Pampelonne has no shortage of beach clubs and to be honest, a lot of them are selling you the same afternoon with different towels. What Byblos Beach gets right is the two things that actually decide how a day on the sand goes. The loungers are solid wooden sun beds with thick mattresses, deep enough to spend six hours on without shifting about, and the drinks are way better than they need to be.
We started our lunch with cocktails and focaccia with stracciatella, which is a good way to begin any meal. The cocktails are properly made rather than overly sweet or deceptively enormous, which is not a given on this beach, and there is a long list of mocktails too, which our son went through with the seriousness of a man choosing a well-aged Bordeaux.
Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon we ordered a fresh coconut to rehydrate, because the sun here in summer does not negotiate and also, to be fair, because our son wanted the experience of drinking coconut water out of a coconut.
The wine list includes Fondugues Pradugues, the natural wine estate just outside Saint-Tropez that we love, which meant our wine decision took about four seconds.
We enjoyed a late lunch starting with a tomato salad, which in the Var in summer needs no explanation. Octopus with peppers, and squid with zucchini came next. As a plat we ordered the sole meunière, which is a slightly old-fashioned thing to order on a beach and all the better for it, butter and lemon and nothing clever done to it. It’s also something we rarely make at home and the juxtaposition of an iconic bistro dish in the sand was too tempting to pass up.
The beauty of a St. Tropez beach club is there is no fighting for chairs, so after a leisurely lunch it was back into the sea, and back to the loungers, and the afternoon went the way beach clubs afternoons go – no plans and no schedule. We stayed until the light started to drop and the beach emptied out around us, enjoying a last cocktail before the Byblos driver arrived to take us back into town.
Note: Byblos provided support for the reporting of this story.