La Colombe d’Or

There are restaurants and hotels with a famous past, and then there is La Colombe d’Or. In Saint-Paul de Vence, this is the place where the history of the village’s artists, writers, actors and filmmakers is still quite literally hanging on the walls.

It began much more modestly. In the early 1920s, Paul Roux opened a little café-restaurant called Le Robinson, where locals came for pan-bagnat, pissaladière and dancing on the terrace. In 1932, he and his wife Baptistine, known as Titine, turned it into a small four-room inn and renamed it La Colombe d’Or.

Saint-Paul was already beginning to attract artists, and Paul Roux quickly became part of their world. Matisse, Léger, Picasso, Miró, Calder, Braque and Chagall became regulars. Roux was interested in art and, rather wonderfully, hospitality often became part of the exchange. Artists sometimes paid for meals or rooms with their work, gradually filling the walls of the inn with paintings and ceramics. What began as a small family establishment slowly became what tis now often referred to as an “inn-museum.”

This is what makes a meal here different, the works on the wall belonged to the people who actually sat at these tables. Picasso really was here. Miró really was here. Chagall really was here. There are photographs of Picasso dining at the Colombe d’Or, and Jacques Prévert became such a close friend of Paul Roux that he eventually settled in the village.

The story continued after the war, when the artists were joined by another kind of celebrity. Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Lino Ventura and Serge Reggiani became part of the Colombe d’Or circle, followed over the years by an extraordinary list of actors, filmmakers and international stars. Montand and Signoret even met at the Colombe d’Or in 1951 and married in Saint-Paul later that year.

The art collection has continued to grow, too. Works by later generations of artists have been added over the decades, including César, Arman, Jean-Michel Folon and Sean Scully. Even the building itself carries traces of its history: the façade incorporates stones from an old castle near Aix-en-Provence, while a fireplace designed by architect Jacques Couëlle bears the handprints of people involved in its construction.

And yet, despite all the names and all the mythology, La Colombe d’Or has never become a grand, formal restaurant. The food remains rooted in Provence, and the setting is still the terrace, garden and dining rooms of the old inn. The current menu includes Mediterranean and Provençal dishes, with the famous plate of hors d’oeuvres still very much part of the experience.

Of course, there is a price to all this history.

You can come for lunch or dinner, or book one of the rooms and stay overnight. And yes, you are paying for more than the food or the bed. You are paying for the address, the atmosphere, the collection, the accumulated stories and the privilege of spending a little time inside one of Saint-Paul de Vence’s most enduring institutions.

I wouldn't describe it as an undiscovered place, quite the opposite. La Colombe d’Or is famous, and it comes with a very definite Côte d’Azur price tag. But there are still very few places where you can sit down to lunch surrounded by works created by artists who once sat at exactly the same tables.

For me, that is the reason to go. Not because it is where the rich and famous go today, but because you can still feel the extraordinary period when artists came to Saint-Paul, stayed for a while, made friends, exchanged paintings for meals and somehow turned a little Provençal inn into part of art history.