Most people treat Nice as the airport for somewhere else. It is also the best-fed city on the coast, the practical base for the whole Riviera — closer to everything than Monaco, cheaper than Cannes, open all year — and it eats with a confidence the resort towns do not have. Here is where to eat in Nice itself, and the two tables within half an hour that justify the drive.
The old town and Cours Saleya
Vieux Nice is where the city eats its own cooking — socca from the griddle, pissaladière, petits farcis, a plate of the little stuffed vegetables the Niçois take more seriously than anyone. Chez Pipo by the port has made socca for a century; La Merenda, a few tables and no telephone, is the room every food writer has found and none has spoiled. The Cours Saleya market runs every morning and the restaurants around it are honest rather than grand. None of this needs a minimum or a concierge; it needs the right day and a table booked a few days ahead in season.
The table on the diving platform
Le Plongeoir is the Nice booking — a restaurant built on a former diving platform above the sea at Rauba-Capeu, waves underneath and the Baie des Anges beyond. The setting does the talking and the Mediterranean kitchen keeps up. It runs Tuesday to Sunday on a €250 guide, and the rail-side tables at sunset are placed rather than walked into from May to September. It is the one Nice table that behaves like a Riviera resort booking, and it has its own dress-code notes.
The serious rooms
Nice holds more Michelin stars than any city on the coast outside Monaco, and they sit in unlikely places. Jan, by the port, is a South African chef's intimate room that took a star and kept it; Flaveur, run by two brothers, holds two and cooks with the produce of the hills behind the city. La Petite Maison on Rue Saint-François-de-Paule is the original — the Niçois bistro that went on to open in London, Dubai and beyond, still serving its own city first. The Negresco's dining room on the Promenade is the grand-hotel version. None carries a club minimum; all of them book out on a Saturday in season, and the smaller the room the longer the lead.
Up the hill: La Colombe d'Or
Twenty minutes inland at Saint-Paul-de-Vence, La Colombe d'Or is the inn where artists paid with pictures. Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Léger hang in the dining room, a Calder turns over the pool, and lunch on the terrace under a fig tree is the most civilised afternoon on the Riviera. It is a working hotel and restaurant rather than a museum, à la carte with no minimum, run by the same family since 1920, and it closes from the end of October until Christmas. Book lunch, not dinner, and arrive early enough to see the pictures. The full story is here.
Twenty minutes east: Cap Ferrat and Èze
The coast east of Nice is where the Riviera keeps its quiet money. Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat has the Grand-Hôtel's dining rooms and its Club Dauphin by the water; Beaulieu has La Réserve, the pink palace on the sea; and above them at Èze, La Chèvre d'Or hangs off the village walls with two stars and the best view of any table on the coast. All three are a driver's twenty to thirty minutes from Nice and work as an evening out from a Nice base or a lunch on the way to Monaco. For the coast itself, see Nice to Monaco by helicopter; for the week on one thread, the Nice concierge.