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Living high life is good as gold

Neil Sowerby
7/ 7/2008

FAR off on Cap Ferrat smoke plumes. Brushwood being torched as a millionaire's garden gets spruced up for the season?

At sea a dot of a yacht serenely glides into Villefranche harbour. Spring in the Med is just as magical as the oversubscribed summer months. Chillier in the evenings perhaps but find an afternoon suntrap and already you can smell the herbs and feel your pale Brit skin tingle.

From the lofty eyrie that is Eze village, perched 430 metres above sea level, it's easy to adopt a Godlike aloofness to a workaday world - and to believe the old, weird stories.

In Provence, the Chevre d'Or (the golden goat) was the stuff of legend. The Eze version describes how the Slav violinist Zalto Balokovic, on a visit to the village, was guided by a goat with a golden coat to a building he eventually went on to renovate. Today it is the core of the Chateau de la Chevre D'Or hotel - our gloriously hospitable base for a quick break in the south of France.

The managers of this Relais Et Chateau property, which features a rooftop statue of the legendary goat, push a more mundane version of its origins. A previous owner raised goats here and sold the milk in Nice, a few miles away, hiding the profits, pieces of gold, in a stone wall. The treasure was uncovered when the building, formerly a private house, was renovated.

In today's Eze the outrageously picturesque, pedestrian-only cobbled streets are paved with gold. It's an unreal collection of fashion boutiques, galleries and upmarket trinket shops. For life's staples there are ordinary stores outside the walls by the car park on the Middle Corniche road that links Nice and Menton on the Italian border.

That's the way into the village. On the south side it's a vertiginous drop to the Lower Corniche, that bottleneck coast road into Monaco.

The Chevre d'Or clings to that hillside, a sprawling (in the nicest possible way), higgledy piggedly collection of rooms, suites, cottages and terraces with an amazing collection of bronze animal statues.

Teetering on kitsch? Well, maybe. But it is a soothing escape from the artificial- feeling tourist trap/stage set of Eze proper, however pretty.

Our room, with that breathtaking view along the coastline to Cap Ferrat and far beyond was the Friedrich Nietszche Suite. The great German philosopher, inventor of the `superman concept', composed the third part of Also Sprach Zarathustra while clambering up the stony path from the coast.

Enjoying the luxury, after snow in England, of reading fat novels on a sunny balcony, we gave the steep path named after him a miss (even though there is a shuttle bus back!).

We had spent our first night is a smaller apartment, in an annex cottage towards the top of the hill village (with a memorable bathroom, built into an original cave, with jazuzzi, leopardskin upholstery and replicas of the kind of ancient cave paintings you find in the Dordogne).

It was close to the Chevre D'Or's rival hotel, the boutique Chateau Eza, which we couldn't resist exploring. A meal at its Michelin-starred restaurant was the perfect excuse. Inside it is a fascinating mix of medieval stone (you half expect Gerard Depardieu in period costume to step out of one of the huge oak wardrobes) and more contemporary chic. The dining room looked out over a bracelet of lights - Villefranche and Nice in the distance and it felt like floating over the planet in a spaceship. The food was not quite as out of this world, the chef's insistence on a lighter style of cuisine tempering the strong flavours I expect of Provencal cuisine.

The accompanying wines, though, were exceptional, showing the quality of whites coming out of this area now.

The Chevre d'Or has two stars and its young chef Phillipe Labbe is hotly tipped to secure that precious third. On the evidence of a 210 Euro tasting menu he deserves it, each course tasting harmonious with not too many competing flavours and while on occasions you wondered how did he manage to construct that particularly dish, there were no redundant foams and froths and bizarre combinations for effect. Service was charming and super-efficient, as throughout the hotel.

It would have been easy not to stray from the Chevre, but we managed a couple of lovely excursions. I recommend the beautiful and varied gardens of the Villa Ephrussi-de-Rothschild, which are tucked into the narrow approach to the Cap Ferrat peninsula.

The house itself is an Italianate extravaganza created by exuberant heiress Beatrice de Rothschild to house her immense collection of 18th century objets d'art, impressionist paintings and oriental plunderings, but it's all a bit fussy compared with the surrounding seven hectares of Renaissance fountains, gargoyles, exotic Med plants and even a formal Japanese garden, all overlooking the sea on both sides of the peninsula. Sublime.

Afterwards we walked along the coastal path to the sheltered Plage de Paloma for beers and fried fish on the pebbly beach.

The Cap is very much millionaire's row, but for the tots there is a small zoo featuring Siberian tigers and Himalyan bears.

Much less refined is the splendid old town at Villefranche-sur-Mer, which retains a certain louche sailors-docking feel to it. The dark, vaulted passageway called appropriately the Rue Oscure, is scarily medieval. The Hotel Welcome, a sort of shrine to bohemian artist Jean Cocteau who once set up home there (our room was aptly the Beauty And The Beast), is a recommended, though not cheap, harbourfront hang-out, but the real attraction is the string of seafood restaurants. The pick is La Mere Germaine on the Quai Courbet.

We chose, though, to drive on over to Nice for a saunter along the celebrated horseshoe Promenade des Anglais - legacy of our Victorian countrymen, who first colonised Nice as a winter resort.

Along from the Cours Saleya flower market and opposite the famous Alziari olive oil shop, where we purchased the obligatory take-home litre in its blue and yellow can, we chanced upon a restaurant a world away from Michelin refinement but just as satisfying - La Petite Maison.

It's the Cote d'Azur's equivalent of Sam's Chop House, a rough and ready conversion of an old grocery store, but it reminded me of the place food holds in French hearts, serving up classic tapenade, pissaladiere, cote de boeuf, bearnaise and chocolate mousse, with a sturdy local red. Everyone at that long lunch scraping every last morsel out of a lobster or spooning succulent bone marrow on to ethereal mashed potato, was having a ball. Purring, slurping and finally hugging the hefty patronne in the black dress before swanning out with an `a bientot, ma chere'.

My apologies for spending so much of the article on food, but while we preen ourselves about the quality of the `Great British Menu' and the like we mustn't forget that French haute cuisine is often still the benchmark. And you can dine outside more regularly!

FACTFILE

Chateau de la Chevre d'Or, Eze (33 04 92 10 66 66, chevre d'or.com). Standard double, high season, 295 €. From October 15, 270 €. Chateau Eza (steinhotels.com). Standard double from 365€. A menu degustation costs 105€. easyJet flies daily from Liverpool to Nice from just £21.99 one way (£45.66 return) including tax. To book visit easyJet.com or call 0905 821 0905. Neil hired his car from Carrentals.co.uk. To book, visit the site or phone 0845 2250845.