What makes it different
Niçoise food is not generic Provençal food. It is a coastal, Ligurian-influenced cooking built on chickpea flour, olive oil, anchovy, chard and whatever the sea gave up — the food of a city that was poor and Italian for most of its history.
Socca is the thing to try first: chickpea flour and olive oil, cooked flat on a big copper pan over a fire and served in torn pieces, black-blistered on top. It has to be eaten where it is made.
The dishes worth knowing
Pissaladière — an onion tart with anchovy and olives, no cheese, no tomato. Pan-bagnat — a round loaf soaked in oil around the ingredients of a salade niçoise, invented to be carried to work. Petits farcis — small vegetables stuffed and baked. Tourte de blettes — a sweet chard pie, which sounds wrong and is not.
A real salade niçoise has no cooked vegetable in it and no lettuce, and this is a subject on which local opinion is not flexible.
Where to eat it
The Cours Saleya is the obvious place and much of it is aimed at people passing through. The old town lanes behind it, and the streets around the port, are where the cooking is generally better and the room is generally smaller.
This site does not recommend individual restaurants. A guide written at a desk cannot tell you which room is good this season, and pretending otherwise is how guides go stale.
