Useful Information
I'm wary of setting out anything which may be regarded as a recommendation, whether by naming a restaurant or setting out a process. The reason is that either could change. Restaurants change their staff. Processes are altered by government whim. The following reflects our experience at the date of writing (2024/25). Feel free to feedback any information to the contrary, but please don't rely on what is said below which is based on our recent experiences.
The following includes only those places we use regularly. There are many others.
Restaurants
Le Rustic (Place Nationale): our "go to" for an evening meal but also open for lunch. A family owned and run place serving Mediterranean food. A menu covering pizza to fillet steak, priced for hungry families, Outside eating in summer, cosy inside in winter. It has a pizza oven on the ground floor (hence the cosy winters) and a basement kitchen. It can accommodate from a singleton to large groups. Wine and beer are good and nicely priced. We usually drink the current Bandol red. Best to book in busy periods. Closes Wednesday. Best naughty thing: Le Colonel for dessert, essentially sorbet with a double Vodka. You can tell the kids that it is Daddy's ice cream.
Le Vauban (Rue Thuret): Fine French dining achieved by good staffing and a small, manageable menu. Wines excellent. Closes Monday and Tuesday. Booking essential. Smart but not formal. Qualified by one local chap as "somewhere to take a lady".
Le Pimm's (top of the hill, Rue de la Republique): Nothing to do with British Pimms drinking. This is a Brasserie: a bar, a cafe, and a restaurant. The food is simple but it excels itself for Sunday lunch for which booking is essential. Open from 07:30 until 21:00. Closes Sunday evening. A happy hour from 17:00 but getting less cheap because it is the "go to" place for a large spread of the locals and so doesn't need to try too hard on that account but the service is good and entertaining. Outside and inside service. Ideal place to start the evening with a Quart (250 ml jug) of wine or a Grimbergen Blonde beer.
Le Phoenicia (1 avenue Barquier, Antibes, France): while the UK has Indian cuisine, the French have Middle East and North African, and the best of these are usually Lebanese, who also make excellent and reliable wine. The only warning is to try and avoid over ordering. Sit outside to catch the evening breeze. Best to book. See Le Phonic
Pizzas
Pizza is readily available but there are some nuances. Not all places which serve pizza want to do takeaway unless business is quiet. A place which considers itself a restaurant will not have the pizza oven up and running for dinner until 19:00 even if it has been selling food throughout the day.
Da Citos (Cours Massena at Marché Provençal): for pizza in, and takeaway after 18:30. Da Citos have taken over the bar over the other side of the southern end of the Marché, which is also a reliable place for beer and wine. Perfect while waiting for your takeaway.
L'Epicerie Italienne on Rue Aubernon near the Marché, keeps its ovens going until 19:00 subject to demand.
Le Rustic - see above: has excellent thin base pizza. Will do takeaway but often too busy to want to.
Bakeries
Bakeries, boulangerie, each close 1 or 2 days per week. They coordinate to ensure there will always be more than one available every day in the old town. For savoury: try the pissaladiere which is a thin pizza base covered in tomato puree and onion, and take care on approaching the mandatory black olive in which by custom the stone is left. For sweet: we go for the Baba aux Rhum but it is all good. The French have rediscovered the heavier breads which were standard before the Austrian influence (Napoleon often met them) made their world baguette crazy. That said, French dads and grandads continue to be sent out early morning to fetch baguettes. Try the Pain Campagne and Pain aux Cereals if you want bread which will last more than 24 hours in your apartment.
Aux Délices Antibois Fils, Rue de la Republique at the Place Nationale: full range of breads and patisserie. Bakes on site.
La Boulanger des Gourmets, Rue Sade: full range of breads and patisserie.
Le Four à Pain, Cour Massena, Marché Provençal: Best Baba aux Rhum in Antibes.
Boulangerie Veziano, Rue de la Pompe: may still be the best but it has been discovered by at least one of the social media sites and often has a substantial queue, particularly if the tour guide groups are in town. And so we haven't been in for a while. Bakes on site.
Copenhagen Coffee Lab, Cour Massena, Marché Provençal: part of a chain and really a cafe but selling Scandinavian type breads and pastries. See below for comments on it as a cafe:
Coffee
If you are a milky coffee drinker then any of the local bars can be relied on to deliver a decent café crême although the price:volume relationship can vary. The following are more for black coffee drinkers. As to tea, the French have yet to grasp the need for water and tea to meet at the moment of boiling. They invariably serve the water separately from the tea (a bag you may be asked to select while your water is cooling).
Good Mate Coffee, Rue Georges Clemenceau: a purist coffee house which serves a few, very few nibbles. This is the best coffee we have found in the old town and at good prices. The large Cappuccino is large and priced low relative to many others, currently EUR5. A long black (café allongé) will suck your cheeks in. The place is small and can just about seat five if they are all friendly. You will be asked to go around to the hatch at the side after ordering a takeaway. There simply isn't enough room for waiting customers to stand inside. Opens at 08:00.
Copenhagen Coffee Lab, Cour Massena, Marché Provençal: excellent coffee and serves breakfast as well as bread and patisserie. Cooked eggs can be had with moist Germanic rye bread. Seating inside as well as outside and can cater to the billy-no-mates who want to sit for hours with their laptops (wifi and power points). Opens at 07:30, unsurprising because it faces the market and the stall holders have already been at work for an hour setting up.
NOMADS, Rue Sade: excellent coffee, but another one social media has discovered and often crowded out. Does have inside and outside seating and offers a small range of patisserie.
Buses
There are local buses and those which connect to Nice and Cannes. The local buses enable travel within the Antibes area which includes Biot, Vallauris, and Sophia Antipolis We have found the following routes most useful.
Route 82: This is an express service from the airport, via Antibes, and through to Vallauris. Timetables vary seasonally and over the prior two decades so has the route and the type of bus. The current incarnation uses air conditioned electric coaches and travels part of its trip on the A8 autoroute. This reduces the travel time to as little 25 minutes to Antibes. Suitcases are placed into the luggage carriers under the bus which means you do need to make sure the driver is getting off the bus to retrieve yours when it gets to the Antibes Pole d'Echange (the bus station located next to the railway station which also has one of Antibes two taxi ranks)). The current timetable can be found at 82 Bus. Allow about twenty minutes to walk down as far as the old town and the apartment.
The service uses Terminal 2 at Nice Airport. If you arrive or leave through Terminal 1 you should use the Tram for a free transit between the two Terminals. Confusingly, some websites imply the bus stops at Terminal 1 and sometimes for fun it does! Tickets can be purchased on the bus and, for a saving of 40 cents they can also be purchased at the Centre de Services inside the Terminal. Take care to note the start and end times of the bus service. There is an alternate and cheaper bus service, the 620 (see below for more information), which runs marginally later into the evening from the Aéroport Promenade, an easy walk from Terminal 1. There is a night bus service, the 621, but it runs from Nice, hourly at night, and has been known to be full of returning revellers by the time it arrives at the Aéroport Promenade. Unfortunately some of the airlines have services from the UK so late that none of these buses works well and you may need to resort to a taxi (see below) if you are too late for the 82 to Antibes. Current bus prices are EUR21 for an aller retour (return ticket valid for a month). An aller simple (single) can be bought for about EUR11. The driver can take both cash and credit/debit cards.
Route 6: a useful local service which runs through the town centre and up to the Carrefour hypermarket and for do-it-yourselfers (bricolageurs) on to the Castorama (stop Cimetiere Bas: the French sister company of B&Q). It runs in the other direction to Port Gallice in Juan les Pins. Unusually for local bus it does not run through the Pole d'Echange. See 06 Bus for the route. We find the Briand stop convenient for the old town. The bus runs approximately every 20 minutes. There is flat fare of EUR1.50 if bought on the bus. Tickets are valid for an hour and so must be "validated", that is time punched after purchase at the ticket reader beyond the driver.
Route 620: This bus runs from the Antibes Pole d'Echange to its equivalent in Cannes as a slower and cheaper alternative to the train. It may be easier to walk over to Rue Directeur Chaudon to catch it in Antibes. See 620 Bus. Although single fares are EUR2.50 the ride is slow, circuitous, and not for those prone to car sickness, and ends anyway at the Cannes railway station.
Trains
One of the attractions of Antibes is the variety of transport routes available. The Paris Nice TGV service, and its overnight sleeper version, stop at Antibes which reflects the town's importance both at a regional municipality and its long term tourist attractiveness. Long distance travel can be booked through Trainline and SNCF (See Home page for internet addresses). Local services run from Cannes to the west through to Ventimiglia which is the first stop over the Italian border. It stops at all the famed tourist stops of the Côte d'Azur including Nice itself, and Monaco.
Tickets for short distance trips can be bought through machines in the station using UK credit cards. Prices are generally more expensive than buses: Cannes is about EUR10 for the train. The train trips are usually far quicker and the train track runs for much of its length along the coast so try to sit upstairs to discover from where all those cheap YouTube videos are filmed.
Care with tickets: you will not be able to hop on a TGV using a regional train ticket. TGV tickets are all seat reserved.
Parking
Parking is expensive even by UK standards. This is intentional. The Marie has spent the last twenty five years trying to discourage people from driving into old Antibes.
Because of the pedestrianised zone, you will find most airport taxi drivers unable to get into the old town centre to drive up to the apartment, and we recommend anyway the bus service which is summarised below.Otherwise, book with Allo Taxis, see below.
If you are driving to Antibes, details of parking can be obtained from: Q PArk (ignore the booking page).
The nearest/best Q Park is the Pré des Pécheurs, underground car park, 20 Avenue Verdun 06600 Antibes. You do not need to book through the website. Parking here is expensive but you can buy tickets for one to four weeks, and these are much cheaper than paying by the hour for more than several hours. You will receive a ticket when entering. There are payment machines at each pedestrian exit.
To buy a period ticket, a forfait, at the ticket machine: you will need to wait at least an hour after entering the car park before being able to use one of the machines to buy a period ticket by following the instructions below. Essential is to press the Forfeit button first, before inserting your entry ticket. Otherwise the machine will expect you to pay for your parking up to that moment. On screen instructions are in French, English, and German. Once you have a forfait you will be able to access the car park even when it is showing as full.
Note that the machines are prone to playing up. One problem is displaying gibberish when trying to buy a forfeit but in our experience the buttons still work, being 1 to 4 weeks down the 4 buttons. There is a call button on the machines and the office is next to the entrance barrier if you need to call up help.
You can park in the free car park at Fort Carre. There is a shuttle bus service (navette) from these free car parks to Port Vauban, outside the ramparts (latest cost €1 per person per trip), and they are walkable: allow 20 minutes. These navettes have recently been Ford Transit style minibuses but the municipality is in the process of replacing them with electric minibuses.
Open air car parks near the Salis beach are usually free from October to May.These are about 10 minutes walk from the apartment.
DO NOT LEAVE ANY POSSESSIONS VISIBLE IN PARKED CARS AND IDEALLY REMOVE ALL YOUR POSSESSIONS. ALSO HIDE ANY BRANDED MARKETING THE HIRE CAR COMPANY HAS LEFT IN THE CAR - THIEVES WILL ASSUME TRAVELLERS WILL LEAVE BAGGAGE IN THE CAR
Taxis
Taxis in France are expensive and difficult to track down in the town. There is taxi rank outside the station, and therefore near the Pole d'Echange bus station which in recent years is often populated. The better option is to book with Allo Taxis which is, as it's website claims, "official" and can access the pedestrianised zone. The booking receptionist is used to English language customers.
Airport: the taxis at the taxi rank of the airport will charge a flat fee currently of EUR75 for the trip to Antibes, but rarely (unless they are also on the Antibes official list) be able to get into the pedestrianised zone and will need to drop you at either at the roundabout before the Rempart archway on Avenue de Verdun, or along Rue Auberon which runs along the south side of the Marché Provençal but is more complex to get into, particularly for an out of town taxi driver. We, and the airport, do not recommend using any other than a taxi at the airport taxi rank.
Emergency Services
This data is copied from the UK Government site French Emergency Numbers:
Emergency services in France
Telephone 112 (ambulance, fire, police)
Ambulance: 15
Fire: 18
Police: 17
Deaf and hard of hearing emergency number (SMS, chat, video and fax): 114
The emergency Ambulance service uses red vehicles and is called the SAMU. This differs from white ambulances which are used for non emergency travel.
Travel Insurance: The UK has reciprocal arrangements with France for emergency treatment and you should arrange to have a UK Global Health Insurance Card (GHIC) which can obtained prior to travel through GHIC. We cannot give you travel advice but please be aware that Travel Insurance' health cover is used for repatriation when you are not fit enough to use your intended means of returning home. The GHIC only applies to your emergency cover through the French health service. That is: the NHS will refund the French for those costs. Once the French system has completed that emergency service, you will need to cover any costs of delay returning home and the additional costs caused by your illness and that is what your Travel Insurance is intended to cover.
Other Foreign Office advice can be found at: UK Foreign Office Advice for FrancePharmacies
Pharmacies are as regulated as in the UK with the additional benefit that on any day at least one local pharmacy will be open. If either of the two below are not open, simply ask the question on your mobile telephone.
We have used Pharmacie du March at the corner of Cour Massena and Rue Georges Clemenceau, and Grand Pharmacie d'Antibes at the corner of Avenue 24 Août and Rue de la République. The latter also stocks ranges of make up. Both are helpful.