Maison de Bacon

Maison de Bacon — known to everyone in the Cap simply as Bacon — opened on the eastern shore of Cap d'Antibes in 1948, and has been serving the same bouillabaisse, in the same dining room, with the same recipe and a near-identical clientele, for almost eight decades. The restaurant is the Mediterranean's most famous bouillabaisse address. It is also one of its most expensive, and on most regulars' lists, its best.

The bouillabaisse is the order, full stop — six fish minimum, sourced live from the morning auction, presented whole to the table for inspection, then carved tableside and served with the broth, rouille, and toasted bread. The rest of the menu is a serious Mediterranean seafood card: bourride, sea bass roasted in fennel, langouste from the cap waters, and a dessert programme that runs to a tarte aux pignons that the kitchen has been making since the original chef-owner Henri Sordello opened.

The dining room — pale wood, white linen, a wall of glass facing the Mediterranean and the Iles de Lérins beyond — has changed almost nothing since the 1970s, and its visual stillness is part of the point. The wine cellar holds an unusually deep Provençal white section, with old Domaine Ott rosés that the family has held in storage for decades. Service is led by the third-generation Sordello family and runs on a kind of formal warmth that few Riviera restaurants still bother with.

Bacon is the closest thing the Riviera has to an unchanging dining institution. The clientele runs from yacht owners moored in the harbour below to French politicians, Italian footballers, and the occasional eighty-year-old regular ordering the same lunch they have ordered every June since 1972. It is a destination booking and a deliberately conservative one — the kitchen does not chase trends and does not need to.

Bacon is a milestone-birthday lunch on the Cap. A round table for six, the whole bouillabaisse production at the centre, a magnum of vintage Provence rosé in the ice bucket, and the entire afternoon to take it slowly. The kitchen handles a celebration dessert without theatre; the family will pour a digestif on the house if asked correctly; and the room treats the occasion with the gravity that a decades-old institution should. For a long Riviera lunch that earns its name, this is the most quintessential option in Antibes.