Monaco
1. Monte Carlo Beach
A Century of Style, A Brand New Season
Approaching its centenary, Monte-Carlo Beach in Monaco remains one of the Riviera's most enduring social institutions. A place where the day revolves around long lunches, time on the water, padel, and golden-hour apéros.
For 2026, the property returns with fresh energy: a new culinary destination, La Vigie Zanoni Monte-Carlo, opens in June under Italian chef Simone Zanoni, bringing vibrant, seasonal Italian cuisine to the tip of the peninsula.
A Lamborghini Monaco partnership introduces a private "cool room" near the sports facilities. And Jacquemus returns with a refreshed visual concept across the Beach's retail and pop-up spaces, continuing last season's fashion-house collaboration in a new guise.
The redesigned Le Deck, the Michelin-starred Elsa restaurant, the Olympic pool, private beach and pontoon, padel courts and kids club complete a setting that rewards return visits season after season.
Pampelonne Beach, Ramatuelle
2. La Réserve à la Plage
Where Great Design Meets Great Food
Designed by Philippe Starck to evoke the original spirit of Saint Tropez and set on Pampelonne's golden sands, La Réserve à la Plage is the ideal place for a long, considered afternoon. The aesthetic is serene and cohesive throughout: natural materials, careful proportions, linen-draped cabanas, and the Med framed like a painting from every lounger. It feels less like a beach club and more like someone's very well-appointed private stretch of coast.
The kitchen sends out fresh, fragrant plates made for sharing: grilled catch-of-the-day, wood-fired meats, crisp vegetables with Provençal herbs, and a wine list that leans sensibly into the rosés of the region. From the Michel Reybier team behind La Réserve Ramatuelle's spectacular private domain, this is a beach stop with genuine culinary provenance and the kind of quiet confidence that never needs to announce itself.
Pampelonne Beach, Ramatuelle
3. Épi 1959
Clay Courts, Cold Rosé and a Garden
Part exclusive members club, part sport and wellness resort, Épi 1959 occupies its own quiet corner of Pampelonne and feels entirely removed from the noise of the coast. Only ten retro cabanas, a serene pool and a garden designed by Madison Cox, the landscape architect behind Marrakech's Majorelle, set the tone from the moment you arrive. Nothing here shouts. Everything here delivers.
The day is structured around clay court tennis before lunch, grilled langoustines on the beach, and golden-hour apéros facing the Med with a carafe of something cold and local. Book a treatment at the Biologique Recherche spa afterwards, get coiffed at Frédéric Fekkai's salon, and you are ready for a night on the Saint-Tropez tiles without having lifted a finger. Private, low-key, and utterly super-cool. You will be back.
Pampelonne Beach, Ramatuelle
4. Loulou
The Club Everyone Is Talking About
The Parisian institution lands on Pampelonne with everything that made the original a legend: generous Italian cooking, an effortlessly chic crowd and a setting that somehow feels both of-the-moment and completely timeless. Think white and yellow linen, truffle pasta, a Bellini in hand and your feet in the sand. The menu is built around fresh, seasonal produce with a confident Italian hand: handmade pasta, pristine seafood, sharing plates that arrive at exactly the right pace for a long Riviera afternoon.
Loulou Ramatuelle sits right on the beach, the kind of spot that earns its reputation without trying particularly hard to have one. The crowd is international and well-dressed without being performative about it. The music is always right. The rosé is always cold. It is no surprise that it has become one of the most talked-about stops on Pampelonne in a remarkably short time, and no surprise either that getting a table requires some forward planning. Book early, arrive unhurried, and let the afternoon take care of itself.
Pampelonne Beach, Ramatuelle
5. Le Club 55
The Original Legend
Since 1955, Le Club 55 has held court on Pampelonne with its famed bohemian minimalism and a guest list that reads like a century of cultural history, from Brigitte Bardot to Kate Moss and everyone worth knowing in between. Lunch here is simple Provençal mastery: grilled fish, fresh vegetable salads, local rosé served in carafes at a wooden table with your feet close to the sand. Pull up a sun bed and watch the turquoise waves, and perhaps just a VIP or two, roll gently in.
Family-owned, discreet, and reassuringly timeless, Club 55 operates on a philosophy that has not shifted in seven decades: the guest is not a king here, but a friend. There is no dress code worth speaking of, no bottle service theatre, no scene to perform for. Just one of the best lunches on the French Riviera, in the place that made the French Riviera what it is. Arrive by tender. Stay for the afternoon. Come back tomorrow.
Gulf of Saint-Tropez, Grimaud
6. COMO Le Beauvallon
The Best New Reason to Drop Anchor
Originally built in 1914 and host over the decades to Winston Churchill, Audrey Hepburn and F. Scott Fitzgerald, COMO Le Beauvallon reopens for the 2026 season as one of the most anticipated arrivals on the Riviera in years. The Belle Époque estate sits on ten private acres of palms, pines and terraced Mediterranean gardens overlooking the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, with its grounds flowing directly down to the beach club and private pontoon where your tender moors directly in front of the property.
The beach club restaurant, Beauvallon Sur Mer, has been designed by Dorothée Delaye and combines Asian and Mediterranean influences into a menu that is as considered as the setting demands. Above it all, Yannick Alléno, 17 Michelin stars and counting, oversees the culinary programme for the 2026 season. A private speedboat runs guests across to Saint-Tropez in eight minutes. Few will want to use it.
Cannes
7. Carlton Beach Club
La Croisette Classique
Front-row views of Cannes Bay, cuisine by Chefs Alexandra Delamare and Laurent Bunel, and your yacht just a tender ride from the pontoon. Behind you stands the InterContinental Carlton Cannes, the Grande Dame of La Croisette and a backdrop to a century of silver-screen legend. Grace Kelly. Sophia Loren. Meryl Streep. The red carpet is a short walk from your sun lounger.
Start with the 1930 Riviera Spritz, a perfectly calibrated combination of Gin d'Azur, lemon, rosemary and Champagne, before settling in for a long lunch of lobster rolls, razor clams and roasted lamb chops. The menu is straightforward, seasonal and very good. During Cannes Film Festival season this is one of the most coveted lunch tables on the coast, so book well in advance. Out of festival season it is no less worth the effort.
"The Carlton Beach Club is the classic French Riviera experience done properly. The setting, the service, the sense that you are exactly where you are supposed to be. It is always my first recommendation."
Île Sainte Marguerite, Cannes
8. La Guérite
The Best Party on the Riviera
Set on the pine-fringed shores of Île Sainte-Marguerite, the island that guards Cannes harbour and holds the legend of the Man in the Iron Mask, La Guérite has been drawing the international set since 1935. There is no road in. You arrive by superyacht, tender, or water taxi, and the sense of departure from the mainland is immediate and total. That isolation is not a logistical inconvenience. It is the entire point.
The atmosphere begins with chic, unhurried lunches beneath an open sky and a menu that does full justice to the setting. Under Chef Yiannis Kioroglou, the kitchen delivers Mediterranean plates with a confident Greek-inspired flair: octopus carpaccio, grilled langoustines, crisp Provençal vegetables and a French finesse that ties it all together.
As the afternoon moves on, the DJ sets begin, the Champagne arrives at pace, and La Guérite becomes something else entirely. One of the great all-day experiences on the French Riviera, and completely unreachable without a boat. Arrive early for lunch. Plan to stay for golden hour. Accept that the evening may take care of itself.
Saint Raphaël
9. Les Roches Rouges
Michelin Stars and Red Cliffs
Framed by dramatic ochre cliffs that give the property its name and surrounded by the scent of Estérel pines, Les Roches Rouges has held onto the minimal, unhurried soul of its 1960s and 70s origins while its kitchen has quietly ascended to Michelin level. A pontoon now the property accessible by tender: moor alongside, step ashore, and let the afternoon unfold entirely on its own terms. It is the kind of arrival that the property deserves.
Michelin-starred dining at Le Récif under Chef Alexandre Baule is the centrepiece, with a menu that reunites and reinvents seafood, meat and vegetables using local provenance and a kind of quiet, brilliant invention that does not need to announce itself.
Afterwards, the seawater pool carved directly into the natural rock is where the rest of the afternoon belongs. The view across the Estérel coastline, red stone meeting blue water under a wide Provençal sky, is one of the most purely beautiful on the entire Riviera. Les Roches Rouges is not the loudest stop on the itinerary. It is often the most remembered.
Antibes
10. Hôtel du Cap Eden Roc
The Pinnacle of the French Riviera
This legendary place needs no introduction, but it deserves one anyway. The cliffside pool carved into the rock at Cap d'Antibes, the Michelin-starred kitchen, the private dock that takes your tender directly to the property, the Dior spa, the Eden-Roc Grill with its long, languid lunches and pastel sunsets over the Med. Every detail at Hôtel du Cap Eden Roc confirms its place not merely as the best address on the French Riviera, but as the benchmark against which everything else on the coast is quietly measured.
The Murphys first brought Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Picasso here in the 1920s and in doing so invented the Côte d'Azur summer as the world has known it ever since. A century on, the hotel opens for another season and the enchantment is entirely undiminished. Come for lunch at the Grill. Stay until the light goes. Arrange the tender in advance, because this is one arrival worth getting exactly right.
