Plage de Tahiti
Pampelonne
Credit Cards: All Major
Prices: Moderate-Expensive

Serving classic specialties: salad Niçoise, steak tartare, cous cous and the lot. Noted for offering the best food on the beach. This has always been one of my favorite beaches, going back to the era when Felix was front man in the evening at L’Escale at the port and during the daytime at Tahiti plage in some capacity I have forgotten exactly what. As an aside, it is also known for topless sunbathing on golden colored sand on the extreme northern side of Pampelonne. Plage de Tahiti is a fashionable less chaotic hangout and to emphasize once again, the cooking at Tahiti Beach on Pampelonne is still excellent as is the rosé wine.

Route de L’epi
83350 St. Tropez, Ramatuelle, France •
Tel. + 33.645.63.8487

Nikki Beach’s scene is the most exuberantly youthful and certainly à la mode at the moment. Naomi Campbell celebrated her birthday here last year and opened it up for the public who soon followed in droves. It is part of a chain, the original Nikki Beach is in Miami and they have opened others and are planning to open in Egypt and will launch one in Koh Samui, Thailand at Lipa Noi Beach in December. The thought that Voile Rouge failed in importing their brand of St. Tropez to Miami and yet Nikki Beach succeeded in bringing Miami to St. Tropez is a revolting reality.
The St Tropez branch is a series of split-level decking areas, which surround an enormous swimming pool. The show in the daytime at Nikki Beach reminds one of a disco with booming, loud music but the young
crowd here is visibly enjoying it. At night, it is a candlelit wonderland.
To obtain a place on one of the large white cotton mattresses that are lined up around the pool, you are obliged to consistently order bottles of Champagne. This is ridiculous, gauche, and most assuredly a sign of neurotic, nouveau riche insecurity, and the following incident gives definite proof. One tasteless, wasteful mat-squatter within a two hour period ordered about 100 bottles of Roederer Cristal Champagne just so that he could spew them into the pool with, I suppose, the odd tipple now and again.

Plage de Pampelonne
Boulevard Patch
83350 RAMATUELLE – FRANCE
Tél.+33 (0)4 94 55 55 55
Fax.+33 (0)4 94 79 85 00

Club “Cinquante Cinq” is a lunchtime beach destination accessed by a narrow road, clogged bumper to bumper by high-ticket automobiles. The beach club is also one of the toughest tables to book for lunch in high season, which makes you wonder if it is all worth it—arriving by private yacht is far easier and certainly a more pleasant experience, but the booking problem remains the same. The beach club is divided between a main restaurant; while a white canopy-shaded beach bar is adjacent.
An overgrown bamboo forest is the backdrop to a Provençal beach bungalow with white canopies and lavish beach club jetting all the way down to the water’s edge where a wooden pier extends out a short distance. Huge yachts are anchored offshore and the occupants slowly arrive by launch.
It is interesting that Club 55 was once a ramshackle beach hut, where the Colmont family lived. By an accident of good fortune, they wound up catering for the cast and crew of the film starring Bridget Bardot “And God Created Woman” in 1956, and over the last three decades or so, became a sometimes destination for the more well-behaved and less boisterous element of the St Tropez crowd.

They have fresh wild salad and a menu that offers more interesting items, which is best accompanied by bottles of Provence rosé or rouge wine, at least this is what I experienced whenever dining there with a French friend of mine who never ordered from the menu. He usually finished the lunch by ordering a large pitcher of green apple sorbet with an entire bottle of Calvados mixed into it.