Berlitz Travel - Berlitz: Nice, Cannes & Monte Carlo Pocket Guide

How To Use This E-Book

Getting Around the e-Book

This Pocket Guide e-book is designed to give you inspiration and planning advice for your visit to Nice, Cannes & Monte Carlo, and is also the perfect on-the-ground companion for your trip.

The guide begins with our selection of Top 10 Attractions, plus a Perfect Itinerary feature to help you plan unmissable experiences. The Introduction and History chapters paint a vivid cultural portrait of Nice, Cannes & Monte Carlo, and the Where to Go chapter gives a complete guide to all the sights worth visiting. You will find ideas for activities in the What to Do section, while the Eating Out chapter describes the local cuisine and gives listings of the best restaurants. The Travel Tips offer practical information to help you plan your trip. Finally, there are carefully selected hotel listings.

In the Table of Contents and throughout this e-book you will see hyperlinked references. Just tap a hyperlink once to skip to the section you would like to read. Practical information and listings are also hyperlinked, so as long as you have an external connection to the internet, you can tap a link to go directly to the website for more information.

Maps

All key attractions and sights in Nice, Cannes & Monte Carlo are numbered and cross-referenced to high-quality maps. Wherever you see the reference [map], tap once to go straight to the related map. You can also double-tap any map for a zoom view.

Images

Youll find lots of beautiful high-resolution images that capture the essence of Nice, Cannes & Monte Carlo. Simply double-tap an image to see it in full-screen.

About Berlitz Pocket Guides

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Table of Contents

Eating Out

The south of Frances exceptional local produce is at the heart of the cuisine here. Much of the best cooking is seasonal: asparagus in spring, tomatoes and courgettes in summer, tarts and gratins made with fresh figs in late summer, game, wild mushrooms and truffles in autumn.

Regional Specialities

Olive oil rather than butter is used for cooking and is a crucial ingredient in anchoade (also known as bagna cauda ), a warm anchovy and olive oil sauce, into which chopped raw vegetables are dipped, and aoli (garlic mayonnaise), which usually appears as an appetiser dip.

Salade nioise

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Nices distinctive cuisine is a fusion of Provenal and Italianate influences resulting from the towns Savoyard past and a long to-and-fro history between the two, as well as its market-gardening tradition. Some specialities, such as salade nioise (salad with tuna, olives, peppers, green beans, eggs and anchovies) and ratatouille (a hearty, luscious mixture of tomatoes, onions, garlic, courgettes, peppers and aubergines), have travelled the world; others remain essentially local.

Nice claims to have invented ravioli, but here, unlike those found in Italy, they are typically filled with leftover daube de buf (beef stewed in red wine and herbs, cooked in a daubire ) and swiss chard. Other Italianate specialities include gnocchi, made from potatoes or durum wheat, and soupe au pistou , a rich, minestrone-like vegetable and bean soup into which a sauce of basil, garlic and olive oil (pesto) is stirred at the end.

Nices cailletier olive turns up in many dishes; indeed, la nioise on a menu will often indicate a sauce made with tomatoes, onions and black olives, and may be found accompanying pasta, fish, chicken or rabbit.

Perhaps the most characteristic of all Niois dishes, however, is petits farcis niois , an assortment of stuffed tomatoes, aubergines, courgettes, onions and bell peppers, each with its own slightly different filling, based around ham, rice, herbs, minced meat and breadcrumbs.

Portable Treats

Snack food is an art form in Nice, where a whole range of specialities just seem designed for eating in the street. Socca , one of the legendary dishes sold at stalls in Vieux Nice (best-known are Chez Ren Socca at 1 rue Pairolire and Chez Thrsa in cours Saleya market), is a thin chickpea crpe cooked on a large circular iron plaque, then cut up into portions, seasoned with black pepper, and best served very hot; pissaladire is a delicious open onion tart, garnished with anchovy fillets and black olives. Then there are panisses , deep-fried chickpea flour fritters, and ganses , mini doughnuts flavoured with orange blossom water and dusted with icing sugar, traditionally eaten during the Carnaval period. Even salade nioise has its portable version, the pan bagnat : a crusty roll rubbed with garlic and olive oil and crammed with lettuce, tomato, onion, tuna and anchovies.

Vegetable Heaven

One area where Niois and Provenal cuisine differ from the rest of France is the emphasis on vegetables, thanks both to the variety and quality of local produce and to peasant tradition where meat was mainly reserved for special occasions. Preparations can be as gloriously simple as marinated and roasted red peppers, or the fresh herbs and varied young salad leaves of delicate mesclun . Tomatoes are an ingredient in numerous sauces, but also appear as simple salads and chilled summer soups or as tomates provenales , a popular accompaniment to meat and fish dishes, sprinkled with minced garlic and breadcrumbs and baked very slowly until almost caramelised. Look out also for caponata , aubergine stewed with tomatoes and capers.

Peppers and garlic are two local staples

Sylvaine Poitau/APA Publications

Youll also find all manner of vegetable tians , baked gratins of courgette, squash or aubergine with egg and rice, named after the rectangular earthenware dish in which they are cooked. Tiny purple artichokes, almost without a choke, are braised la barigoule with mushrooms and bacon, but are also sliced very finely and eaten raw. Another treat is delicate orangey-yellow courgette flowers, dipped in egg and flour and deep-fried as fritters or stuffed with brousse (fresh cheese). Blettes (swiss chard) are served as a vegetable or combined with apples, raisins and pine kernels in Nices tourte de blettes , a surprisingly sweet tart; while stuffed cabbage, the leaves bound around a sausage-meat filling, is a rustic speciality of the Cannes and Grasse area.

Fish and Meat