Alain Llorca

Restaurant Alain Llorca occupies a 1990s-vintage chalet hotel on the route de Saint-Paul, just outside the village walls and one kilometre downhill on the road from La Colle-sur-Loup. The chef Alain Llorca — Le Negresco in Nice, then Le Moulin de Mougins under Roger Vergé, then Le Chantecler in his own name — opened in 2008 and has held one Michelin star for fifteen of the last seventeen years. The room is built around a single full-height picture window facing the village panorama: the Vauban walls, the bell-tower of the Eglise Collégiale, and the two-thousand-metre Massif des Préalpes behind.

Llorca's cuisine is recognisably contemporary-Mediterranean French with deep regional sourcing. The headline plate is the 'cabillaud à la romarin' — a slow-cooked cod with rosemary, fennel and Niçoise olive oil — that has been on the menu since opening. Other anchors: a hand-rolled spinach gnocchi with Carros lamb jus; a Bandol-poached Mediterranean turbot with samphire and lemon confit; a slow-cooked Lozère lamb shoulder with thyme; the famous 'soufflé Grand Marnier' that the pastry team has refined since 1995 and which is the canonical Riviera soufflé.

The wine list is the most Provençal-led of any Côte d'Azur Michelin-starred room — 1,400 references with deep coverage of Bandol, Côtes-de-Provence, Bellet (the tiny Niçoise appellation), Cassis, and a strong rosé section. Sommelier Romain Iliou runs the floor and the pairing flight at €120 is heavily Provençal — eight glasses across the region's serious appellations. The Champagne and Burgundy sections are also serious; the Bordeaux is deliberately tight.

The dining room holds forty-two covers across fourteen tables; the captain rotates the room and the chef does a chef's-table walk before the cheese course. Service is family-run — Llorca's wife Frédérique runs the front-of-house, his son Romain manages the cellar, the captains are seasonal staff who have worked the room for years. The hotel itself is twelve rooms; most diners stay overnight which lets the kitchen run unhurried.

Alain Llorca is the proposal-grade table inland of Saint-Paul — the picture-window view of the village at sunset is among the most photographed dinner views on the French Riviera, the hotel's overnight option means a complete proposal-and-stay weekend, and the seven-course pacing is unhurried. Brief Frédérique three days ahead; the team have done dozens of proposals across the years and time the moment with the cheese course as the village lights come on across the valley.