Travel to France: Provence, Grasse, Cabris and the Perfect B&B

Here is a piece about a terrific Inn in the south of France.  But first, a disclaimer:  I am not a travel writer.  Not only am I not a travel writer, I don’t read travel magazines or guides or books or websites dedicated to explaining where people should go and what they should see.  This is because I like to discover, meaning I would prefer to find a place worth seeing by turning down a small road without even a utility line strung alongside, while quite hungry, and it being late, and we not knowing where we are headed, but having an instinct we can find something interesting along the way.  It doesn't always work, of course.  We have suffered some pretty awful nights.  We have also come upon some true and unimaginably extraordinary experiences (and meals and views and places to sleep or hike or swim or rest).  And I don’t think the experience is the same if you haven’t found a place yourself.  And if you go to the places touted in the tour books guess what you find?  People who read tour books.  And I typically take the view, well, that these experiences are interesting in part because they are private and known only to self and those with whom we choose to share such experiences.  So I’ve not written about them.  But I am not sure about my decision to keep exploration so private.

We now live in the age of unbridled interconnectivity (although where I sit right now writing this has no Internet, which is alarming and exciting and refreshing all at once).  And although my preference remains to find things by exploration of real places and not cyber-life, to be fair I do now stumble upon some pretty cool places via the Internet, even if not as much as I find driving small roads and aiming for villages high on hills.  I found the Inn I am about to write about on an Italian ‘slow food’ website after about two hours of Googling away and I would not have found it by driving around. 

I would never have found the place on my own mostly because the road it is on was no more than a path; a hard turn and drop off a B road in the south of France.  So steep and narrow first I would never have even noticed it (and in fact drove by it twice) and second when I did see it I thought it was literally a trail, not a road.  Even I would not have taken a rental car down that road without express instructions from the innkeeper to do so – and this from a guy who has gone down a street so narrow we eventually had to stop, fold in the rear view mirrors by rolling down the windows (we could not get out of the car) and back up for an hour to cover some two hundred yards (or we would have scraped the sides off the car and the buildings); taken the wrong bus through rural China for eighteen hours (didn’t know it was the wrong bus at the time); driven a rental car in New Zealand to the top of a mountain before realizing we were not on a road but were, in fact, on a trail. 

The haven I found through research on line is tucked onto a hillside in rural, coastal Provence.  It is a bed and breakfast, Le Mas du Naoc.  It sits just outside the small village of Cabris, a short drive on winding mountain roads from the perfume manufacturing center of Grasse and only a half an hour from Cannes.  The husband and wife team of Sandra and Jérôme Maingret runs the Inn. 

Although run as a traditional B&B, with limited access to the hosts after Eight PM and no meals or services beyond answering simple questions and breakfast, I call it an Inn because the home does feel like a storybook small Inn.  The rooms are separate from where the Maingret’s live with their small children  – Camille is 10 years old, Justine 8 – and are easily accessible at any time day or night without disturbing the hosts or other guests.  Upon check-in I was handed a tremendous skeleton key – first to unlock the iron gate barring the entrance, which creaks like a gothic novel when it opens, and then the thick wooden door to your own chamber.  But the Maingret’s call it a Bed and Breakfast, and this is their business, so I will call it the same.

The B&B as I said is tucked below the main road on that goat-path of a small, steep street.  My sweet rented Peugeot convertible (free upgrade from Sixt) barely fit as I descended vertically to the hotel.

An old ‘tilery,’ the ancient building is surrounded by gardens.  Sandra and Jérôme have worked for a decade to convert the property, both inside and out.  By chiseling away over time they have built an idyll.

The rooms are each distinct and feel carved out of the stone house.  The furniture is simple and warm.  Big windows open to the gardens and birdsong.  My room, facing the village’s old laundry house, was large enough for a family.  The shower in the ample bathroom – open to the view and with a massive rain-head poured thousands of tons of water – was itself worth the price of admission.  There is no phone in the room.  There is no TV.  There is wi-fi if you bring the computer into the bathroom.

The grounds are sculpted but remain natural, with terraced orchards of olive trees (the family produced 45 liters of olive oil from the trees this past year); a breakfast lawn bordered by wild herbs and flowers, including a rosemary plant grown so large at first I thought it was a pine hedge; and all around, from the front of the main house to the edges of the small saltwater pool, lavender flourishing like a weed, jasmine, magnolia and orange trees, and other perennials I could not name without taking a class, all there to explain why Grasse is a world center of perfume manufacture.  (I went for a run early each morning and the smells coming off the mists were all I needed to know to understand why perfumes come from Grasse.) 

The lawns are littered with varied and large clay pots.  They are used as planters and stitched together with rusted metal bands and twists of wire.  They are artfully placed around the grounds, an homage to the home’s history. From the pool and from the largest room, Cote Sud, you view the Sea in the distance, framed by the hills of Provence.  

I was in this sweet part of France for work.  But if on holiday a short run or drive away in the small village of Cabris, with its narrow streets, are good and varied restaurants, tennis courts, a park and a meadow.  In ten minutes drive you can visit the perfume factories and museum of Grasse.  There is hiking on steep trails, bicycling on narrow mountain roads and limitless exploring of towns and markets.  The coast is a half an hour away, including the city of Cannes, in many ways the opposite of Cabris.

Sandra grew up in a small town in the Loire Valley.  She and Jérôme  – a teacher at a business school in Grasse and a laborer and builder on the property – moved to raise a family and create something interesting and special.  Sandra told me her Inn and her recipes are a tribute to her childhood and Grandmother.  The breakfasts she serves are a worthy tribute, which brings us to the food.

Each morning I sat in the garden and Sandra would bring a tray with hot, dark coffee; an assortment of breads and croissants; locally made jams and Brittany butter; homemade granola; a soft-boiled egg; and yogurt from a local dairy.  And each day Sandra changes some element of the breakfast by varying the home-baked breads or small muffins, or, one morning by serving true French toast, made with a thick slice of hearth-baked bread, soaked overnight in orange-flower water and egg before being pan fried to perfection.

Sandra makes all of the breads each day.  She includes locally grown grains and cereals, like kamut or corn (kamut is a word she used as an example of the grains she uses and I had no idea what it is (it is a type of wheat) but can say it is delicious).  All of the jams as well are homemade with local ingredients.  In her jams she adds herbs from the property, such as rosemary or thyme.  Her fig jam was the best jam I have ever tasted and has addicted me to figs.  The butter served with breakfast comes from Brittany, and is made with sel de Guérande, a specialty salt (which is also unbelievable on boiled eggs).  The salt crystals are mixed with the butter and between the sweet cream and sharp salt it’s hard not to eat the butter by the spoonful (which would be bad to do for many reasons).

The recipe for the French toast, according to Sandra, “is easy.”  First, you must use dense bread, thick and “well leavened.”  Beat an egg with three “soup spoons” of sugar, one soup spoon of “orange flower water” (I don’t know what this is), one soup spoon of “brandy of pear”, “a little” cream and “two glasses of milk.  You can then soak the sliced bread in this mixture overnight if you’d like of dip the bread fresh.  Grill the bread on a hot pan with a little butter or olive oil.

This recipe for French toast comes from Sandra’s grandmother, from the town of Saumur, in the west of France, the region Sandra described as “the country of lex chateaux de la Loire,” which makes it sound pretty inviting, and is Sandra’s home town.

If you would like an out of the way, hard to find small B&B in a hamlet high in the hills of coastal Provence, and you think you would enjoy home-made fresh fig jam to spread on a home baked croissant, I suggest you will like Le Mas du Naoc.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio