The first time I drove to Chez Bruno I made the mistake of treating it as a restaurant. It is not. It is a half-day ritual that begins on the D562 above Lorgues, ends some time in the early evening, and rearranges what an American visitor thinks the South of France is for.
You leave Saint-Tropez at eleven. You take the inland road through La Garde-Freinet, not the coastal road through Sainte-Maxime. The drive is just over an hour if you are honest, an hour and a quarter if you stop at the bakery in Le Cannet-des-Maures, and the landscape changes character three times — pine to vine to oak. By the time you turn off the D10 at Lorgues, you are no longer on the Riviera. You are in the country.
The farmhouse — pink stucco, lavender beds, a courtyard of plane trees the size of a small chapel — has been the property of the Bruno family since 1983, when Clément Bruno took over what was then a modest auberge and made the decision that would define the rest of his life. He would serve only truffles. Nothing else. The menu, as a result, has been functionally unchanged for forty years. So has the bill.
What you actually eat
There is no menu. There are no choices. You sit down. You are brought, in succession, four or five courses, each built around a different variety of black truffle (winter), summer truffle (June through August), or, in the rarer months, the Alba whites. The opening is a brouillade — soft scrambled eggs with shavings the thickness of a coin. The second is a pomme de terre en chemise baked under foie gras and a quarter-inch of truffle. There is usually a pasta. There is always a slow-cooked egg. There is, at the end, a piece of cheese under more truffle than cheese.
The wine list is the wine list of the Var, which is to say that the rosé is excellent and the reds — Bandol, the better Coteaux Varois — are taken seriously. Order the Pibarnon if it is hot. The Tempier if you are staying for the digestif.
What the meal actually is
You will read, in the older French guides, that Chez Bruno is excessive. That it is gauche. That the dining room is a museum and the bill is an event. I have eaten there a dozen times and I disagree on all three counts. The dining room is, in fact, deeply quiet. The service is the service of a family business now in its second generation — Benjamin and Samuel Bruno took over from their father Clément in 2014 — and the bill, set against any equivalent table on the Riviera, is honest. The truffle is local. The kitchen is doing one thing and doing it for forty years.
What the meal actually is, then, is the antithesis of everything Saint-Tropez has become in August. It is slow. It is rural. It is not photographable. The room is full of people who have driven from Aix, from Cannes, from the small wine châteaux of the inland Var — and a small, growing number of Americans who have figured out that the most interesting hour of a trip to the Côte d'Azur happens entirely off the coast.
How to make the day
The right structure is the long lunch. Arrive at twelve-thirty. Eat until three. Take the small detour, on the way home, through the village of Tourtour, perched on a hill twenty-five minutes north — the view from the terrace of the Bastide de Tourtour is the best in this part of Provence, and there is, in the village itself, a small antique dealer who is worth twenty minutes. Drive back via the D562 through Vidauban, stop at the Domaine de Triennes if the cellar is open (Aubert de Villaine has a hand in it), and you will be back in Saint-Tropez for an aperitif at La Ponche before sunset.
If you want to stay over, the Château de Berne, fifteen minutes from Lorgues, has eighteen rooms and a serious restaurant of its own. The pool is excellent. The vineyard is excellent. Most of the Americans who do Chez Bruno as a day trip end up, on their second visit, doing it as an overnight.
A small note for the readers from across the Atlantic
The Var is not a destination American clients of mine arrive looking for. It is, almost without exception, a place they leave determined to come back to. Chez Bruno is the door. What is on the other side — the country roads, the vineyards, the slow lunch as the most defensible use of an afternoon — is the actual answer to the question of why anyone serious comes to the South of France in the first place.
The coast is the postcard. The hills are the country.
— Camille Vedy
