Nice: Socca, Markets and Street Food
Nice has its own food, not generic French bistro fare and not Provençal cooking either. The Niçoise kitchen runs on chickpeas, olive oil, anchovies, and vegetables, with deep Ligurian roots from the centuries the city spent under Savoy rule. Eat the specialities where locals eat them, which usually means a market stall or a small back-street table rather than a terrace with a sea view.
Socca, the dish to try first
Socca is a thin chickpea-flour pancake baked in a wood-fired oven and cut into rough, blistered wedges, served hot with black pepper. It is the definitive Nice street food, and it does not keep, so eat it standing, straight off the oven. Chez Pipo on Rue Bavastro near the port is the best-known name, cooking it in an old Biot-stone oven, roughly 12 EUR for a sit-down plate. For a few euros less, the stalls in and around Cours Saleya do a perfectly good version to eat on your feet.
Pan bagnat, pissaladière, and the rest
Pan bagnat is the original portable Nice lunch: a round roll soaked in olive oil and stuffed with tuna or anchovy, tomato, egg, olives, and peppers, sold at bakeries and market stalls across the old town for a few euros. Pissaladière is an onion tart on bread dough, brushed with anchovy paste and studded with olives, another market staple. In cooler months look for daube, a slow beef stew braised in red wine.
The salade niçoise rule
Here is the one to get right: a proper salade niçoise has no boiled potato and no green beans. It is raw vegetables, anchovies or tuna, hard-boiled egg, black olives, spring onion, and good olive oil. The potato-and-green-bean version is a later Parisian edit that Niçois purists treat as a plain error. If the plate in front of you has warm potato in it, you are getting the tourist version.
Where to buy it
The markets are a legitimate meal in themselves. Cours Saleya runs Tuesday to Sunday mornings for flowers and produce; the Marché de la Libération, north of the station, is the bigger, cheaper, more local daily market where fewer tourists go. For a sit-down meal, walk one or two streets back from the main squares, where family-run kitchens outcook the terraces trading on foot traffic.
What it costs, and tipping
Street food and socca run 5 to 12 EUR a person; a casual Niçoise bistro 20 to 35 EUR; a mid-range dinner with wine 40 to 70 EUR. Local rosé is the default pour, but Nice has its own tiny AOC Bellet in the hills above town, worth ordering by name. Service is included by law, so a rounded-up euro or two is generous, not the 20% habit some visitors bring.
Read more: our Nice guide covers the wider city, and the 3-day itinerary builds market mornings into the plan.