Nice is different from other towns along the French Riviera. There is a pinch of everything here. Along the Promenade des Anglais there are the luxury hotels, now mixed in with a far greater proportion of condominiums and a few restaurants of variable quality. In the centre of the city the open areas have been remodelled and turned green. Trams slide across these twenty-first century spaces among public art and nervous fountains. Their occupants, the few that there are, are heading for the inevitable retail. In vieux Nice there are only restaurants, dozens of them, lining the pedestrianized streets, very indifferent eateries facing each other as they fight over an indifferent clientele.
Venture away from all this and there is a lot more to Nice than you could find in the many chic resorts along the coast. Today small is chic on the Riviera and Nice is big, very big. Although the tourist office still clings to the fashions of one hundred years ago there is a new Nice, multi-national, multi-racial, part Italian, part French but mainly Niçois. The night is no longer tender here, if it ever has been, and the backstreets away from the coast remind the traveller of Montpellier and Marseille rather than Cannes.
HotPot has established itself in the station district, an area generally populated by a mixed group of north African and Asian groups mixed with young white French. Hemmed in by the more traditionally ubiquitous standby, neon-fronted French Vietnamese restaurants, Hot Pot is a fun Korean evening out with fresh fish, sizzling hot plates and full-flavoured broth. The servers juggle shrimp and scallops in entertaining demonstrations of their craft, slicing beef and flipping clattering tofu directly into the mouths of more experienced diners. The patrons are chatting, laughing and eating in equal measure, a good sign in any restaurant. You could do worse. At any place in vieux Nice, par exemple.
Hot Pot, 6 rue Alsace Lorraine, Nice. 04 93 82 33 54
