La Colombe d'Or

La Colombe d'Or has occupied the same building immediately outside the Vauban walls of Saint-Paul-de-Vence since 1920, when the Roux family — three generations now in ownership — opened it as a working artists' inn. The original premise — paintings in exchange for meals and lodgings — produced one of the most extraordinary private art collections in France: Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Bonnard, Braque, Calder, Miró, Soulages, all of whom ate, drank and slept here at various points across the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s. The collection still hangs in the dining room, the lobby and the bar, unprotected behind glass, and is now valued at several hundred million euros.

The cooking is deliberately simple Provençal — the kitchen is not the point of the restaurant and the Roux family have never pretended otherwise. The signature is the famous 'panier de crudités provençal' — a wicker basket of raw garden vegetables with anchoïade, tapenade and a herb-aioli that has been the opening course for ninety years. Other anchors: a wood-fired Provençal sea-bass with Niçoise olives and lemon confit; a slow-roasted lamb shoulder with thyme and ratatouille; the famous 'tomates farcies' that the matriarch Yvonne Roux developed in the 1950s.

The wine cellar is unexpectedly serious for an institutional Provençal inn — 800 references with a Bandol and Côtes-de-Provence rosé core, deep verticals of Domaine Tempier, Château Simone and Domaine de Trévallon, and a Champagne section that runs to grower-producers rather than the grandes maisons. The Burgundy section reflects the artist-clientele's preferences across the decades — there is a Romanée-Conti vertical going back to the 1960s that the family quietly maintains.

The dining room is the experience. A converted stone-walled outbuilding off the inn's main lobby; a single open fireplace; ten tables under hand-carved larch beams; and the art on the walls — directly above the diners' heads, lit only by candle and the wall-sconce. The summer terrace under the fig tree, with the original Calder mobile suspended above it, is the most photographed restaurant terrace in France. Service is unhurried and family-run; the captains have worked here for decades.

La Colombe d'Or is the once-in-a-lifetime celebration room — the room where Picasso ate his fortieth-birthday lunch and Yves Montand married Simone Signoret in 1951. There is no equivalent dining experience anywhere on the Riviera. Book the corner two-top under the Léger painting in the main room; arrange the inn's overnight chambre with the matrimonial four-poster; let the room and the art do the work. It is also the most reliable client-impress address inland of Cap-Ferrat for a senior visitor who wants the experience of a hundred-year-old Riviera institution.