There are perhaps three chefs in the world whose work shapes the calendar of the people I send to Europe each year. Yannick Alléno is one of them. As of the spring of 2026, the chef's signature now sits at the two precise points of the year that define the luxury circuit on the French map — the snow at Courchevel in February, the sea at Saint-Tropez in July — and the diptych he has assembled, in those two destinations, is the most ambitious thing of its kind in French hospitality this decade.
This is a short portrait of what that means, on the ground, for the visitor who will be in both places.
The summit — Le 1947, Cheval Blanc Courchevel
For nine years, the most ambitious mountain dining room in Europe has been Alléno's three-Michelin-starred Le 1947, twenty-two seats and five tables, at the Cheval Blanc Courchevel. The 2025-26 season ran from 5 December to 4 April, Tuesday through Sunday, two services beginning at 19:30. The format has been functionally unchanged since Alléno took over the kitchen in 2017 and lifted it, in the same year, to the highest distinction in the Guide.
What you eat is the synthesis of three obsessions. The first is the sauce extraction — the technique Alléno developed over a decade, using cold concentration of stocks under vacuum, that has restructured how the entire generation of French gastronomy now thinks about flavour. The second is alpine produce — a vocabulary of pollen, milk, mountain herbs, freshwater fish and high-altitude vegetables that Alléno has spent a decade mapping. The third is the wine pairing, which at Le 1947 plays a registered French selection of unusual depth — the small bottlings of the Jura, the rare cuvées of the Côte de Beaune, the verticals from the Northern Rhône.
It is a three-and-a-half hour menu. It is not, in the strict sense, a dinner — it is a thesis. Book on the second night of the stay, after a day on the pistes. The room is on the first floor of the Cheval Blanc, the lighting is low, the bookings are limited to five tables, and the experience is, if you have not had it before, the one mountain dinner of your life worth flying for.
The sea — Beauvallon Sur Mer, COMO Le Beauvallon
On 24 April 2026, the bay of Saint-Tropez gained its first new palatial property in nearly a century. COMO Le Beauvallon — the 1914 Belle Époque palace on the Grimaud side of the gulf, closed since 2008, restored over four years by Christina Ong's COMO Hotels group — opened with forty-two rooms and suites, ten acres of private grounds descending to a private beach, and a partnership with Alléno that signals where the chef now intends to spend his summers.
The signature is Beauvallon Sur Mer, Alléno's first beach-club restaurant, conceived around a culinary register the chef describes as Southeast Asian-Mediterranean — the cooking of the French coast filtered through the spice and the lightness of Java, Bali, southern Thailand. The room sits at the water's edge of the property's private cove. The terrace is the most beautiful beach-side dining room to open in the South of France since the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc's pavilion was reopened in 2025.
The first month of service has been, by the consistent report of friends who have eaten there since opening, extraordinary. The grilled fish is the grilled fish. The pasta course is the surprise. The chilled aged-rum service at the end of the meal is the small gesture that locates the kitchen, immediately, in the right register.
Rooms from €840 a night, in May; expect that figure to roughly double in August.
The diptych, in one paragraph
Two destinations. Two architectures. Two cuisines. One signature. The visitor who books Le 1947 in February and Beauvallon Sur Mer in July has, in a single year, eaten at the most ambitious mountain dining room and the most ambitious beach club on the French luxury map — both of them assembled, in 2026, by the same chef. The structural choice Alléno has made — to anchor his year between the summit and the sea, rather than between the city and its suburbs — is also, increasingly, the structural choice of the clients I send to both places.
The mountain in February. The sea in July. The chef in both rooms.
If you have not yet built a year on this geometry, it is the year to start.
— Camille Vedy
