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I hate to spend time garlanding somewhere that needs no public relations effort. But Provence is one of those improbable places, like the Amalfi Coast, which are exactly as enchanting as everybody says. We’ve been going regularly for about fifteen years. To begin with, it’s a juggernaut of a landscape: mountains and valleys combed with vineyards, puckered with stone villages that look incredibly fake, like film sets, their wooden shutters throwing off little chips of paint when they bang in the wind. The weather is dazzling in the summer, and easy-going in the spring and autumn. There’s a regional pride in good cooking that yields long-lasting, idiosyncratic restaurants, and local wine (Châteauneuf-du-Pape is down the road) worth trying to strap to the roof of your car. Anyway, once you start going, it's uphill going anywhere else. That’s why there are tourists all over the place with their eyes squeezed shut, causing scenes, having little epiphanies over the tomatoes.
The last time we were in Provence, we drove south through the Cévennes National Park, from Massignac, because we were already in France on a longer trip. If we hadn’t been, I’d do it this way: fly to Marseille and arrive mid-morning, walk outside to the car rental place (there’s no struggle with trams or buses to rent a car at Marseille airport; it couldn’t be easier), and drive an hour northwest, directly to the set four-course lunch at Le Bistro du Paradou.
An aside: telling someone to go to Le Bistrot du Paradou, while visiting Provence, is a little like telling someone in Paris to make a reservation at Le Bistrot Paul Bert. That is to say, it’s hardly a tip, but it’s so delicious, so likely to make you feel glad to be alive, it would be awful to miss it. The menu changes daily, but there’s a schedule that they will fill you in on when you call to make a reservation (cassoulet on Tuesdays, lamb on Saturdays, and so on). I try to work it out so we arrive on a roast chicken day; it comes in a puddle of buttery jus, beside a little mount of tagliatelle and morels. The set price includes as much of the house wine as you like, factoring in that somebody will still need to drive to the hotel. You’ll rock-paper-scissors it.
Hôtel Crillon le Brave, perched on a summit in sight of Mont Ventoux, that Tour de France behemoth, is a favourite hotel of my dad’s. My husband Andrew and I started staying there ourselves—in the smallest rooms, during the shoulder seasons—before we could afford it. Every morning, we ate buffet breakfasts that walked right up to the limit of theft and held us over until dinner: omelettes, cheeses, espressos, apricots, hams, you name it. The terrace where the restaurant is located overlooks a heart-in-mouth valley that runs to the ridgeline of the Mont-Ventoux Natural Regional Park, and sitting on it is reason enough to stay at the hotel.
Shortly before the pandemic, a new owner (the Maisons Pariente group, which owns a handful of in-the-know properties, including Hotel Lou Pinet in Saint-Tropez) took over Hôtel Crillon le Brave, and our trip this summer was the first time we had been back since the change. Even through a fog of nostalgia-bias, I can see it’s a smoother operation now: the rooms, which are mostly still decorated in a rustic, Provençal style (brick floors, wood beams, cafe curtains) have been refreshed, and the showers are newly powerful. The pool, bracketed by white linen umbrellas and cypress trees, is a glamourpuss, and there’s a new, hugely popular restaurant, La Table du Ventoux, that takes over the terrace for lunch and dinner after the buffet skulkers have moved on. We stayed with our children, aged 5 and 2, who were handed balloons and foam noodles by staff members who crouched on their haunches to talk.
When we went roaming, this time, we kept to Sure Things: the half-asleep, medieval hamlet of Crestet (population: 400), at the edge of the Dentelles de Montmirail foothills, where some of the best views over the Vaucluse are from the carpark next to the local château. A short drive away, in the centre of the village of Séguret, there’s a café, called Salon de Thé Eglantine, where you can take a slice of quiche to a picturesque clump of folding tables beside the Fontaine des Mascarons, a historic 17th century fountain with three water-spouting, masked faces, who are said to banish bad spirits. The hilltop honeypot, Gordes, has a permanent traffic jam on its southwest approach, because of deranged people like me, hopping out of their cars to snap pictures. Once you’re past the snarl, the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque, its famous lavender fields overseen by a community of Cistercian Monks, is only a few minutes past Gordes by car.
In L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, a plain town with the Sorgue river cutting through it, cold-eyed shoppers are always rushing for the antique market, but we’re never organised enough to go. Instead we have lunch at Le Jardin du Quai, a tranquil restaurant located behind one of the permanent antique shops. The daily no-choice menu can be hit or miss, but the setting—concrete garden tables with gravel underfoot, dappled light, a large black labrador, named Scooby Doo, cruising for scraps—is so convincingly lovely that you could stick to the bread basket and the house red and feel like you’re in clover. When we make it down to Cucuron, a village around an hour southwest in the Luberon Regional Natural Park, it’s also to eat. There’s a grande dame restaurant, La Petite Maison de Cucuron, in a stuccoed house with blue shutters, where the owner employs someone who must be the most successful chanterelle forager in history of mushrooms. They come right out of a skillet, seared, flecked with parsley, practically in piles.
More than anything else, I think it’s the high-low quality of Provence that people find seductive. There are fancy hotels, but the true attractions are low-hanging and accessible: exploring on foot, poking through brocantes, small towns, wineries. Buying peaches and fresh goat’s cheese and fougasse for a car boot lunch and feeling like a genius. There isn’t much of a scene anywhere, unless you count the queue for double-scoops at Léone in Vaison-la-Romaine. It’s restful. It feels like you’ve figured out how to live.
