Cap d'Ail, Off-Season: A Coastline Without the Crowds

The Côte d'Azur in late September has the particular light that the painters always loved and the crowds have never quite learned to share. For a small set of collectors and habitual travellers, it is the only time of year that the coast really makes sense.

For most of the summer, the corniche road between Nice and Menton is functionally impassable to anyone who actually wants to drive. The traffic moves at walking pace; the parking is a question of negotiation; the restaurants are full of people who have come for the photograph more than the lunch. By the third week of September the air thins, the day-trippers retreat, and the road becomes, for a few weeks, what it was meant to be.

Where to stay, and what to drive

The hotels in Cap d'Ail and Beaulieu-sur-Mer that hold their position year after year are not, on the whole, the ones with the loudest reputations. They are the small properties — eleven rooms, twenty rooms — that close in November and reopen in late February, and that quietly host the same families generation after generation. The cars in their car parks in late September are unobtrusive: dark Bentleys, occasionally a black Aston Martin, the very rare Ferrari in dark blue. The Lamborghini in lime green that monopolises the corniche in August is, mercifully, absent.

The lunch question

The restaurants worth the journey are familiar to anyone who has spent any time on the coast: La Réserve at Beaulieu, La Voile d'Or at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, the small fish kitchen at the foot of the rue Pasteur in Èze whose name does not require advertising. What changes in the off-season is the booking process: a telephone call rather than an online form, a conversation with the manager rather than a confirmation email, and the small but significant difference of being given the table you actually wanted.

The point of going

There is, in the end, a slightly old-fashioned argument for the off-season. The coast was always a place of quiet rituals: the morning drive to a market, the long lunch, the evening on a terrace looking south. In July those rituals are exhausting; in late September they become themselves again. For those of us who travel for the experience rather than the photograph, that is more than enough reason.