Tokyo born Head Chef and restaurateur Keisuke Matsushima has some self-distance imagining himself as a shogun on his menus. Japanese style interior, but Keisuke Matsushima is not a Japanese restaurant – no, it is French cuisine with touches of Japan among others.
The small haute cuisine restaurant is squeezed in between other business at the busy street of rue de France in central Nice not far from the city’s two landmark hotels, the Negresco and the Palais de la Méditerranée. You will never miss Negresco’s palatial entrance, but you can certainly risk simply just passing Keisuke Matsushima’s humble entrance if you do not look carefully.
On a warm summer’s day at the Riviera you can be served food like vegetables from Liguria, with raw and cooked vegetables together with garlic and anchovy dip. Another starter you can have is 15 gram of spring caviar, le Caviar de Printemps, with zucchini mousse and sorbet fresh onion. If you prefer to have fish as your main then you should consider the sea bass served with potato crust, mushrooms from Paris, summer truffle vinaigrette and with the mesclun salad, which is assorted young salad leaves from Provence.
The fish and meat dishes mostly are inspired by the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur cuisine with a typical meat dish, like the Mille-Feuilles de Boeuf “Simmenthal” that is a traditional local dish, but which has been worked over by the chef and is served with wasabi and a Japanese taste. Another meat dish worth trying out is the saddle of lamb from Alpes-de-Haute-Provence with roasted lavender, lamb juice in olive oil and cannelloni with ratatouille and panisse that is a culinary speciality from the region, originally from northern Italy, made from a base of chickpeas which are fried or baked.
You will have ups and downs during you lunch or dinner at Keisuke Matsushima which still thinks it is okay to not understand that today’s world of fine dining is global and not local when it comes to the modern restaurant guest with excellent knowledge of the world.
Almost all fine dining restaurants in the world have at least someone who can speak English which is the most used international language in the world. Forget about that when you are having your meal at Keisuke Matsushima. Despite the fact that there is a huge number of visitors to Nice each year, most of the staff refuses to speak any English at all so you have to go with Japanese or French as sole alternatives.
No problem with that if you actually speak one of these languages, but a fine dining restaurant should be able to communicate at least pretty well in English so the guests know what they order. There are many restaurants on this level around the world with limited knowledge of English, but very few with such an extremely limited knowledge or interest in communicating in other languages than Japanese or French. We have had many guests contacting us about what they consider as bad treatment of them and in some cases rude as well.
A fine dining establishment of today must understand the global world we are living in and can not treat guests like it was 1965, when it was more common for a fine dining restaurant to treat their guests like they should be grateful for dining at their restaurant when it nowadays is the other way around and especially not in the region Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur with many of the top restaurants of the world. There are loads of great restaurants in the region so overlook your skills in Japanese or French before making a reservation. Keisuke Matsushima’s cooking is good in most cases, but there are several better alternatives in the region for people looking only for the best and at the price level presented at Keisuke Matsushima.
Written by Andy
