A la Colthard

There are advantages and disadvantages to revisiting the same place. The advantages are in knowing a place you settle in quicker and know where to go. The disadvantages are the lack of that new sensation of experiencing something for the first time!!! There is a second more subtle one that in revisiting your memoroes have built it up too much and there is feeling of disappointment. Thus it was yesterday when we took Jamie and his mother to the Grand Hotel du Cap Ferrat. The swimming area called Club Dauphine is attractively situated by the rocks on the point of Cap Ferrat and the pool glistened. Yet this time I noted an absence of amenity: there is no spa, gym, restaurant. All you can do is swim and sunbathe.

At the restaurant in the hotel reached by a short cable car ride you eat on a terrace under a tree, the service was good but we all commented that the food did not match this. I had a distinctly gooey pasta. It was titled linguine with cuttle fish and I was expecting that black ink sauce which darkens the teeth. However the sauce was more a reduction of vegetables and pulses and all rather bland, as was Jamie’s mother cod. The food is not seasoned at all and as last time was not hot enough. All in all an expensive disappointment.

Another famous hotel the Negresco did pass its third test. Always worth a visit for the interior of the large atrium, painted ceilings, loos and pictures – this time I saw a Chagall and Dali, both visitors to the hotel and at least 5 of the owner Madame Augier. The 3 course meal at 39 euros is good value. I admire the owner’s refusal to sell. A hotel group with a bottom line profit mentality would sooner or later alter an interior with so much unoccupied and and unprofitable space without realising that it’s this gloriously individual eccentricity that bring so many visitors and guests. We were stopped by an elderly security officer. Along the Promenade you see four armed solders and the city is bracing itself for the anniversary of July 14th.