Location Index
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Uncle Orson's Restaurant Guide
La Cagnard
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ven if the food weren't marvelous and the service perfect, it would be worth going to this restaurant just for the setting. You drive up into the narrow streets of the "Haute de Cagne," the medieval city on a steep hill, and park your car at the automatic lot — believe me, you don't want to drive it beyond that point! (The automatic lot itself is fun — you drive your car into a cradle and it is then moved automatically by an elevator and slipped into an empty space in the pigeonhole parking spaces along the wall.)
Then you take a good little walk among the ancient stone buildings, marveling that people actually got their cars through the narrow streets and into the impossibly small garages. Clearly Americans could never live here, because we could never drive here.
When you reach La Cagnard, which is also a hotel, you go up a narrow, steep flight of stairs and then back through the bar to a double dining room. The back part is for outdoor dining under the stars, overlooking the whole city of Cagne and the gorgeous green hills around it. The inner dining area seems at first to be merely a gracious old-fashioned dining room — until, on clear nights, they roll back the roof and the sky opens up above you.
That's the setting. Here's the good news: The food and service are even better.
Here is where I came to love the cheeses of Provence; and if you love goat cheese, fully half the cart is devoted to it. Here we learned to heed the waiters' suggestions for special dishes the chef was particularly proud of that night. And this is the restaurant that my daughter Emily remembers as the best she ate at in Europe — for good reason.
As with my review of the Moulins de Mougins, there is no reason for me to try to remember particular dishes — the menu will not be the same by now, more than a year later (and certainly not in the fall or winter, when provençal cooking moves inland to celebrate the hunter and the herdsman rather than the fisherman and the vegetable farmer). Suffice it to say that even though the Moulins de Mougins has a world-famous chef, La Cagnard more than held its own, and it is worth the drive to this out-of-the-way, unchic, but also unspoiled town to see a part of the Riviera where real people live, and where chefs can creat masterpieces without becoming celebrities, because excellence is merely what's expected.
La Cagnard
address forthcoming
Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence, France