Pan bagnat, the sandwich of Nice

Pan bagnat is a round roll, split and soaked in ripe tomato and olive oil, then filled with raw vegetables, tuna or anchovy, hard-boiled egg and black olives. It is built from the same ingredients as a salade niçoise, packed into bread. The name is Nissart: pan is bread and bagna means bathed, so it is “bathed bread”.

It began as plain food for fishermen and workers. Cooks in Nice describe stale bread softened with the juice of a crushed ripe tomato, rubbed with garlic and moistened with a little oil. It is dated loosely to the 19th century. Today kiosks and bakeries sell it as a full meal; one Nice kiosk weighs its sandwich at about 350 g. Like socca and pissaladière, it belongs to the everyday street food of the city, described in our guide to Niçoise cooking.

What goes in, and what stays out

A pan bagnat holds raw vegetables, and only the egg is cooked. The label recipe lists tomato, cébette, radish, green salad pepper, basil and black olives, with tuna, anchovy and egg, and fava beans and violet artichoke in season.

Bruno Pardot, president of the Commune libre du Pan Bagnat, says in a 2023 interview that it never contains lettuce or cucumber, or it becomes a vegetable sandwich. A member of the Cuisine Nissarde label’s technical committee, speaking to Le Parisien in 2024, adds mayonnaise, chicken and green olives to the list. Tuna, egg and anchovy are the only proteins. The olive of the tradition is the small black Niçoise.

How cooks in Nice make it

The vegetables barely change; the soaking, the oil and the fish do.

Version	Soaking and seasoning	Fish	What is particular
Cuisine Nissarde label	Crumb soaked with salted tomato pulp, then a dash of vinegar, then 20 to 30 ml oil per sandwich	40 g tuna and 1 salted anchovy	Pressed firmly, rested a few moments
Bruno Pardot, Commune libre du Pan Bagnat (2023)	Little oil, no balsamic; wine vinegar tolerated but it turns the anchovy	Salted anchovy, not oil-packed; tuna tolerated	Tomato cut in quarters or eighths, olives at the edge
Kiosque Tintin, Nice (Brut, 2025)	Salt, then vinegar, then plenty of oil, pepper last	Anchovy or tuna; both for the greedy	Celery in the vegetables
Sara Issautier, Lou Balico (ARTE, 2026)	Tomato juice and garlic on the bread, crushed before eating	Tuna and anchovy, both non-negotiable	More artichoke than usual
La méthode Cuisinier (2023)	Basil-flavoured oil, bread cut as a bowl	Tuna and anchovy	Can be made a day ahead

The oil is where Nice disagrees. The longtime owner of the Kiosque Tintin recalls farmers from the hills who judged a pan bagnat by whether the oil ran down to their elbows. Pardot answers that oil was an expensive product and that a pan bagnat takes only what it needs. The label recipe settles on 20 to 30 ml per sandwich, which is what the steps above use.

Tuna is the other quarrel. Pierre Raffard, a food geographer interviewed by ARTE, notes that tuna was costly and not always in the sandwich, while anchovy was always there. Issautier insists on both and uses house-cured anchovies. A fishmonger shown in the same report says anchovies need at least three weeks in salt.

Bread, anchovies and keeping it

Use a good country roll. Aurélien Maiolino, pan bagnat world champion in 2023 according to the Ville de Nice, prefers a round loaf but says a good bread of another shape is fine, and the label uses a round country bread of 15 to 20 cm. In the Le Parisien report, Niçois tasters reject a soft, seeded bakery roll as the wrong bread.

For the anchovy, Pardot insists on fillets from salted anchovies rather than oil-packed ones, and says the difference is large.

Pan bagnat keeps well. La méthode Cuisinier prepares it up to 24 hours ahead and says it is, if anything, better. Wrap it for the beach or a picnic, and eat it with your hands.