French Riviera Travel News

Archive for the ‘Nice Restaurants’ Category

Nice Port was lively, to say the least, on this Saturday night in August. The row of restaurants along the Quai des Deux Emmanuel had lined up their tables outside and made sure that a wall of sound surrounded their customers. At a certain point we realized that we were listening to three separate musical tracks coming from different restaurants even though our restaurant mercifully spared us background music. Thank you Paloma Cantine.

The attempt at some calm was not the only welcome touch at Paloma Cantine. I love traditional Niçois dishes like pissaladière, grilled sardines, bagna cauda but sometimes they get a little ho-hum. The modern decor here hinted at the fresh, contemporary touch the chef lent to these local staples. The sardines over polenta appetizer was amplified with delicate mixed greens and really first-rate cherry tomatoes in a savory olive oil based dressing. Nice. My second appetizer was a lovely pissaladière topped with rougets. The portions were not super-copious though, so don’t think you’ll get away with ordering an appetizer and calling it a meal.

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Le Petit Moulin baguette

Oh, so what. A baguette, you might think. How good could it be? It’s just bread, after all. Granted. If all you’ve been eating is that tasteless, industrial, feeble excuse for a baguette that’s on sale everywhere from supermarkets to your lesser boulangeries, I can forgive your cynicism. Reader, I submit for your consideration Le Petit Moulin, a boulangerie under the loving supervision of Christian Rassent and winner of the 2010 Best Traditional Baguette in the Alpes-Maritimes award.

Where the standard baguette is crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, Mr Rassent’s loaf has a slight crispiness on the outside giving way to an airy but chewy intererior. The standard baguette is almost odorless and has a slightly cloying, immediately forgettable flavor. At Le Petit Moulin the baguette has a distinctly nutty aroma and the robust sweet/sourflavor  lingers in the mouth. It’s a bready-bread. Best of all, it lasts. The standard baguette is pretty much finished in 12 hours and is rock-hard in 24. Rassent’s bread is still delicious after days.

What’s his secret? The starter dough. Eschewing baker’s yeast, this bread-man uses a sourdough starter. It takes longer but there’s just no comparison when it comes to the texture, the taste or the longevity of the loaf.

Must cost a fortune, then? Not so. His loaf is a mere €1.20, only slightly more expensive than inferior bread. But you will have to go out of your way for it. Le Petit Moulin is far from anyplace a tourist would ever think to visit in a neighborhood the French tactfully call populaire. It’s at 144 bd Madeleine, Nice not the most convenient location but what is convenient is the automatic bread dispensary just a few blocks away at the intersection of Route de Canta Galet and Route de Bellet, not far from Nice’s vineyards.

Automatic bread dispensary open 24/7.

Thinly-sliced radish adds extra crunch

Long known by the local cognoscenti, Flaveur recently burst onto a wider scene when Michelin awarded it a star only a month ago. Since then it’s been a scramble to get a reservation but oh, is it worth the wait. It clearly belongs on any list of the best restaurants in Nice. The lunch deal provided an unbelievably good value for money. For only €32, you got an starter, main course, dessert plus a glass of wine plus coffee. And the food was exquisite.

We all began with a kir as aperitif and enjoyed a tiny disk of smoked haddock with a cream sauce as an amuse-bouche. For my starter, I chose the Risotto au vert / Gambas et Pétoncles / Copeaux d’asperges et citron caviar an exciting and highly original interpretation of risotto with shrimp, sliced asparagus, sprouts and peas. Each mouthful was an adventure that involved the clever combination of myriad flavors all smoothed into harmony. A crunch here, a tart touch there, a whiff of an exotic spice, an undertone of lemon; it was impossible to pin down but the result was divine.

The main course was Volaille fermière rôtie sur la peau / Brocoletti et Grenobloise / Jus corsé au thym citron. The morsels of free-range chicken breast were topped with a juicy skin and surrounded by a delicately seasoned broccoli puree dotted with pine nuts and teensy croutons. The flavors were superb but the meat was a little drier than I would like. Then again, if you want a juicy chicken breast, don’t choose a free-range chicken I suppose.

Dessert was a flower

The dessert was another triumph: Croustillant Rose-Litchi / Mousse Ivoire / Glace chocolat blanc. To accent the pairing of rose and litchi flavors, the dessert was served with a small vial of rose-water infusion that you squirted over the concoction. What I liked was that as you spooned your way through the dish, a little morsel of litchi would pop up here and there in the white-chocolate ice cream.

The meal was creative without being precious, inventive, intuitive and an eloquent ode to a spring day on the Cote d’Azur.

David Faure’s Aphrodite is my go-to spot when I want a truly extraordinary lunch at a price that won’t give me indigestion. I hadn’t been to this restaurant in Nice since it received its first Michelin star last year so I was curious whether the quality was the same as I remembered a couple of years agol. If anything, the restaurant had improved its lunch offering.

For an inexpensive fixed-price lunch (€25), some chefs decide not to exert themselves by elaborate preparations. Not here. We began with a cool amuse-bouche of a delicate mousse punctuated with crispy paper-thin potato slice and a fresh cracker but what followed was a total triumph. Chef Faure has mastered “molecular” cuisine and the entree was a full display of his technique. Fresh peas were surrounded a chunk of quail topped  with a fois gras flavoured ice cream (who would have thought?) and then dressed up with a carrot foam that looked like a flower on the plate. Insane. The main course was a perfectly broiled cod topped with a light bath of savory sauce and complemented by fried radishes. Dessert was an exquisite concoction of violet sherbet, rasberries, mascarpone plus meringue cookies over a rasberry gel sprinkled with vanilla. Mignardises of meringue and rasberry gel completed the meal.

What was great was not only the subtle balance of flavors and the summery coolness but the portions were designed to be just filling enough for lunch without weighing you down. We left neither hungry nor stuffed. It was just right. Everything was just right from the cascading water that formed a backdrop to the enclosed terrace to the carefully chosen paintings inside the formal but cheerful dining room. Aphrodite is clearly one of the best restaurants in Nice. If you can find a better-value lunch in town, let me know!

Sometimes a place is so friendly and nice, you hate to disappoint them with a bad review. Boni at 15 rue Tonduti de l’Escarène has attracted a number of fans ever since the original opened on rue Barla. The Franco-Italian style fits perfectly in our region where there is a constant flow of Italians in and French out. Maybe that was the trouble. The chef seemed to use the names of Italian favorites–antipasti! farfalle!–without remaining faithful to the spirit of Italian cuisine. As the menu was uninspired, the dishes needed that extra something that you find everywhere in Italy. There, an antipasti is composed of  freshly grilled vegetables, fruity olive oil, salty fish, Parma ham. Here, there were a few miniscule slices of raw salmon, an average tomato topped with tuna, some mesclun and a little hunk of Italian cheese. The grilled sea bream worked well but the farfalle with salmon was dry and tasteless. The risotto with asparagus was gloppy–an unforgivable lapse. The apple crumble dessert was OK but nothing special.

The concept caters to the trendy ‘sorta tapas’ idea. You can choose 2 or 3 ‘bols’ plus a dessert. In practice, that meant 2 starters, a main course and a dessert for €23. The price was reasonable but the quality was average.