Mirazur – Menton's three-star garden on the Italian border

Mirazur occupies a 1930s rotunda on avenue Aristide-Briand in Menton, built almost on the Italian border and facing the Mediterranean, where chef Mauro Colagreco has cooked since 2006. It holds Three MICHELIN Stars, a distinction that arrived in 2019, the year Colagreco became the first chef not born in France to be awarded three stars in the French edition of the Guide Michelin. Months later Mirazur was named Best Restaurant in the World at the World's 50 Best Restaurants awards in Singapore, the peak of a climb from fourth place in 2017 and third in 2018. Behind the trophies sits a quieter discipline: a surprise tasting menu assembled daily from three gardens scattered across the hills above town, so the kitchen answers to the harvest rather than the other way round. In 2026 Mirazur marks twenty years on this terrace above the Golfe de Garavan.

01The room and the setting

The restaurant sits in a 1930s villa about thirty metres from the Italian border, its dining room raised to look straight down the Golfe de Garavan towards the old town and the Alpes-Maritimes behind it. The building's rounded, terraced form has made it a landmark on this stretch of coast long before Colagreco arrived.

The 2019 Michelin and 50 Best double win set off a three-year renovation: a new dining room, enlarged vegetable gardens and a more immersive way of moving guests between kitchen, cellar and terrace, so the meal now unfolds across several rooms rather than one table for the evening.

02The chef

Born in La Plata, Argentina, in 1976, Mauro Colagreco trained under French legends like Bernard Loiseau, Alain Passard at L'Arpège, and Alain Ducasse at the Plaza Athénée, staying with Loiseau in Saulieu until the chef's death in 2003 before a further year under Guy Martin at Le Grand Véfour.

Insider tip

Nearest station Menton-Garavan; the dining room sits about thirty metres from Italy.

He opened Mirazur in 2006 at twenty-nine. Six months later Gault&Millau created a new 'Revelation of the Year' category just to recognise him, and within a year he had his first Michelin star; a second followed in 2012, the third in 2019. In 2022 he became the first chef named UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, for biodiversity, formalising a commitment to circular, seasonal cooking that has run through Mirazur from the start.

03The cooking

There has never been a printed menu to choose from at Mirazur: since 2006 guests have taken the carte blanche, a surprise sequence that lets the kitchen receive the day's harvest and catch rather than dictate it in advance. The current format runs to nine sequences, each built around a single vegetal ingredient pulled from the gardens, and short of a specific request the kitchen will not repeat the same dish twice for the same table.

Running alongside it are four 'Universe' menus — Root, Leaf, Fruit and Flower — drawn from the biodynamic calendar's belief that the moon's position energises different parts of a plant on different days, so a Root menu leans grounded and earthy while a Flower menu turns light and aromatic.

04The gardens

Colagreco calls his plots the 'Sanctuaries of Mirazur'. Rosmarino, just steps from the restaurant and barely twenty metres above the sea, has grown from an ornamental garden into terraces of orange, lemon and banana trees, loquats, almonds and jasmine. Up in the hinterland, Castillon climbs to 600 metres and supplies most of the kitchen's fruit and vegetables from wide cultivated beds around a centuries-old olive grove. A third site at Sospel, thirty kilometres out, is being developed into a 42-acre agro-ecological farm due to expand by 2027.

Across the gardens the team records up to 1,500 plant species, and on a given week, 60 to 80% of the kitchen's produce is now grown rather than bought in.

05Wine and drinks

The cellar runs to roughly 40,000 bottles across 5,000 references, assembled patiently by Colagreco with his sommelier team and ranging from the Mediterranean hinterland to Argentine and Piedmontese vineyards. The pairing programme is led by Magali Picherie, who returned to Mirazur in 2020 and was named Chef Sommelière of the Year by Gault&Millau in 2022.

For the restaurant's twentieth anniversary the team created 'Origine', a pairing that retraces 2006 through rare and emblematic vintages from the year Mirazur opened, alongside the regular 'Terroir' and 'Exception' routes. There is also a non-alcoholic pairing made entirely from garden plants — infusions, ferments, macerations and house-pressings — with no grapes at all.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.