Père & Fils Raingeard – a Michelin chef's homecoming in Contes

In Sclos-de-Contes, a quarter of the village of Contes some twenty minutes inland from Nice, Patrick Raingeard and his son Édouard turned a former village bar on the place de l'Abbé-Cauvin into Père & Fils Raingeard, opening on 11 June 2025. The chef had carried a MICHELIN star for sixteen years, the last eleven of them spent on the doorstep of Monaco, before trading the marble lobbies of palace hotels for a square shaded by plane trees, at the foot of Contes' nineteenth-century church. The restaurant today is Selected in the MICHELIN Guide, for a moderate spend, and has been awarded 14.5 out of 20 and two toques by Gault & Millau. It is a small, deliberately unshowy project: a father who spent a career cooking for others now cooks under his own name, with his son running the dining room, in a village few visitors to the Côte d'Azur ever think to climb towards.

01The room and the setting

The address itself is part of the story. Where card players once drank at the counter of the village's PMU betting bar, there is now a dining room and a terrace, set on the square in front of Contes' church and beneath its plane trees. The transformation from bar to table happened in a matter of months in 2025, and the result keeps the square's unhurried, local rhythm rather than dressing it up.

Inside, the decor stays close to the building's past: timber, natural stone and plenty of daylight, in a room designed for long lunches and unforced conversation rather than spectacle. The shaded terrace can seat up to forty, making it one of the larger outdoor tables in this stretch of the Paillons valleys.

02The chef

Patrick Raingeard is a Breton who ended up cooking Mediterranean food in the hills above Nice. He trained in his native region before moving to Paris for a decade of apprenticeships with Gaston Lenôtre, Alain Passard at L'Arpège and Jacques Maximin at Pavillon Ledoyen, grounding he later built on at La Mère Poulard on Mont-Saint-Michel and, in 1997, at the opening of Ladurée on the Champs-Élysées alongside Pierre Hermé.

Insider tip

Open Wednesday to Sunday for lunch and dinner; call ahead as hours can vary.

He moved to the Riviera in the 2000s, running the Zebra Square kitchens in Monaco before taking the Port Palace, where he won his first MICHELIN star in 2009 and was named Nantes-born chef of a Monaco address with a genuinely impressive run behind him. In 2012 he took over the kitchens at Cap Estel in Èze, winning a second star there in 2013 and the Gault & Millau d'Or PACA title the same year. After more than ten years making the silverware shine at Cap Estel, he set his pans down on Contes' square in 2025 to write, as Gault & Millau put it, a father-and-son score with his son Édouard, who runs front of house and increasingly shares the stage when dishes reach the table.

03The cooking

The cooking leans on the Mediterranean and on what grows a short drive away: September and October bring sweet potato, beetroot, celery and artichoke alongside the last of the summer vegetables, in a seasonal carte Patrick Raingeard rewrites with every change of season rather than forcing. Gault & Millau's inspectors singled out grilled prawns on a bisque of carcasses softened with roasted almond milk, a roast leg of lamb built like a Sunday roast, and a brandade of poultry set on a parmentier of confit thighs, scoring the table 14.5 out of 20 and two toques.

The produce is named on the menu and credited on the website: organic vegetables from Les Restanques d'Aurélien, free-range eggs and poultry from La Ferme des Garfes-Galli Nice, sourdough bread baked in La Turbie, and herbs and aromatics grown by Les Jardins d'Alice. The wine list runs to some eighty references, balancing classic appellations with better-value discoveries.

04What to order

Among the dishes on the current carte: a sablée tartelette of escargots with a celery remoulade and a garlic-and-parsley cream, the most autumnal plate on the menu; roasted sea bass with oregano, a green parsley jus, sweet potato and a balsamic reduction; and a seafood raviole alongside a brandade of poultry from the Paillons valleys. Gault & Millau also noted a cassolette of Paimpol coco beans in a citrus bouillon and a warm roasted fig tart finished with a mascarpone siphon and a praline heart.

For dessert, a caramelised pear feuilleté is matched with an ice cream made from rose water produced in nearby Lucéram, while a lemon tart is served with a sorbet made from Menton lemons, which have carried Protected Geographical Indication status since 2015.

05When to go and booking

The menu is built around choice: the Menu aux 3 Envies, at €55, lets diners compose their own starter, main and dessert, while the evening-only Menu aux 4 Envies, at €80, hands the kitchen free rein for a single tasting-style menu served to the whole table. Children under ten have their own Menu de Lou, priced at €18, and an English version of the carte is kept for international visitors.

The restaurant serves lunch and dinner from Wednesday to Sunday, though hours can shift around events and the season, so a call ahead is worthwhile. Booking is handled by phone on +33 4 93 72 62 87.

06The neighbourhood

Contes sits in the Paillons valleys, close enough to Nice for a half-day trip and roughly twenty-five kilometres from Monaco, yet it keeps the unhurried pace of the Niçois arrière-pays. The commune has form in sending cooks into the world: it was the birthplace of Henri Charpentier, who trained under Auguste Escoffier before building a career in Paris and later opening his own restaurants in New York and Los Angeles. A century on, Père & Fils Raingeard reverses that journey, bringing a chef formed in Paris's grandest kitchens back to a village square.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.