Monaco does not lack for tables with a view. What it has lacked, until this summer, is one that feels like it belongs to somewhere quieter — a pine-shaded point at the end of the Monte-Carlo Beach peninsula, closer in spirit to a hidden cove on the Italian coast than to the principality's usual density of chrome and gilt.
La Vigie Zanoni Monte-Carlo opened on 12 June at Pointe La Vigie, the rocky tip of the Monte-Carlo Beach peninsula on the Roquebrune-Cap-Martin border, and runs its first season through 13 September. The address itself is not new — Monte-Carlo Société des Bains de Mer has long run a restaurant on this headland — but the kitchen is: Simone Zanoni, the chef behind Le George at the Four Seasons Hotel George V in Paris since 2016, has taken it over for the summer, bringing his own name to the door for the first time.
The path here has run through some of the more demanding kitchens in Europe. Zanoni grew up on a farm near Lake Garda, in Lombardy, before moving to London at eighteen to work his way up through Gordon Ramsay's restaurants, then to Versailles as executive chef of the two-Michelin-starred Restaurant Gordon Ramsay at the Trianon Palace. At Le George, a star followed in 2017 and has held every year since — a rare thing for a hotel restaurant built as much for a passing clientele as a loyal one.
At La Vigie, the register is deliberately looser: generous sharing plates, seasonal pastas, tuna crudo with strawberries, arancini, and a run of pasta dishes — tortellini carbonara, ravioli with braised veal shoulder, ravioli with three types of ricotta — built for a long afternoon by the sea rather than a tasting menu. The one dish made specifically for the address, a tagliolini with caviar and Champagne, is the closest the menu comes to acknowledging where it actually sits.
It is a small bet on Monaco's part — a single summer season, a chef on loan from Paris — but a telling one. The principality's dining scene has spent the past year adding Michelin stars by the handful; what it has needed less of is formality, and more of an afternoon where the sea is close enough to hear.
— Camille
