Club 55, Pampelonne
A storm, a borrowed oven, and seventy years of refusing to become something else.
It began with weather. In 1947, Bernard de Colmont, an ethnographer who filmed his expeditions, was driven into the empty bay of Pampelonne by a mistral while working at sea. He came back the next year with Geneviève and the children, and stayed. Bernard had spent the 1930s filming the Lacandón, descendants of the Maya, deep in the Mexican forest, and became a celebrated explorer for it. He recognized an untouched place when a storm handed him one.
They built a cabin in the dunes. No electricity, no running water, and a long wooden table out front where the family ate. In 1955 they started feeding friends off that table, then friends of friends. The year became the name. The following spring a film crew arrived. Brigitte Bardot asked Geneviève whether she could feed the crew of And God Created Woman, eighty people, for the length of the shoot. Geneviève borrowed the Saint-Tropez baker’s oven, said yes, and cooked. Their young son Patrice was put in charge of Bardot’s pet rabbit. The film made Saint-Tropez famous.
They called it a club for one reason: so they could refuse people. Not by wealth, by manners. In the 1950s the King of the Belgians and his aide-de-camp washed their own plates before they could eat, because Geneviève had started cooking before she owned enough plates to go round. They did it. The house motto has not moved since: here, the client is not the king, because he is a friend.
Patrice took over in 1972 and spent half a century proving that restraint scales. He never opened for dinner, on the grounds that nature deserved to recover at night. He grew the lunch on his own farms inland, vegetables, olive oil, and wine, including at Château de la Môle, where Antoine de Saint-Exupéry grew up. He settled an argument between two sailors by inventing a regatta, loser buys lunch, which grew into Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez. And when he was offered tens of millions for the club, he asked what exactly he would do with the money. Eat lunch at Cinquante-Cinq every day?
Patrice de Colmont died in October 2025, at seventy-seven. His team posted five words: “Tu vas nous manquer, patron.” His daughter Camille, the third generation, was already working beside him. The white and blue tablecloths have not changed. The reservations still happen by telephone. The long wooden table is, in every way that matters, still there.
It was never about austerity. It was knowing what not to add. Swim first. Lunch is earned.
