A restaurant for special occasions, La Palme d’Or at the Hotel Martinez in Cannes has been taken over by the intrepid chef Jean Imbert who has delivered a superb experience for dinners.
The swashbuckling chef Jean Imbert, who in 2022 displaced Alain Ducasse from his long reign over the dining rooms of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris, is on a roll. Every couple of months it seems like he’s named chef of yet another restaurant, yesterday one in Saint Barthélemy, today at new hotel The Lana in Dubai. One of most interesting recent new perches that Imbert occupies is La Palme d’Or at the Hôtel Martinez in Cannes. There is no doubt that this place needed a shake-up, since a dinner I had by former Martinez chef Christian Sinicropi was one of the most pretentious and least satisfying meals I had in 2022. So I met a childhood friend who lives in Monte Carlo for dinner at the restaurant with great curiosity.
Unlike most of the Martinez, which has been extensively remodelled since it became part of Hyatt’s Unbound Collection, the dining room looked pretty much the same, with the possible exception that the crowd wasn’t as chic as I’d remembered it. Unfortunately, Imbert continues Sinicropi’s irritating habit of writing a menu as though it were a film script, i.e. Opening Scene, etc., which strikes me as trying too hard to appropriate some of Cannes’s film festival glamour. What really mattered was the food, of course, and the reason we were there is because my friend had heard good things in the circle of eye-wateringly wealthy women she frequents as one herself in Monaco.