Still looking to book an apartment in Antibes?
Here are three rental apartments in Antibes near
L'Auberge Provencale.
RESTAURANT REVIEWS
ANTIBES
• Les Figuier de Saint-Esprit
• L'Auberge Provencale
• Yaka
• La Taille de Guêpe
GOLFE-JUAN
• Tétou
CANNES
• La Guérite
VILLEFRANCHE
• L'Aparte
EZE
• Chevre d'Or
ST-PAUL-DE-VENCE
• Le Tilleul
• La Colombe d'Or
CAGNES SUR MER
• Restaurant Lou Lou
MOUGINS
• A La Table d’Edmund
FURTHER AFIELD
• L'Auberge de la Penne
ROSA’S TIPS
• Making the Most of the Market
• Wine Bars: A Corking Night Out
Looking for restaurants in Nice?
Visit our restaurant guide to Nice on our Nice Pebbles site
L'Auberge Provencale
61 Place Nationale, Antibes
04.93.34.13.24
Seafood: To Eat in or Take Away? That is the Question
It’s hard to miss this restaurant in the centre of Old Antibes, just off Rue de la Republique. A long standing favourite, and popular with tourists and locals alike, the décor is traditional and rustic, with tiled floors, exposed beams and with brass cooking pots and antique pepper grinders competing for shelf space. As the décor and setting suggests, this isn’t a place where you will be surprised by the cuisine, but its honest, conventional, extremely well cooked Provencal fare.
Well known for its seafood, L’Auberge offers a take away option as well as dining in which can be perfect to take back to your rental apartment in Antibes. From the tempting seafood counter in front of the restaurant, you can walk way with simple well cooked dishes of oysters, prawns, scallops, clams and langoustines. All served for you on a platter complete with lemon and finger bowls!
If you choose to dine in, you can take advantage of a wider menu of great seafood dishes including velouté de champignons des bois aux langoustines et Saint Jacques (creamy rich mushroom soup with langoustines and scallops), poelée de calamars en persillade (squid with a healthy kick of garlic and basil), Filet de lotte en rotie de chorizo (rich spicy Spanish sausage with monkfish) or perhaps their traditional bouillabaisse. If you’re not a fish lover there are plenty of simple meat options including fillet steak, roast duck with orange and gingerbread or roasted lamb with garlic and thyme. Vegetarians could opt for pesto-fried gnocchi.
For desserts, there are Provencal favourites such as crème brulee with lavender, tiramisu with strawberries or perhaps fruit gratin with fresh mint or chocolate brownie and ice-cream. The setting can be quite special – especially in season. There is a lovely shady courtyard which is intimate yet, large enough to not feel on top of fellow diners. When the weather is less favourable there is a cosy interior dining room or a “winter garden” with a glass roof, so you are still reminded you are on the French Riviera. The service is decent and always with a smile, and the wine list is reasonable.
Two diners can certainly eat extravagantly, with a decent bottle of wine, for less than 150 euros but if you are on a slightly tighter budget can choose an entrée, plat and dessert from the Menu du Vieux Marché Provençal, inspired by fresh ingredients from the local market, for 34.50 €, or the lunch menu – a steal for a mere 19.50 €. Or of course, there is the take away menu for dining in your rental apartment in Antibes.
– Gayle, Riviera Pebbles. If you would like to contact Gayle you can email him at gayle@rivierapebbles.com
Rosa says,
Seafood stalls heaped with gleaming shellfish are a common sight outside restaurants in the south of France. Usually you will find a mix of French shellfish, with oysters coming from the Atlantic coast and the prized moules de bouchot – mussels that grow on wooden posts – being brought in from the Mont St-Michel Bay in Normandy. Among the sea creatures that are more likely to come from the Mediterranean are oursins (sea urchins), whose forbidding spikes protect their deep orange, strongly iodized flesh. Sometimes you might see tellines, clam-like shellfish hardly bigger than a fingernail, or violets, which have a knobbly oyster-like shell and a taste that many people find overpowering. Unless you order moules-frites, a dish borrowed from northern France in which the mussels are cooked with white wine and served with chips, you can expect seafood platters to be served cold and mostly raw, with shallot vinaigrette for spooning over the oysters and rye bread for the accompaniment.