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?
Follow LUX on Instagram: @luxthemagazine
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.
The view of the Villa Clair Soleil makes you feel like a guest at a private villa, rather than a Four Seasons Grand Hotel
Is it a private villa or Grand Hotel? An editor at LUX tells us why the Four Seasons Grand Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat should be the first stop on your Grand Tour itinerary
The Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat, one of the world’s most celebrated hotels, is not really grand at all. Not in the sense of being huge and generic. Although it’s deceptive. Viewed from your yacht, this white cruise ship-shaped edifice at the tip of the headland containing the most exclusive real estate in Europe, if not the world, seems to have “grand” written all over it.
Follow LUX on Instagram: @luxthemagazine
But when you arrive, you are let through a guarded gate and up a drive more akin to that of a private villa. The feeling continues if, as we did, you decide on a game of tennis after checking in. Here you might expect an array of tennis courts of various surfaces, and a tennis school, perhaps. Instead, you get one exquisite tennis court in the gardens, surrounded by flowerbeds and trees, with a backdrop of the hotel and that Mediterranean sky. Very private house. And we saw almost nobody else using it; once there was a solitary local teenage girl finishing a lesson with the hotel’s resident tennis coach, who looked like he had been there for decades.
The breathtaking sea view from the Pool Suite
The hotel’s legendary swimming coach, Pierre Gruneberg, meanwhile, really was at the hotel for decades before passing away last year aged 92. Among the guests he counted as his pupils were Charlie Chaplin, Somerset Maugham, Aristotle Onassis, Tina Turner, Brigitte Bardot, David Niven, Elizabeth Taylor, Bono – and LUX’s Editor-in-Chief. The pool is at the tip of the peninsula, beyond the main gardens, where the rocks drop to the sea. It is accompanied by the Club Dauphin restaurant, where we sipped on some sparkling Provence rosé (delicious in a dry, low-dosage way), while watching putative celebrities and honeymooners dunk themselves in the celebrated pool.
Read more: The best of the old and new: Hôtel Hermitage Monte-Carlo
The palace nature of the hotel is evident in the lobby, with its Art Deco marble floors and walls. So perhaps it is a palace, but it always feels like a private one, for just you and your friends. That extends to the bedrooms: our suite looked over the lawns and flowerbeds to the sea. It felt as if a butler would knock on the door and tell us the house party was beginning at any moment. Although there were no house parties while we were there, this is a hotel with one of the most famous terraces in the world, overlooking the lawns and overhung by jasmine and bougainvillea.
The Terrasse Palace Sea View Suite at the Four Seasons Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat
With a jazz band playing in the gardens, dinner at the Michelin-starred Le Cap was magical, the cuisine as vibrant and elegant as the place: razor clams and cockles au naturel with fresh seaweed, citrus fruits and fennel bavaroise was a dish for the ages. A delicious hotel and an experience unrepeatable anywhere else in the world.
LUX checks in to Borgo Santandrea, a sweet spot on the Amalfi coast which feels far from the madding tourist crowds
‘Everybody should have one talent, what’s yours?’ Or so says Dickie Greenleaf in the thriller – most recently a Netflix hit – TheTalented Mr Ripley. If it was Italy, rather than criminal Tom Ripley, responding, the answer would not be ‘forging signatures, telling lies, impersonating practically anybody’, but, perhaps, ‘Venezia, Roma, Toscana… Amalfi’. But how could one pick just one? Across its various shooting locations Ripley’s Amalfi shone out in staggering blue. I couldn’t resist.
A private beach, a pool, and ancient buildings look out onto the Amalfi Coast
It’s hard not to reach for clichés when, checking into the room, one is faced with a vast abstract painting of two blues – that is, sea and sky – contained like a Rothko in their window frame. The room seems to lead one towards this, across bespoke furniture and their signature tiles of blue and white.
Read More: Mandarin Oriental, Zurich, Review
Tucked away, 52 metres above sea level, one sleeps cocooned in something which is clean, refreshingly modern. And yet, at the beach bar, Marinella Beach Club, one still feels that one might just hear the fisherman, raising a glass of limoncello up with a clinking ‘salute!’ after a long day of hauling nets into its ancient building.
Alici, for fine dining at Borgo Santandrea, is a 1 Michelin star restaurant
Holding onto both old and new is the Marinella Restaurant. A Cardinale Twist to begin, for me. Its bitter freshness is what I want in the salt air, while I browse the menu. It seems wrong to bypass fish while sitting by the setting sun over the sea. Borgo Santandrea do it as they should – tender, fresh, not overdone or too spiced up; the ingredients are as fresh as they can be, so I begin with a platter of shellfish sprinkled with Amalfi lemon zest.
Follow LUX on Instagram: luxthemagazine
Next comes a confession. I’m afraid I have a weakness for ‘Zucchini alla Scapece’. It’s that type that has its natural sweetness balanced by the acid of its vinegar marinade and freshened by mint. It brings me back to a Neapolitan chef in Tuscany, who – unable to comprehend how one of his customers didn’t like garlic – would stamp about the kitchen, thumb to fingers shaking his hand in the air, muttering histrionically, ‘è aglio, dio mio’. But fear not, here – garlic brings out the juices of a tender, grillet fillet of fish, paired with potato.
Each room at Borgo Santandrea is styled in a different way, looking at various shades Meditteranean styles
Not that a need a ‘pick-me-up’, or ‘Tiramisu’, following this, but it did the trick. And my swim provided a salty digestivo, and, under its soporific gauze, I fell into a deep slumber, back in the bedroom of signature artisan chic, just 50 metres above the sea.
Bespoke boat trips are offered for guests across the hotel
I have no doubt that The Talented Mr Ripley will be sending lots more people Amalfi’s sun-warmed way, and I’m lucky I had got there before. Lucky, too, that – contrary to ‘telling lies… impersonating practically anybody’, Borgo Santandrea provides a rare pocket of honesty along an increasingly tourist-ridden place. It seems to pare itself back to the essence of Italy’s talent – if there is just one, that is – that laidback elegance and spirit that can’t help but leak into one, and see the utter necessity of shaking one’s fist at garlic.
Find out More:
Recent Comments