Overview
The fresh, lively scent of a Menton lemon. The melting texture of long-cooked onions. The bracing chill of that first sip of rosé. Les Petits Farcis isn’t just about flavors — it’s about all the pleasures of a day spent shopping at the Cours Saleya market and preparing an authentic Niçois meal in France’s most Italian city.

Market Tours & Cooking Class:
These come in a variety of flavours, please see the pricing table below for the options. The following sample itinerary will give you a feel for what they involve:

Our day begins at the Cours Saleya market where the narrow maze of centuries-old streets that is the Vieux Nice opens up onto this splendid space lined with bars, cafés and fish restaurants on either side and market stalls down the centre. The main aisle is the most dazzling, yet what really interests us is the collection of small producers’ to the side. The fruit and vegetables are not as uniformly shaped and the variety not as great, but every ingredient we’ll find here is firmly rooted in the region and much of it is organic.

Your menu choice will dictate which shops and producers we visit in Nice. Because traditional Niçois cooking relies more on vegetables than meat or fish, we can also plan an entirely vegetarian menu. Once our shopping is complete we'll head 'home' for some serious cooking. A couple of hours later we will sit down to an authentic Niçois meal and toast our efforts with a glass of wine.
After lunch, if you wish, I will lead you on a gourmet tour through the zig-zaggy streets of the Vieux Nice, where you will taste Niçois olive oils, see fresh pasta being made, learn more about Provençal wines and discover local sweets.

Four Day Cooking Course
A few times a year, Les Petits Farcis offers intensive four-day courses for those who wish to learn a full repertoire of Provençal dishes. Classes take place in my renovated 17th-century apartment off the Cours Saleya market on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 10.30am to 2pm, with an optional market tour on Wednesday morning. Each day we prepare a full menu of seasonal dishes with only the finest ingredients from the market and local food shops, then sit down to our three-course meal with accompanying wines. My assistant keeps everything running smoothly so that I can focus on teaching. A typical menu might consist of soupe au pistou (a Provençal minestrone), rack of lamb with a mustard and herb crust, artichokes braised in white wine, and strawberry tart. Students receive a booklet containing all the recipes from the course, plus my personal lists of favourite restaurants and food shops in Nice. The maximum number of students is six, keeping things small and friendly.

Meet the Producers tours
The producers at the Cours Saleya were understandably suspicious at first of a foreigner who dares to teach Niçois cooking. But my constant presence at the market, enthusiasm for the local produce and loyalty to the small producers has convinced them over time that I am a true Niçois at heart. Many of the producers have invited me to their farms, which is what gave me the idea for the Meet the Producers tours. Just beyond Nice the land becomes rugged and mountainous, making the producers’ task a challenging one. The scenery is some of the most breathtaking on the Côte d’Azur, yet this is not an area that most tourists would explore on their own as the villages are so remote and tiny. Depending on your interests, we can visit an olive farm to taste organic oil made from the local Niçois olives, see dozens of varieties of citrus fruits at a garden run by a former Formula One race car driver in Menton, gape at the 80 organic tomato varieties grown in the hills of Bellet, and sample the little-known wine from that same region. The price of the tour includes transport in a comfortable vehicle and a gourmet lunch in a small village. Weekdays are preferable, as most of the producers come to the market on weekends. We can accommodate a maximum of seven people.

Pricing

Market Tours - Options Prices in Euros   Market tour, cooking class and four-course lunch, 9.30am to 3pm €200   Market tour, cooking class, four-course lunch and afternoon gourmet food walk, 9.30am to 6pm €290   Market tour, gourmet food walk and olive oil tasting with lunch, 10am to 2pm €150   Afernoon gourmet food walk, 3 to 6pm €100   Saturday or Sunday early morning market tour with tasting breakfast, 8 to 11am €120   Meet the producers tour, 9am to 5pm (includes transport by car and lunch) €290 Four day cooking course €480

Accommodation
Courses do not include accommodation and are designed to fit around your own schedule and accommodation preferences in Nice and the surrounding areas of Provence. I am happy to recommend hotels and self-catered apartments in Nice.

Tutor
Food critic and cookbook author Rosa Jackson is fascinated with Nice and its unique culinary tradition, a result of its history and climate. She wrote about food for a daily newspaper in Canada before moving to France in 1995 to work as an interpreter at the Cordon Bleu cooking school and run Paris Market Tours.

She has edited five editions of the Time Out Paris Eating and Drinking Guide (published by Penguin), a guide to more than 850 restaurants, bars and cafés; updated several chapters of the 2006 Time Out South of France and Fodor's Provence and the Côte D'Azur guides; and written about food for a number of magazines and newspapers, including Food & Wine, Fine Cooking and Eating Well in the United States, Food and Travel magazine and The Evening Standard newspaper in Britain, and Eat magazine in Japan. She is the France correspondent for Australian Gourmet Traveller magazine

Her first cookbook, Petites recettes pour grandir, was published by Marabout (a division of Hachette) in March 2004, and her second cookbook, La cuisine des paresseuses, came out in February 2005. She is married to a Frenchman and has a four-year-old son.

Location
With 2,640 hours a year of sunshine (an average of seven hours a day), Nice is one of the sunniest and most glamorous spots in France. But the summer vegetables that go into its famous ratatouille — tomato, eggplant, bell peppers, zucchini — tell only part of the story. Just behind Nice is the arrière-pays, a rugged, dry, mountainous region whose inhabitants survived for hundreds of years on mountain plants, dried beans or chick peas, and vegetables such as squash and Swiss chard alongside small amounts of meat and fish.

Getting There
The Nice-Côte d’Azur Airport is the second largest in France. 45 airlines make 82 direct connections to 27 countries worldwide and operate a large number of daily flights to and from 30 other French cities. With over 300 flights a week and some 45 daily flights, the Paris-Nice route is the busiest in France. From the airport it’s a 15-minute bus ride into the city centre, costing €4.

La SNCF (French National Railway Company) provides 11 regular connections from abroad and 20 daily connections with the largest cities in France.