and roast Aveyron lamb with citrus fruits and almonds, simmered fennel and eggplant royale. The restaurant is an old oil mill, just outside the village. The dining room is decorated in minimalist cream and burgundy and there is a smart terrace. Llorca runs a cooking school and there is also a shop. Unless you’re Elizabeth Taylor (who hosts an Aids fund raiser at the restaurant during the Cannes Film Festival), book long before you leave home. You can make reservations for both the restaurant and hotel online.

Also worth a look is Restaurant Candille at Le Mas Candille, a hotel with two restaurants on the edge of town (Boulevard Clément Rebuffel, 06250 Mougins. ☎ 33 04 92 28 43 43, fax 33 04 92 28 43 40. info@lemascandille.com, www.restaurantcandille.com, lunch €€€, dinner €€€€). Here the chef dresses lentil soup with roast crayfish, poached quail’s egg and deep-fried parsley. He wraps the omnipresent sea bass in a tobacco leaf, and punctuates cauliflower with pecans and pistachios.

For something completely different, Le Ban Noï (538 Avenue de Tournamy, 06250 Mougins, ☎ 33 04 92 28 08 88. ban-noi@wanadoo.fr, €) serves good Thai food.

BIOT: For a tiny perched village, Biot is packed with good restaurants in every price range, from crêperies and pizzerias through good brasseries and bistros to the height of haute cuisine. At the moment, because of the chef’s Michelin star, Les Terraillers is the hot reservation (11 Route du Chemin Neuf, 06460 Biot, ☎ 33 04 93 65 01 59, fax 33 04 93 65 13 78, contact@lesterraillers.com, www.lesterraillers.com; lunch €€, dinner €€€). Set in a 16th-century pottery on the edge of the village, it has a vaulted dining room with bare stone walls and beams. The pretty terrace has pink-washed walls. The set menu of classic dishes might include gratin or warm oysters with champagne butter, or a spring roll of Dublin Bay prawns with vegetables. Leave room for chocolate desserts worth every mile you’ll have to walk to work them off. The pottery’s old kiln is a private dining room for 10.

I prefer Chez Odile (Chemin des Bâchettes, 06410 Biot, ☎ 33 04 93 65 15 63, €€€), where the fixed price menu emphasizes regional cooking in a rustic atmosphere. The kitchen is open to view so it isn’t the quietest of places, but the atmosphere is colorful and food very good. The restaurant is closed in December and January and closing days (or nights) vary throughout the year, so call ahead.

NICE: Lately, some restaurateurs in Nice have been displaying a label of La Cuisine Nissarda to show that they prepare the traditional dishes of Nice in an undiluted, traditional way. I suspect that this is probably one of those marketing gimmicks that tourist boards are so fond of dreaming up. Even if it is, anything that focuses attention on Nice’s unique culinary style can’t be bad. Some Niçoise dishes, like stockfish (estocaficada in the local language) – a stew of dried cod or haddock and vegetables – can be an acquired taste. And socca, the chickpea flour pancake that seems like such a good idea, can be heavy and greasy if not served by an expert. But well-prepared Nissard food is distinctive and delicious.

Casalinga, which has the Cuisine Nissarda label, serves Provence-influenced food as well as good Niçoise stockfish and stuffed zucchini blossoms (4 Rue de l’Abbaye, 06300 Nice, ☎ 33 04 93 80 12 40, 11:30 am to 3 pm and 3 to 7 pm, closed Sunday, €€).

Don Camillo, another with the Cuisine Nissarda quality label, is not far from the Cours Saleya, where its fresh produce probably originates (5 Rue des Ponchettes, 06300 Nice, ☎ 33 04 93 85 67 95, vianostephane@wanadoo.fr, dinner 7 to 10 pm, Monday through Saturday, Sundays and Monday lunch, €€€-€€€€). The restaurant, which gets a lot of good local press, offers gourmet gastronomy alongside traditional menus. Chef Stephane Viano is something of a local celebrity. Go to the Grand Café de Turin in Nice for the freshest seafood and shellfish (5 Place Garibaldi, 06300 Nice, ☎ 33 04 93 62 29 52, fax 33 04 93 13 03 49, 8 am to 11 pm, no reservations, €-€€). This is an old-fashioned seafood brasserie with a great atmosphere, a lively terrace and some unusual house specialties like roast asparagus salad. It’s open nonstop, all day long and if you want a plate of scampi for breakfast, no one will raise an eyebrow.

La Zucca Magica, is that genuine rarity in France, a gourmet vegetarian restaurant (4 bis Quai Papacino, 06300 Nice, ☎ 33 04 93 56 25 27, open Tuesday to Saturday, lunch 12:30-2:30 pm, i, dinner 7:30 to 10:30, €-€€). Zucca means pumpkin and the place is decorated with pumpkins of every shape and size. Apparently this is one of the symbols of Nice. Owner Marco Folicardi was a successful vegetarian chef and TV personality in Rome before setting up in Nice. His restaurant, near the Old Port, is tiny, with only 18 tables. The menu is basically Italian, but original for all that. Ravioli might be served open, like an open-faced sandwich on a slice of fine pasta. The “meatballs” are made of goat cheese and eggplant. The menu changes regularly, depending upon that day’s market. If I had any problem it’s that I always find staff in vegetarian restaurants either cranky or bossy. Signor Folicardi’s charming staff is anything but cranky. But don’t be surprised if you end up eating what they think you should order.

ANTIBES: L’Oursin, which means sea urchin, is an institution (16 Rue Republic, 06600 Antibes, ☎ 33 04 93 34 13 46, €). No stay in the town would be complete without a drop in at this crowded and popular seafood joint. The menu is reasonable, the terrace is noisy and friendly. There’s also an inexpensive children’s menu.

Oscar’s, also in Antibes, is a cosy place with Italo-Provençal cuisine (8 Rue Rostan, 06600 Antibes, ☎ 33 04 93 34 90 14, fax 33 04 93 34 90 14, €-€€). The dining room is small, with bare stone walls, pink napery and frilly white chairs. Menus change with the market but the restaurant’s four-course menu of entrée, fish or meat course, cheese and dessert is always a good value.

MENTON: La Calanque is a rustic, waterside restaurant near the harbor (13 Square Victoria, 06500 Menton, ☎ 33 04 93 35-83 15, noon to 2 pm and 7:15 to 9:30 pm, Tuesday to Saturday; Sunday lunch, noon to 2 pm, €€). It serves fat, fresh charcoal-grilled sardines (have the waiter show you how to debone them, there’s a knack to it), soup de poisson and local seafood. The menu is also dotted with such Niçoise specialties as barbajuan – a ravioli stuffed with Swiss chard and cheese and then fried – don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Given the ambiance and the location in this smart little town, the set-price menus are quite reasonable.

ÈZE: Have lunch on the beach in Èze. Anjuna Plage is named after a popular beach in Goa but the only thing vaguely Indian about this place are the exotic plants and statues arranged around the terrace restaurant (58 Avenue de la Liberte, RN98, 06360 Eze Bord de Mer, ☎/fax 33 04 93 01 58 21, nadia@anjunabay.com, www.anjunabay.com, €-€€). Food is traditional seafood with an occasional touch of exotic spice. The beach is pebble and shingle so you will need to rent one of their pale blue matelas. About €9 buys you a place on the beach for half a day, with a few spaces available for non-diners.

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