La Bastide Saint-Antoine – Jacques Chibois's house on the hill

High above Grasse, where the hillside softens into olive groves and the horizon opens onto the Bay of Cannes, La Bastide Saint-Antoine occupies a Provençal country house built in the 17th century. Jacques Chibois and his wife Odette bought the property in May 1996, after five years of searching for exactly this kind of house, and turned it into both a Relais & Châteaux hotel and one of the Côte d'Azur's defining gastronomic addresses. Chibois had arrived in Grasse as the first chef in the history of Cannes to hold two MICHELIN Stars, won in the early 1980s at the Hôtel Gray d'Albion, where he was also named Chef of the Year. Today the restaurant belongs to Les Grandes Tables du Monde, the circle of around 170 of the world's most serious tables, and it is selected in the MICHELIN Guide — a house built on patience, produce and a very particular Provençal light.

01The room and the setting

The kitchen works a room of roughly seventy covers, busy but unhurried, and in the warmer months Chibois moves service out onto the terrace altogether, cooking under the same view over Grasse that has drawn visitors to this hillside for well over a century.

The house itself has carried rich company before the Chibois family arrived: after English aristocrat John Taylor's improvements in the 19th century, it passed to an ironmaster from Pont-à-Mousson who threw fashion shows here and once hosted the Rolling Stones for a full year in the 1970s. Sixteen rooms and suites, named after villages of the Grasse hinterland and split between Provençal elegance and a more contemporary register, now surround the restaurant as a small Relais & Châteaux hotel.

02The chef

Jacques Chibois was born in Limoges in 1952 to a family of millers who also ran a guesthouse, growing up close to farmers and the produce they raised — an apprenticeship in taste before he ever entered a professional kitchen. He trained formally at a Michelin-starred house near Limoges before working under Michel Guérard, Jean Delaveyne, Roger Vergé and Louis Outhier, a roll call of the chefs who defined post-war French cuisine.

Insider tip

Lunch menu Mon–Sat only; evening Menu Senteurs five courses; book ahead on the phone.

In the early 1980s he became head chef of the two-MICHELIN-starred Grey d'Albion in Cannes, the first chef in the city's history to hold two stars there, and was named Chef of the Year during his time at the helm. He now cooks at La Bastide alongside executive chef Laurent Barberot, with whom he has reworked the carte and menus towards lighter, more aromatic, seasonal cooking built on local produce.

03The cooking

Chibois's food runs on two obsessions: black truffle, celebrated each January with a market he hosts himself, and olive oil, which turns up across a cuisine rooted firmly in Provençal and Mediterranean tradition rather than trend.

His long-running signature remains a butterfly of langoustines in a grapefruit-and-orange emulsion scented with basil — a dish that has followed him from Cannes to Grasse and still anchors tasting menus today, continually refined rather than replaced.

04What to order

The current carte opens with marinated red tuna and sardine confit in olive oil with bean sprouts and coriander cream, or a squash velouté with citrus ricotta on red Camargue rice. Among mains, sea bream arrives with red and white cabbage, chestnuts, hazelnuts and pomegranate juice, while roasted veal and sweetbreads are caramelised with liquorice and served with gingerbread-spiced carrots and a Tonka bean jus. Desserts run to a strawberry soufflé with mint sorbet and a Manjari coffee-and-chocolate plate.

05Wine and drinks

The cellar is one of the house's quiet points of pride: more than 1,000 references and some 25,000 bottles, built up over more than 25 years of supporting the region's own winegrowers as much as stocking the great names of France.

06The neighbourhood

Grasse itself is the perfume capital of the world, and La Bastide sits just outside its centre on a hillside of olive trees, a short drive from Cannes — close enough for an evening at the Croisette, remote enough to dine looking out over the Mediterranean rather than at it from the shore.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.