• In town, definitely take a walk on the Promenade des Anglais, so named because its construction was funded by the English congregation of the Anglican Church. There’s also a fabulous produce market in Cours Saleya every day except Monday, when it becomes a brilliant antique fair instead
• Hop over the border to Italy (1hr on the train) and go to the wonderful Hanbury Botanical gardens, which run right down to the sea on slopes covered in citrus trees. There’s a huge open-air antiques market too, and Italy has a much more relaxed approach to fakes than France, so you can pick up some great stuff
• Off the coast at Cannes (40-minute train from Nice) there’s Jason deCaires Taylor’s Underwater Ecomuseum, where you can scuba dive or snorkel around submerged statues. They’re only three to five metres deep and access is free. All you need to do is get one of the many shuttle boats from Cannes and dive in! 

• Behind the cathedral in the old town is a café called Marinette. Wonderful pastries, really large things with vanilla cream. It’s a great place for breakfast or brunch. Out of town, we love Amour Café down in Antibes because it’s such a friendly place. Worth a stop if you’re out that way
• For lunch in Nice, I’d say Le Galet (which means pebble, named for Nice’s pebbly beach) which is open much more of the year than some of the other summer-only beach clubs. Out of town, in Roquebrune Cap Martin, you have La Grotte & L’Olivier (the cave and the olive tree). They were trying to dig a railway tunnel and the rock was too hard, so there’s just a cave and now the restaurant is half in and half out of it, on the edge of the village. Great pizza and lunches as well as the setting
• For dinner, there’s a French-Japanese fusion restaurant called L’Eau de vie. They kept the name from the previous business that was there. It’s a really nice, very small restaurant and the chef’s Japanese, but he cooks French specialties with a twist. A couple of hours from Nice in Hyères, and worth the trip, is Chez Soi. The town is a bit downmarket, but has some lovely museums and the restaurant is excellent. 

• Nice is a pleasure port and it’s worth a walk around the marina. You’ve got these small wooden boats called Pointus, painted in bright colours and moored almost alongside these vast superyachts. There’s a free ferry that takes you across the harbour too, giving you a good view of all the boats as you go
• There’s a really good observatory up on the hill which is well worth a visit. The views from the hill are great and it’s a very interesting place. Also, it was a location for the filming of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris
• You have to see one of the “perched villages” too. Eze is very famous and gets crowded in summer, which is why I prefer Haut de Cagnes, which has a really old château at the top, which is now a museum. Just the other side of Monaco is Roquebrune Cap Martin. It’s very, very old and when you’re there, it feels like nothing’s happened since about 1500. That’s not so crowded either. 

Drawing on travel writer and Nice resident, Jon Bryant’s suggestions along with a few tips from the owners of our places, we’ve put together an idea of what a few days in the area could hold. Visit historic villages and botanic gardens, eat at cave restaurants and old town cafés, swim among submerged statues off the coast of Cannes.  

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In her book, Amuse Bouche, writer and French food lover, Carolyn Boyd takes you on a tour of the culinary regions of France. In the south, this means the origins of the famous salad Niçoise, the callisons of Provence and the peppers of the Basque country. Read the extracts here. 

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