Casa Fuego – Mauro Colagreco's fireside canteen above Menton

Casa Fuego sits on the terraced slope of Menton's Garavan quarter, close to the Italian border and only a few steps from the glass-fronted dining room of Mirazur, the restaurant that carried chef Mauro Colagreco to three MICHELIN stars and, in 2019, to the title of World's Best Restaurant. Where Mirazur is garden and ceremony, Casa Fuego is family table and flame: an Argentinian grill restaurant Colagreco opened in 2020 as a tribute to his own childhood between Buenos Aires and the Atlantic coast. It is selected in the MICHELIN Guide, recognised for cooking built entirely around the asado, the Argentine ritual of wood-fired grilling, and for a terrace that looks straight down over Menton's old town and harbour. The pitch is deliberately unfussy — shared plates, open flame, a long wine list — but the hand behind it, and the produce it uses, are anything but casual.

01The room and the setting

The dining room is built around its grill the way a chapel is built around its altar. A large wood-fired oven and open grill dominate the interior, visible through glass walls that let the view spill in from every angle, while outside a covered terrace runs the length of the building with what is, by common agreement, one of the best outlooks in Menton: the old town, the port and the Mediterranean laid out below. The tables are solid, undressed wood, set with stainless Mepra cutlery, wooden-handled Laguiole steak knives and Churchill 1795 Stonecast plates — a deliberately rustic counterpoint to the precision of the kitchen behind it.

Inside, diners can choose a seat with a direct line to the grill and the open kitchen, or one on the terrace for the sea view; either way, the room reads as an Argentine hacienda transplanted onto the Côte d'Azur, a short walk from the manicured gardens of Mirazur.

02The chef

Mauro Colagreco, the Argentine-Italian chef behind Mirazur, opened Casa Fuego directly across the street from his flagship restaurant as what he calls his own family canteen, built around the flavours of his Argentine childhood and the secrets of his family recipes. He arrived in Menton in 2006 as a young chef with no ties to its traditions, and has since become, by his own account and that of local producers, inseparable from the town itself — he also owns the pizzeria La Pecora Negra and the bakery Mitron nearby.

Insider tip

Book ahead; the terrace table with the sea view is the one to ask for.

Day to day, the grill is run by head chef Matteo Cetti, from Como in northern Italy, who trained in San Francisco before spending seasons in the Balearics and Uruguay, where he learned the slow, ember-based technique of the parrilla — distinct, as he explains it, from the high-flame Italian grill he grew up with. The floor is overseen by director Giuseppe Di Maria, who runs service with the same warmth Colagreco built into the concept.

03The cooking

Casa Fuego works almost entirely with fresh, seasonal, short-circuit produce: some of the fruit and vegetables come straight from the chef's own garden a few metres from the restaurant, the rest from Menton's covered market or from Ventimiglia, just over the Italian border. All of it passes, one way or another, across the wood fire — not only the meat, but fish from local, sustainable boats and vegetables cooked directly on the embers.

The menu is built as a journey through Colagreco's own memory of Argentina, filtered through Mediterranean ingredients: chimichurri and aguachile sit alongside escalibada and other dishes drawn from his childhood, all meant to be shared rather than plated individually, in the spirit of an asado among family.

04What to order

Start with the empanadas — hand-cut beef, or onion, potato and cheese, served with a llajua sauce — before moving to the aguachile San Remo, white shrimp marinated in lime with cucumber, coriander and chilli. From the grill, the ojo de bife and the picanha are the benchmark cuts, alongside a rib of beef meant for sharing, lamb shoulder and grilled octopus; the kitchen also turns out handmade pasta and seasonal specials such as a seafood gnocchi. Finish, as the MICHELIN Guide itself notes, with the dulce de leche flan.

05The neighbourhood

Garavan is Menton's quietest, greenest district, a hillside of villas and citrus gardens running up to the Italian frontier — the same terrain that shaped Colagreco's cooking when he arrived two decades ago with, as he has put it, completely fresh eyes on a region he had never worked in before. From Casa Fuego's terrace it is a short walk down to Mirazur, and a short drive into Menton itself for the covered market, the old town and the lemon groves that still define the town's identity alongside the chef who has become, in the words of one local citrus grower, as much a symbol of Menton as the fruit itself.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.