Mirazur

Mirazur is a restaurant of creative cooking in a house from the interwar years on avenue Aristide Briand in Menton. Mauro Colagreco opened it as the first restaurant of his own, and he still leads its kitchen.

Before Menton, Colagreco cooked in the kitchens of Bernard Loiseau, Alain Passard, Alain Ducasse and Guy Martin. He opened Mirazur in 2006, and a first Michelin star came within a year. The third followed in 2019, which made him the first chef born outside France to hold three stars in the French guide, and in the same year the World's 50 Best list put the restaurant at its head. Mirazur has also belonged to Relais & Châteaux for more than a decade.

Much of what reaches the table is grown by the restaurant itself, in vegetable gardens near the house and on terraces at Castillon. The agronomist Silvina Dayer runs the growing, while the ethnobotanist Alessandro Di Tizio looks after wild gathering and the plants of the surrounding hills. Banana and mango trees, pomegranates, sweet potatoes and nopal cactus grow beside the vegetables, and lemon trees stand among other citrus in the garden, where Colagreco picks his own fruit. Menus follow the plant itself, built around its flowers, fruit, leaves or roots, so that a meal reads like a walk through what the gardens hold at that moment.

The Menton lemon appears again and again. Olive oil is scented with it and with Sichuan pepper, and a preserved lemon draws on recipes from North Africa. During the town's Lemon Festival the kitchen serves a menu given over entirely to citrus. For the restaurant's anniversary, Ferran Adrià put together a guest menu with Colagreco, and Michelin lists the house among its plastic-free restaurants.