Food, Glorious Food

The Côte d’Azur has been bulldozing its beach restaurants. The demolition began a few years ago, wiping out celebrated haunts and their too-permanent installations. The image is shocking – but as ever, this coin has two sides. As the upheaval moves closer to home, French Lessons tries to understand.

Once we’d confirmed our flight to the Côte d’Azur this strange summer, our next call was to Mirazur.  Miraculously – at least by last season’s standards – the world’s #1 restaurant had space.  Two adults, and a teenager, pull up chairs at a celebrated table.

What’s life is like in the Côte d’Azur during this extraordinary 2020 season?  French Lessons readers want to know.  To answer travelers’ queries, or to bring the season closer to francophiles around the globe, we offer a glimpse of the area from our first days back. 

As French Lessons wishes readers au revoir until Summer 2020, we share a few stories from this past season that didn’t make our feed.  Gossip, blackout, and glut: Did the springtime omen of nesting doves on Bellevue’s rooftop bring the sort of luck we needed?

It’s called Geoffrey’s of London, but the British commissary of the Côte d’Azur, based here in Antibes, is more than a place to stock up on impossible-to-find essentials and favourite foods.  Is the shop also a reflection of our true selves?

. . . or shall we call this post “Fugue to the Figue”?  When we planted Bellevue’s figuier 13 years ago, we’d unwittingly reconnected our home with its past.  This year’s stupendous crop of figs yields its traditional, French delights – and new heartbreak.

The end of the Côte d’Azur’s scorching canicule marks the close of French Lesson’s 2018 season.  We look back over the summer months and a fast-paced, so-called agenda de ministre, to highlight some of the season’s fun, intriguing, and jaw-dropping stories that didn’t yet make these pages.

French Lessons is thrilled to embark on its 12^th season digging into real life in the French Riviera.  As we find our feet, it’s Christelle’s heels, the climatisation (as ever!), the parking, the coffee and a couple beachcombing locals that remind us:  We are back.

What do a tornado, double-the-figs, police on horseback, Macron, Trump, the BBC, and Leonardo DiCaprio all have in common? As the summer of 2017 rolls up its beach towels and twists the cap back on the sunscreen, French Lessons considers what made this Côte d’Azur season like no other.

Rosé wine is as pivotal to a Côte d’Azur summer as its glorious sunshine. French Lessons gladly joins a special tour of Château d’Esclans, one of Provence’s shining stars in rosé production. Walk with us through this celebrated estate, and join us for lunch in its fairytale gardens.

The sudden appearance of Starbucks in Cannes tosses French Lessons back to its earliest days in the Côte d’Azur when, craving caffeine, we searched for a takeaway latte. French culture, however, didn’t embrace the grown-up sippy cup. As a mid-summer celebration, here’s a first glimpse at the big Work-In-Progress.

A trip to the shoe store tells me – to put it the French way – that my daughter soon will eat soup off my head. It’s a startling idea, even without the soup. A velvety potage is one of many ways that French food spices up its mother tongue.