Mirazur

The calendar

Choose the moon before the table

Mirazur, in Menton, cooks one of four menus each day, and you do not choose it. The restaurant is on the last slope of the town before Italy; the border post at Pont Saint-Louis is a few hundred feet up the road, and the dining room opens on the Mediterranean. The calendar chooses the menu. You choose the day.

Mauro Colagreco cooks four Universes, Root, Leaf, Flower and Fruit, after the biodynamic calendar. That almanac holds that plants answer to the moon and the constellations, and it names, day by day, the part of the plant at its strongest. Root is earth, Leaf is water, Flower is air, Fruit is fire.

So the first step is not the date you are free. Open the calendar on the booking page, where each day carries its Universe, choose the one you want, and look for a table under it. The restaurant says it cooks by 365 micro-seasons a year.

9 a.m., Paris time

Book the month the morning it opens

Tables are released one month at a time, at 9 a.m. Central European Time. March 2027 opened on Monday, November 2. April opens on Monday, December 7, and May on Monday, January 4. In New York that is 3 a.m.; set the alarm. Newsletter subscribers are let in early.

A card holds the table. You may cancel free of charge up to 15 days before; after that, or if you do not come, the restaurant may charge €450 a guest, the price of the menu. If your day is full, join the waiting list; it is not a booking. Parties larger than six book through a separate request.

Menton is 27 miles from Nice airport, about 45 minutes by car when the roads are clear. By train, Menton-Garavan station is about half a mile from the door. For a bed on the same coast, read Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, at Cap d’Antibes.

At Mirazur you book the moon first, and the table second.

The main room

Ask for the window, at lunch

The dining room opens entirely onto the sea: Garavan Bay, and along the shore the colored facades of Menton’s old town climbing the hill. Every table faces it. That is the case for lunch over dinner: you came for this light. In the booking form, choose the main room.

For a group of up to eight, there is La Mesa, the kitchen table, right beside the stoves and facing the sea. At the back, the patio sits under a mobile canopy, for coffee, or a cigar, after.

Nine sequences

Let the kitchen order

There is nothing to choose. The menu is carte blanche: nine sequences, each built on one plant, from the garden’s harvest and the day’s catch. Colagreco promises never to serve the same dish twice unless you ask. If you loved one before, say so when you book.

The menu is €450 a person, taxes included. The cellar holds more than 40,000 bottles. Ask for the Origine pairing, a run of vintages that goes back to 2006, the year Mirazur opened, or for the alcohol-free one, made from garden plants, without a single grape.

Until November 29, the kitchen also cooks a Forest Menu: six courses at €380, with a €250 pairing. On two Sundays still to come, November 22 and December 13, a six-course truffle menu is served in La Puerta, the private room behind a mechanical door: an open kitchen, a cellar walled in wood and glass, records and books, sixteen seats. And in the restaurant’s twentieth year, Mirazur alumni come back to cook on November 27 and December 5.

Rosmarino

The garden next door

The garden starts next door. Rosmarino, 2.5 acres of terraces a few steps from the restaurant, 66 feet above the sea, grows oranges, lemons, bananas, loquats, almonds and jasmine. Castillon, 7.5 acres clinging to the hills at 1,970 feet, is the main source of fruit and vegetables, among olive trees centuries old.

A third site, at Sospel, about 19 miles inland, is becoming a 42-acre farm by 2027. In all, the gardens count up to 1,500 species, and some plates take hundreds of flowers, picked by hand.

Mauro Colagreco

Twenty years, three stars

Colagreco came to France in 2001 and opened Mirazur in 2006. Its three stars came in 2007, 2012 and 2019, the year The World’s 50 Best Restaurants ranked it No. 1. A green star followed in 2020. UNESCO has made him a Goodwill Ambassador, the first chef to hold the title, and in 2024 Mirazur became the first three-star restaurant to be certified B Corp. In 2023 he put the moon in writing, in a book called Mirazur Under the Sign of the Moon. A hotel of eleven suites is planned for early 2027.