Hans and Lord Arran

Feasting along the Cotes d'Azur
text and images by  Lord Arran and Hans Zbinden

"I can I can !" was my response to Lord Arran's mild chiding for not coming down to the Cotes d'Azur and try some of the wonderful restaurants in the region with him. Once this commitment was made, we had to find a date that suited us both and agreed that it would be best to avoid the main vacation season so we scheduled our meeting for a long weekend at the end of August. Booking a flight to Nice and a hotel in Cannes was a cinch but picking the restaurants for our two evenings together was not an easy task, there are just so many excellent ones along the coast and in the hills above. After a bit of deliberation we settled on the Hotel Majestic's Villa de Lys in Cannes for the first evening and on the restaurant L'Oasis in nearby La Napoule for the second.

After having seen how excellently Hans has generated this report of our common gastronomical exploit there remains little to say.

We had two wonderful evenings, which we shall remember for a long time to come. Every blessed word of Hans is true and I can only repeat what I once said to Jacques Chibois about 15 years back when he still had the "Royal Gray" in the hotel "Gray d'Albion" in Cannes (19.5 points then in the guide "Gault et Millau" out of 20, nobody ever had 20) celebrating my birthday, I said: (in French of course) "Dear M. Chibois, I have gone through a series of gastronomical orgasms tonight and thank you very much for it".

This compliment was never forgotten by him and he always welcomed me very warmly ever when I came back.

Give credit where it's due: this very same compliment (and fact actually) applies also for the two evenings we had. If you want to see how happy, content and satisfied (and replete at that) I was just go to "L'Oasis" part 3 "Friandises", where you see part of me (hands and belly) and you can tell.

Once again: thank you Hans for this great report and I am looking forward to more of the sort in the coming years.

A very grateful Lord Arran

As we jointly consumed over 30 (THIRTY!) different dishes over the two days and every single one was photographed, we had to split up this report into several pages. Each part can be accessed directly through the navigation bar which you'll find at the end of each page.

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