The opening of COMO Le Beauvallon on 24 April was the most anticipated French hotel reopening of the decade. Three weeks in, the trade press wrote the polite first review. Three months in, with the place now running at full summer occupancy and the staff past the opening adrenaline, the harder question can be answered: does the property live up to the eighteen-year wait? After a week in residence in late June and a return visit at the start of August, the verdict is yes — with one specific reservation.
The rooms are the most successful part of the restoration. The sixty-two keys retain the Belle Époque proportions and have been re-fitted with the COMO restraint that has become the brand's most identifiable signature. Pale wood, generous bathrooms, no chrome. The suites on the second floor of the main pavilion — the ones with the double doors onto the long balcony facing the Gulf — are the bookings the staff will quietly suggest if you ask. The integration of the original moulding with the new joinery is, by the standards of comparable French restorations, exceptional.
Yannick Alléno's table at the main restaurant is the headline performer. The kitchen is running at the level the chef's other addresses run at, the sommellerie is calmer than the Paris equivalent, and the room itself — pale, sea-facing, formally set without being heavy — is the dinner of the trip. The cooking has the technical density of Alléno's Pavyllon work, adjusted for the holiday context and the produce that arrives daily from the cooperative at Sainte-Maxime. Two dinners are required to read it properly. The Wednesday tasting menu is the one.
Beauvallon Sur Mer — Alléno's first beach-club restaurant — is the discovery. The small sandy room above the pontoon, designed by Dorothée Delaye, has settled into a rhythm that no other beach restaurant on the Gulf is currently matching. The Southeast Asian technique pulled through the Mediterranean produce produces dishes — the raw langoustine with lime leaf, the grilled red mullet with a Thai-leaning sauce — that I would now travel for independently.
The reservation: the in-room service in the first weeks ran behind. A breakfast in the suite that should have arrived in twenty minutes was arriving in forty-five. By the August return, the timing had tightened to the level the brand standard requires, but the gap was visible enough at the opening to warrant noting. By next summer the issue will be invisible. For now, it is the only line of the report that is not unequivocal. The rest is the palace the Gulf has been quietly missing for eighteen years.
— Camille Vedy
