Day 4
With a threat of rain on the horizon we opted to wander the old town of Nice. My friend whom I was visiting has a coffee partnership through her work and so we decided to visit their torrefactor and try the esteemed roast. Was very good iced coffee, thrown in a cocktail shaker which made the morning feel festive.
The rain still hadn’t arrived by lunchtime so we had a cold salad and even colder glass of wine (for 1euro!) at a very Californian barber shop / restaurant and then headed to the beach. Managed about forty minutes before the rain came.
I sent a rough recipe of one of my favourite dinner party dishes to a friend who was searching for inspiration and they later sent me a picture with the harissa tomatoes that warmed my heart. Reminds me why it is that I like cooking, it is as much the feeding and sharing as anything else.
Took a trip to Monoprix to escape the drizzle and bought some rogue snacks. Ketchup flavoured monster munch are one of my favourite French supermarket finds and they tend to save me from slightly iffy hangovers. They are unlike British monster munch, resembling more so a tomato flavoured PomBear, which in my mind is no bad thing.
Dinner was a very, very bad Deliveroo that I won’t honour with any more information than that.
Day 5
The Côte d’Azur is a fantastically easy place to hop along, a short and cheap 14 minute train from Nice you arrive in Èze. There are two Èzes next to each other, one next to the sea and one wiggled up in the mountains. We spent the morning on an empty beach, lapping up the extreme sunshine and resenting that we forgot to bring out parasol that was bought for that exact reason. This part of the coast has rocky beaches which I prefer to the sand as they feel cleaner and less fucking annoying. The rocks were being gently dragged in and out by the tide and made a noise like ice clinking in a glass of whiskey.
One of the best lunches in a roadside shack called La Casa. A southern speciality - pan bagnat, essentially a tuna sandwich but with such fresh accompaniments, radish, celery, olives, anchovies. It tasted like the beach. I googled the sandwich to find out a bit more about it and in three out of four recipes that I viewed, it called for belle tomates. I like the distinction between a beautiful and ugly tomato.
On our motorbike ride up to the next Èze we passed a fruit stall with a sign that offered FRAISE EXTRA. Unsure whether they are selling extra delicious strawberries or they have excess or they are just trying to catch eyes of passers by. The latter worked.
Took an early train back to Paris this morning and am already hungry for my salami and cornichon baguette. It’s only 10h.
I am a writer and cook (chef technically but that often scares me to say) based in Paris. I write an irregular bulletin called Alphabet Soup that works its way through the A-Z touching upon moments of cooking, eating, learning, and writing.