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Monte-Carlo Bay Hotel & Resort, with its 10 acres of gardens

At Blue Bay Marcel Ravin in Monte Carlo, chef Ravin’s poetic Martinique-meets-Mediterranean cuisine has been rewarded with two Michelin stars – and transformed the Monte-Carlo Bay Hotel & Resort into one of the principality’s most exciting culinary destinations. When Ravin invited three-Michelin-starred French chef Anne-Sophie Pic to a special collaboration at his restaurant within a restaurant, the result was culinary magic

LUX: Marcel, how was your experience of the “four-hands” dinner, where you worked with chef Anne-Sophie Pic?

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Marcel Ravin: Wonderfully good! Chef Anne-Sophie Pic has everything you look for in a chef. The camaraderie, the sense of sharing and the respect for the teams made this dinner a moment suspended in time.

Chefs Anne-Sophie Pic and Marcel Ravin, creating a four-hands dinner at Blue Bay Marcel Ravin

LUX: What else would you love to do and achieve at Blue Bay, Marcel Ravin?

MR: I would like to finalise the concept of the restaurant within the restaurant, La Table de Marcel. This is a place of expression with just eight seats, where we will offer an exceptional gastronomic experience to privileged guests, combining culinary art and culture. The goal: to make it a Michelin-starred restaurant itself.

LUX: Have your ideas for your cuisine changed over the years?

MR: It is important for anyone with a passion to maximise the possibilities of the knowledge they have acquired. For me, it’s an eternal renewal based on research at the cutting edge of creativity.

The two chefs at work together for the event, which was part of the Monte-Carlo Festival des Étoiles 2025

A Stay at the Bay

We all know that Monte Carlo is a glamorous destination—perhaps for a bit of showing off your Graff diamonds, drifting around in your Ferrari and being seen in the right places at the right times. But for beach and cuisine, it may not have been top of your list of considerations.

Read more: A conversation with artist-poet Arch Hades

Well, reconsider. Driven by a new generation living and staying there, and by investment from the principality, it is now becoming a prime destination for both.

The hotel’s lagoon area looks out to sea, away from the crowds

Monaco now hosts frequent “four hands” dinners, where multi–Michelin-starred chefs collaborate to create spectacular evenings in the principality’s new array of luxury restaurants. Many of the dinners are led by the two-Michelin-starred chef Marcel Ravin, who runs the Blue Bay restaurant and oversees everything culinary at the Monte-Carlo Bay Hotel & Resort.

Whether you go for one of the special collaborative events or for dinner at Blue Bay, it is spectacular. The terrace features well-spaced tables looking out to sea with a view of the mountains behind. Ravin’s cuisine blends Creole and Mediterranean influences with creativity and panache. Colours and flavours are natural, vibrant and entirely original, as in signature dishes such as Oeuf Monte-Carlo, with truffle, cassava and passion fruit.

A lunch table with a view at Las Brisas, a summer restaurant at the Monte-Carlo Bay Hotel & Resort

The Monte-Carlo Bay is a resort within a resort: by day, stroll along the terrace underneath Blue Bay and you come across its huge, organically shaped pool, which wraps around a rock garden and is lined with white sand. All you need do is settle down on a lounger and choose a view of the pool in one direction or the sea in the other.

Read more: Head to Baku Art Weekend for a unique cultural celebration

Lunch, meanwhile, is just around the corner—at Las Brisas, perhaps the best setting in Monte Carlo. It sits right by the water’s edge with views of the Mediterranean and the mountains. Sip some Perrier-Jouët Blanc de Blancs champagne—an excellent choice, with lightness and florality—and enjoy simple, beautifully crafted Mediterranean cuisine with a fitting blue vibe, given you are surrounded by sea on three sides. Make sure you get a table right by the water.

On our final night, we dined at Jondal à La Vigie, a takeover of a spot inside a pine forest on the next peninsula over, on the other side of the bay. It took 10 minutes to walk there, but if it’s too hot, it’s just a two-minute car transfer. This cuisine, curated by the famous Ibiza spot, is different again, blending Spanish and trans-Mediterranean influences. We strongly recommend pairing the food with the excellent white Burgundy available by the glass. The vibe is super relaxed, without the drumming music you get in so many Monaco places.

And the beach? There’s the beach club exactly between the two, plus the massive resort pool at the Monte-Carlo Bay. You don’t need to venture into “town” at all for a gastro sunshine break next summer. And it’s all just 40 minutes from Nice International Airport.

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A brain scan at Preventicum: is it a work of art, is it a 3D brain scan – or is it both?

Whether you’re 25 or 65, how can you be sure your body isn’t going to deliver you a health shock in the near future? Using the latest technology and analysis, you really can discover any upcoming bumps in life’s road – and take action to avoid them. LUX spends a seamlessly organised day at Preventicum, a leading clinic in London, to find out how it works

One hears the stories, whether they involve friends, family or even ourselves. Someone is in the best of health and then suddenly, from nowhere, they suffer a catastrophic health event – a life-changing condition such as a heart attack or stroke or, even worse, a life-ending condition. Or they discover they have a nasty form of cancer that hadn’t been spotted in time.

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It can happen to young people, old people, fit people, unfit people, fat people, thin people—anyone. It’s part of life’s gruesome game of roulette. And we can’t do a thing about it, right?

Wrong. That would be thinking rooted in the 20th century. And while the past few decades may not have brought the firework-studied breakthroughs in medicine that we saw in previous eras, such as the discovery of penicillin or the first heart transplant, they have, quietly but highly effectively, brought major advances in preventative medicine.

The scan in action using Preventicum’s state-of-the-art technology

However, there is a lack of precision around the definition of preventative medicine, which means people can sometimes be misled. Some practitioners might describe changing your eating habits, or having superficial checkups as required by a health insurer, as preventative. But these are scratching the surface.

To find out how preventative medicine should work, we paid a visit to Preventicum. This is a discreet clinic in central London that sets itself out as a leader in its field and is located in a standalone building, modern and full of interesting art (we had to note).

On the day, we arrived bright and early and were ushered into a well-appointed suite that would be ours for the day. Ahead of our blood tests, we were under instructions not to eat anything, but were assured that copious snacks and drinks would be served later on.

Dr Ying-Young Hui, Preventicum’s Medical Director, in consultation with a client

There followed a series of MRI scans, visual skin checks, ultrasounds and other inspections—nothing painful or invasive. In fact, the whole day was less invasive than a dental appointment. We had opted for the Optimal Assessment, which involved MRI scans for the brain, heart, abdomen and pelvis as well as BrainKey, Oxygenation-Sensitive Cardiac MRI (OS-CMR) and a musculoskeletal region. It also included more than 50 blood tests checking for markers related to organ function, inflammation, cardiovascular risk, hormonal balance and nutritional status. We also had a PLAC blood test to measure for inflammation in the blood vessels.

Read more: Head to Baku Art Weekend for a unique cultural celebration

The brain scan was converted into a 3D plan of the brain, giving a pretty thorough analysis of risk factors there. No MRI is failsafe, but it’s like having a very good examination of your car without actually taking the engine apart (a doctor friend’s analogy that we like).

A radiologist consultation at Preventicum

The most impressive thing about Preventicum was the way everything was joined together efficiently in one place, and then interpreted by one of Preventicum’s expert team of doctors with the prior input of other specialists. It made having the most thorough body tests you can imagine more like a day at a spa. Perhaps what prevents (if you will excuse the pun) more people from doing this is nothing other than the inconvenience that would otherwise be incurred of having to rattle in and out of various medical places at various times and trying to get the results to all join up. That would be irritating enough for anyone with medical knowledge, but pretty daunting for those outside the field, who would have to explain to one specialist exactly what their results were with another specialist and the conversations they had had, and so on.

Try doing this independently and it will feel as if you have spent days doing the equivalent of speaking to a call centre and filling them in each time on the last call you had. Plus all the waiting times. At Preventicum, not only does everything happen in one day, everyone knows exactly who you are, what you are here for and ushers you seamlessly from consultations to tests.

And what about the scans, examinations and inspections? Well, everyone has a different tolerance of these things. Armed with the knowledge that MRI scans are not remotely harmful—they involve no radiation and, unlike x-rays or CT scans, you could spend every day of your life in an MRI scanner and emerge feeling perhaps a little bit as if you had been in a permanent loop of heavy-metal concerts, but no more than that—we hunkered down and had a good time listening to music through the headphones. The most enjoyable part was seeing our brain scans, which looked so much like artwork that we requested to reproduce one for this article.

A client room at Preventicum – far from the walls of a hospital

In all seriousness, we were being given inspections that between them would pick up pretty much anything that could cause us to have one of those catastrophic events now or in the future. Some people might say they would rather not know—which frankly is irresponsible to both yourself and your loved ones. Because with medicine these days, if you do know, then with the majority of conditions that can be picked up with a thorough preventative medicine check like this, you can do something about it, either treating the condition so that it avoids long-term harm, or potentially saving your own life from a dramatic event that will now not happen. And if you get the all-clear, well that’s all good too, no? For the price of a fairly middling holiday in the Maldives, we think it’s a sacrifice worth making — and most LUX readers won’t even need to sacrifice the Maldives trip for a day at Preventicum.

Read more: Spirit Now London acquires works for National Portrait Gallery at Frieze

The day ends, after a relaxing meal (ordered previously) in your room, with a conversation with your extremely smart and affable Preventicum doctor, with whom you will stay in touch for follow-ups as required.

Would we do it again? Hell, yes. Most people of wealth spend more on, say, updating their whisky collection or maintaining one of their cars each year than it costs to spend one well-organised day here, either finding out that you are fit for the next few years or discovering what’s wrong and what to do about it. And it’s all joined up.

preventicum.co.uk

For a mentor, Jonathan Miller could give some pretty damn terrible advice. It was sometime in the late 1990s, shortly after we had met. I was back in the UK from my first job after university, as a foreign correspondent, and, low on contacts but high on ambition, looking for guidance.

Jonathan, to me, was the perfect role model. Intelligent, hilarious, swashbuckling, iconoclastic, a brilliant writer who was also good enough with people to have become an editor and columnist on what was then an all-powerful national newspaper. He was someone whose words rang out across the country every week, and for no reason other than a bond formed of camaraderie, a mutual dark humour and some hobbies in common, he took me under his wing. 

I had heard of a job going, as Rome correspondent of The Guardian. As an Italian speaking Europhile who had studied European politics at Oxford, worked as a foreign correspondent, and written for the Guardian, I felt I was a strong candidate. I asked my new mentor for his advice. “That’s the perfect job for you !” he said, “and you can sock it to those lefties at the Guardian!” Or words to the fact that effect – Jonathan‘s soft right politics were at odds with the newspaper. “Tell them it’s a pivotal time for Italy as it’s going to split into two states, north and south, you can predict it and cover it!”.  

It’s true that the Lega Nord, the Northern League, which favoured breaking up the country into its wealthy north and poorer south, was then at its zenith, but he was the only person I had heard to make this prediction with confidence. But he was Jonathan Miller – not only a national newspaper columnist, but one of the most convincing people on the planet.

I applied for the job, letting my (his) prediction for the future of Italy be known. I didn’t even get an interview. I am not sure why, but a friend working at the Guardian did email to ask me why on earth I had predicted in my application that Italy was going to split into two.

‘I always think of Jonathan’s ebullient, slightly dark confidence, whenever I launch a new issue of any publication’

I mentioned this to Jonathan, dolefully, during our next chat at his house. “Oh well it might happen sometime! Have a drink! Now, I’m 40 and I need to buy myself a Menoporsche! Which one shall I get?” With that, the previous topic was forgotten and we delved gleefully, like small boys with a combined age of 65, into the next. (He sold the “Menoporsche”, a glossy black Porsche 911 from the 1990s 964 series, almost as quickly as he purchased it.) 

The next “project” we had together was altogether more serious: after an ownership change at the publication we both contributed to, we got together with some other senior editors (who looked askance at the young freelance in the room) and put together an ambitious project for a new London weekly newspaper, a kind of cross between The New Yorker and The New York Observer, then at the height of its subversive influence. We got to the stage of producing dummies, a content plan and a business plan (when I say we: this was 90% Jonathan, 9% his fellow editors, and 1% me) and looking for funding for The Beast, as he titled it. Long evenings were spent at his desktop Mac in Hampstead piecing plans together for this game-changer (this was when confidence in legacy media was still high).  

I don’t recall exactly what happened to The Beast; perhaps the hunger to see it through was not there, or the funding proved difficult, or both. But the experience, a crash course in magazine making from people who had done it, taught me hugely important lessons for a future where I did and still do launch and create magazines and media, and I always think of Jonathan’s ebullient, slightly dark confidence, whenever I launch a new issue of any publication. 

Those beautiful days when Jonathan lived in a modernist house in Hampstead, and I would ring him up and drop round for tea or lunch or coffee or drinks with him and his delightful wife Terry – surely one of the nicest people ever to work for Goldman Sachs – and his children Alysen and Dan, seem infinitely far away now.

‘Highly intelligent and with the acuity of, well, a top journalist, Jonathan was always active – hyperactive, even’

Soon, I did get a proper job on a national newspaper, thus instantly disappearing my available time to drive up to Hampstead; and the Millers moved, first to the Surrey/Sussex border, from where he wrote an engaging newspaper column about farming on the edge of suburbia, and thence to the Languedoc, in southern France, from where he became a celebrated correspondent for The Spectator and other media.  

He gave me a tour of his Languedoc “starter chateau” more than 20 years ago when he was buying it, and to my shame I never visited the completed house, although like millions of others I feel I did, having read his dispatches. 

In France, Jonathan embraced his French inner child (having always been very in touch with his British/American/Jewish inner child back in London). According to those who know him best, he inserted himself fully into village life, not only becoming fluent in a second language (something he said improved his writing in English, and should be obligatory for all journalists), but also entering the political arena by being elected to the local town council. He wrote a book about France and frequently contributed provocative, funny, well-informed (and borderline inflammatory) pieces about French politics to both The Spectator and Daily Mail. Emmanuel Macron provided a lot of his material – “the gift that keeps on giving,” he said – but his writing for The Spectator was a potpourri of other subjects that caught his interest, including food, sexual mores and the French health system.

Last year, he decided it was time to write a memoir of his life as a journalist across the changing spectrum of the news. Shock of The News, Confessions of a Troublemaker was finished just before he died. It is typically Jonathan all the way through, insightful, unpredictable, entertaining, iconoclastic, and highly personal, including all his top tips for being a troublemaker, with the primary one being: “read this book!”.

Family was always extremely important to Jonathan: he once sent me an email with the subject field “My brilliant daughter”

My fondest memory of Jonathan, though, is not anything to do with the media or writing. Shortly after we met, he announced that he had tickets for the Iran vs USA match in the World Cup, in France. Jonathan was tickled by the idea of an American Jew and an exiled Iranian Brit going to this match together, and kindly invited me to join his family and other Iranian friends on what remains one of the most fun I have ever had at a football event.  

The atmosphere was a party, from both sides of supporters uninterested in higher politics, nobody really cared who won (Iran, I think, 2-1) and we spent 48 hours eating well, chatting about politics and wine and cars and how outrageous various things were that Jonathan disagreed with. Years on, his latest columns dealt with likelihood of a French civil war, which I personally treat with as much scepticism as the prospect of a North and South Italy, but in this case he had more than 20 years of living in the country to back up his views. 

Highly intelligent and with the acuity of, well, a top journalist, Jonathan was always active – hyperactive, even – which makes his death even more incomprehensible. He didn’t exactly have joie de vivre – he had too much of the Jewish inner black humour for that – but he had vivre. It would make sense to Jonathan to say that even though I haven’t seen him for 10 years, I really miss him. Farewell to my mentor, his buzzing, flashing lights turned off far too soon.  

“Shock of the News: Confessions of a Troublemaker” is available from Waterstones, Abe Books, Amazon and other booksellers

Darius Sanai is owner of LUX Media and The Oxford Review of Books, an Editor-in-Chief at Condé Nast, and in another life, launched The London Beast under Jonathan’s direction

The Heydar Aliev Cultural Center in Baku was one of the last great projects of super-architect Zaha Hadid

An initiative by Leyla Aliyeva, the prime cultural and artistic force in Azerbaijan, on Europe’s easternmost coast with the Caspian Sea, will set the cultural flames alight in the country’s capital

Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, on the Caspian Sea, is a unique cultural hub. Its own culture stretches back for millennia, encompassing the silk routes, fire temples, lyrical poetry in the medieval era, and some powerful contemporary and 20th century artists.

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It is also on a kind of cultural Silk Road, its position on the Caspian, close to Russia, Turkey and Iran on one side and central Asia and China on the other, leading to a constant exchange of artistic concepts.

Baku is a cultural panoply, embracing ancient temples and its old city, Belle Epoque mansions, and contemporary glamour

On the first weekend of November, it all comes together with Fly to Baku: Baku Art Weekend, featuring an astonishing panoply of visual and street arts, culture, dance, performances and exhibitions. The aim, says Aliyeva, is to connect memory with imagination, heritage with innovation, and hearts with hope.

Read more: Spirit Now London acquires works for National Portrait Gallery at Frieze

Guided by the element of water — a symbol of continuity, renewal, and shared memory — the festival unfolds across Baku’s museums, palaces, and public spaces. Over three days, the city becomes the central character of a cultural journey where heritage meets innovation, and where the Caspian horizon reflects both tradition and the future.

Baku Art Weekend takes place at sites across the cosmopolitan Caspian city, from concert halls and theatres to open-air venues

Exhibitions and performances will take place in museums, concert halls, outdoor spaces and the city’s celebrated Boulevard, the crescent-shaped seafront boardwalk that defines its relationship with the sea.

Baku, at the heart of a thriving country that is at once young and ancient, has the cultural soul, the confidence and the sheer creativity to make this the start of something very special – and also the continuation of a centuries-old tradition.

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