The 5 Pizzeria You Can’t Miss in Nice
Nice sat under the House of Savoy until 1860, and the Italian half of its history has never really left the
table — which is why a city of 340,000 people carries a pizza scene with the density you would expect
somewhere across the border. We went through every pizzeria with a Google Business listing in central Nice,
24 of them once the obvious mismatches were filtered out, and weighted each rating against how many people
actually left it, because a 4.9 from a few dozen reviews and a 4.9 from four and a half thousand are not
making the same claim. Five came out clearly ahead, and they split neatly into two very different worlds: two
of them on the pedestrian stretch of Rue Masséna where the tourist city eats, two more in the Port quarter
where locals book a table days out, and one dinner-only room north of the centre that quietly holds the
highest rating in the city.
Les Amoureux, Port
On the numbers, this is the strongest listing in Nice: Les Amoureux holds
4.9★ across 4,454 Google reviews, which is an unusually large sample to keep that high. Its own website
is essentially an ordering page — “Commandez en ligne” and the name, nothing more — so what the place is
actually like has to be read off how it operates, and how it operates says plenty. It opens Tuesday to
Saturday, evenings only, 7:00 to 10:00 PM, and closes both Sunday and Monday. That is a three-hour service,
five days a week, on a small street off the port at 1 Rue Bavastro — the shortest window of any pizzeria on
this list, and the one whose reviews suggest arriving without a plan is a mistake. If you are in Nice for a
few days, this is the one to sort out first.
Doma pizza, Carabacel
Doma matches that 4.9★ on a smaller base — 1,393 reviews — and is the
most explicit of the five about why its pizza tastes the way it does. The kitchen builds everything on a dough
“made from the finest flours that rests for 48 hours,” and works from what it calls fresh, local and seasonal
products rather than a fixed year-round list. The results are not conservative: the Maltaise carries fresh
tuna with seasonal vegetables, red onions, caramelised onions, capers, olives and sesame; the Capretta pairs
goat cheese with honey and pine nuts; the Béarnaise runs cream, farm chicken, Ossau-Iraty, dried tomatoes,
cherry coulis, hazelnuts and thyme — a Basque sheep’s cheese and a fruit coulis on a pizza, which tells you
how far from Naples orthodoxy this kitchen is willing to go. It sits at 31 Rue de Lépante, about a kilometre
north of Place Masséna, and it is dinner only: 7:00 to 10:30 PM, seven days a week.
Prima Volta, Port
Two hundred metres from Les Amoureux, and the closest thing this list has to a neighbour rivalry:
Prima Volta holds 4.8★ from 2,726 reviews at 5 Rue Emmanuel Philibert. Its
website is a single splash page carrying the name and nothing else, so there is no menu, no origin story and
no chef biography to report honestly — what the Google listing does show is a schedule that has clearly been
tuned to a real neighbourhood rather than to passing trade. Monday through Thursday it opens for dinner only,
7:00 to 10:00 PM. Friday, Saturday and Sunday it adds a short lunch, 12:00 to 2:15 PM, and pushes the evening
out to 10:30. Weekday nights and weekend lunches are two different businesses, and this one runs both.
Boccaccio, Rue Masséna
The heavyweight by volume: 5,201 reviews, more than any other name here, at 4.4★. It is also the one
that stretches the category, and it is worth being straight about that — Google files
Boccaccio as a Mediterranean restaurant rather than a pizza restaurant, and the
restaurant’s own description leads with “restaurant gastronomique et produits de la mer,” inviting diners on
“une escapade gourmande en immersion totale avec la mer.” Oysters and seafood are the headline; pizza shares
the room with them. It is the only listing on this page at Google’s expensive price level, it sits at 7 Rue
Masséna “à deux pas de la place Masséna” on the pedestrian street, and it runs a full double service every day
of the week — 12:00 to 2:30 PM and 7:00 to 11:00 PM. Come for a long lunch by the sea’s produce rather than
for a quick margherita.
La Pizza Cresci, Rue Masséna
Two hundred and seventy metres down the same pedestrian street sits the oldest story on this list.
La Pizza Cresci was opened in 1956 by Francis Cresci, whom the restaurant describes
as a pioneer of the pizzeria-restaurant format in France, and it has been trading from Rue Masséna for close
to seventy years since. The wood-fired oven is the centrepiece and the whole argument: it “delivers a lively
pizza with unique taste, crispy and tender with generous toppings,” and the house holds up an onion-and-
persillade pizza as its own particular signature, alongside pasta, risotto, fish, artisanal ice cream and an
apple tart the restaurant is not shy about. Cheese comes from independent producers it selects itself. At
4.2★ from 4,631 reviews it carries the lowest rating of the five on one of the largest samples — roughly
what seven decades on the busiest tourist street in Nice does to an average. It is also the late one: 34 Rue
Masséna, 11:00 AM to 1:00 AM, every single day, colourful dining room plus a terrace on the street.
All five, on the map
The interactive map has all 24 qualifying pizzerias we found across central
Nice, these five marked and numbered, and a button that hands the walking route between them straight to
Google Maps on your phone.
Getting the most out of a pizza crawl in Nice
The good news is the geography: all five sit inside 1.7 km of each other, so this is a walking day rather
than a transit day — Boccaccio to Cresci is 270 metres, Prima Volta to Les Amoureux is 180, and the longest
single hop, Cresci up to Les Amoureux, is under two kilometres of flat city. The awkward part is the clock.
Three of the five are dinner-only for most of the week and two of those close by 10:00 PM, so a “crawl” here
means booking ahead and moving between the Port and Rue Masséna on a schedule, not wandering. If you are
visiting rather than living here, a local eSIM from Airalo means maps,
restaurant listings and last-minute calls to a pizzeria work from the moment you land at NCE, and a booked
transfer from Welcome Pickups takes the guesswork out of the airport
run, which in Nice ends far closer to the old town than most people expect. Paying in euros without a foreign
transaction fee on every meal adds up fast in a city this expensive — a Wise
card is the simplest fix. And if the pizza is one stop on a wider Côte d’Azur itinerary, Tiqets covers skip-the-line entry for the museums and attractions between
lunch and dinner. Staying longer than a fortnight — Nice draws a lot of remote workers and students in the
off season — and HousingAnywhere is the usual route to a mid-term
furnished flat in the Port or Carabacel, which is where two of these five happen to be.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the best pizzeria in Nice?
By rating weighted against review volume, Les Amoureux comes out on top: 4.9★ across 4,454 reviews is
the strongest combination in the city. Doma pizza matches the 4.9★ on a smaller base of 1,393 reviews and
is the more adventurous kitchen of the two. “Best” depends on what you want — Les Amoureux for the consensus
pick, Doma for 48-hour dough and toppings nobody in Naples would recognise, La Pizza Cresci for a wood-fired
oven that has been running since 1956.
Do I need to book?
For the Port pair, plan ahead. Les Amoureux opens Tuesday to Saturday for three hours a night (7:00 to
10:00 PM) and is closed Sunday and Monday; Prima Volta is dinner-only Monday to Thursday and adds a weekend
lunch. Boccaccio and La Pizza Cresci both run every day with far wider windows, so they absorb walk-ins much
more comfortably.
Where in Nice are the pizzerias concentrated?
Two clusters. Rue Masséna, the pedestrian street just off Place Masséna, carries the high-traffic
restaurants — Boccaccio and La Pizza Cresci are 270 metres apart on it. The Port quarter, about 1.3 km east,
carries the neighbourhood ones: Prima Volta and Les Amoureux sit 180 metres apart there. Doma sits on its own
to the north in Carabacel.
Is pizza actually a Niçois thing, or an import?
Both, and the border explains it. Nice only became French in 1860, and the Italian side of its heritage
shows up across the local food culture. That said, the city’s own street-food classics are socca and
pissaladière rather than pizza — the pizzerias on this list are a parallel tradition, not the local
speciality, and the two best-rated of them lean modern rather than Neapolitan.
Anywhere to eat pizza late in Nice?
La Pizza Cresci, and by a distance. It lists 11:00 AM to 1:00 AM seven days a week, which is a fourteen-hour
service and the only kitchen here still open past 11:00 PM. Boccaccio runs to 11:00 PM daily; the other three
have all closed by 10:30.
- 1. Les Amoureux — 1 Rue Bavastro, 06300 Nice
- 2. Doma pizza — 31 Rue de Lépante, 06000 Nice
- 3. Prima Volta — 5 Rue Emmanuel Philibert, 06300 Nice
- 4. Boccaccio — 7 Rue Massena, 06000 Nice
- 5. La Pizza Cresci — 34 Rue Massena, 06000 Nice