During the last few years, there’s been a major evolution in the geography of Cannes’s restaurant scene. Formerly, the restaurants of the glamorous hotels that line La Croisette, the city’s signature seaside promenade, employed celebrity chefs in their kitchens and ran dining rooms where suits did deals over exorbitantly priced meals. Anyone wanting a reasonably priced meal or a taste of local flavors headed to Le Suquet, the old part of Cannes; there, classic restaurants surprisingly soldier on, prices are reasonable, service is friendly, and spots like Table 22 offer contemporary Provencal cooking made with the freshest seasonal local ingredients.
Now, the celebrity-chef craze looks to be ebbing, as several of the city’s five-star hotels opt for branches of upmarket chain restaurants instead, like the just-opened Beefbar at the Hotel Majestic. The gastronomic action has shifted to the Pointe Croisette, a plush peninsula at the very end of La Croisette. Previously little known to tourists or festival-goers, this palmy part of the city stepped into the spotlight with the May 2024 reopening of the meticulously renovated neo-Moorish style Palm Beach, a seaside beach club built in 1928. While certain parts of the club are members-only, most of its restaurants are open to the general public, including the hugely popular Zuma, which offers a modern take on Japanese Izakaya style dining.
The most eagerly awaited new address on the Pointe Croissette, however, is the reopened Tetou, the legendary fish and bouillabaisse restaurant originally established in Golfe-Juan in 1918 and razed in 2018 as part of a government campaign to enforce strict zoning regulations on seaside construction. The bouillabaisse is as spectacular as it is expensive, making Tetou the place to see and been seen in Cannes right now, so book as far in advance as you can.