Pure & V

Who Should Book Pure & V

If you are a wine-forward diner who wants natural bottles chosen with real conviction alongside food that treats vegetables as a serious main event, Pure & V is the right table in Nice. This is the restaurant for the explorer who has already worked through the city's French classics and wants something that feels more like Copenhagen than Côte d'Azur — Nordic discipline applied to Provençal ingredients, with a wine program that drives the experience as much as the kitchen does. It also works well as a destination for a significant dinner: a milestone birthday, an anniversary, or a trip built around eating well rather than eating familiarly.

The Wine Program Is the Point

Sommelier Vanessa Massé built Pure & V's identity as much as any chef. Her focus is natural wines — genuinely sought-out bottles, not a token section on an otherwise conventional list. For a diner who uses the wine list as the first filter when choosing a restaurant, that orientation matters: you are not working against the room here. The pairing logic runs through the whole menu, which means vegetable-forward dishes get matched to wines with the texture and acidity to hold their own. If your priority is a deep, conventional cellar with blue-chip Burgundy poured by the glass, this is not your room. If you want a sommelier who has an actual point of view on natural producers and can walk you through it, this is one of the stronger options in Nice for that experience.

The Kitchen: Nordic Logic in the South of France

Chef Pinja Paakkonen trained in a Michelin-starred kitchen in Denmark before arriving in Nice, that background shows in the menu's architecture. Dishes documented from the kitchen include roasted fennel with a sauce fermented from white asparagus and fresh dill oil, quail cooked whole with smoked beurre blanc, a bavarois with camomile and satsuma mandarin. The throughlines are fermentation, restraint, a vegetable-first hierarchy that is more Nordic than Niçoise. The sourcing is careful, the emphasis on provenance is built into how the menu is described, not added as an afterthought. This is not a French kitchen that has imported a few Scandinavian techniques; the logic runs deeper than that.

The restaurant occupies two floors. The ground floor, decorated in cool tones, is where the full menu runs. Upstairs, Pure & Vins offers a simpler menu in the evenings only, useful if you want the wine experience without committing to the full kitchen output, or if you are eating earlier in a short trip. The price range sits at €€€€, which positions it alongside the other serious kitchens in Nice rather than as an outlier.

Recognition and Standing

For context on where this sits in the wider French dining conversation, the Côte d'Azur's most decorated table is Mirazur in Menton, about 30 minutes east. Pure & V is not competing at that level of formal recognition, but it is doing something different: a neobistro format with a wine-first identity that the three-star circuit does not replicate. If you want the contrast of what France's most technically ambitious kitchens look like, Alléno Paris au Pavillon Ledoyen or Troisgros are the reference points. Pure & V earns its place by being genuinely singular in its category within Nice rather than by chasing that tier.

Practical Details

Pure & V is open Tuesday through Saturday from 6:30 PM to 10:30 PM, on Sundays for both lunch (12:30 PM to 2:30 PM) and dinner (6:30 PM to 10:30 PM). It is closed on Mondays. Sunday lunch is worth flagging as a specific occasion: it is the only midday service of the week, which makes it a natural anchor for a longer weekend in Nice. Booking difficulty is rated as easy, meaning you should be able to secure a table with reasonable notice rather than weeks of advance planning. The address is 7 Rue du Lycée, 06000 Nice.

Explore More in Nice

Pure & V sits within a genuinely interesting dining city. For the full picture, see our full Nice restaurants guide. If you are building a longer stay, our Nice hotels guide, bars guide, wineries guide, and experiences guide cover the rest. For other ambitious modern kitchens in the south of France and beyond, Mirazur in Menton and Flocons de Sel in Megève are worth the trip. If Nordic-influenced precision at the tasting menu level is what you are after in a different context, Atomix in New York City is the international reference point for that format done at the highest level. For classical French cooking that anchors the tradition Pure & V is consciously departing from, Auberge de l'Ill and Bras are the comparative benchmarks. And if you want to understand where the most rigorous seafood-led cooking sits globally, Le Bernardin in New York City remains the clearest standard.