A Drinker's Guide to St. Tropez: Day 2

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I got to bed relatively early on night one as the sun had not yes risen. Before heading back to my room night 1, the Germans and I decided we would all meet and go to Voile Rouge at 1:30 or 2PM the next day. I woke up around 1 and found a note from the concierge confirming Voile Rouge for 1:30PM. No one ever shows up anywhere on time in St. Tropez and the service is always slow and half assed (although the Byblos is picking it up), so the time was not a problem. I had gotten a call from the Germans earlier confirming that we were going to Voile Rouge and in typical efficient German fashion they were already in the lobby when I staggered down from my room at the agreed upon hour. St. Tropez is a little village, in the winter there are only 5,000 inhabitants but it swells to 80,000 in the summer (the locals mostly leave and rent their homes out at extortionate rates to the vapid summer inhabitants). The hotel shuttle driver was trying to explain the contrast for me, explaining in winter it gets cold (and even sometimes snows), most of the hotels and clubs are not open and all the cars, people, excess, etc... is nowhere to be found; just a fishing village. St. Tropez is a village though, and as such there is no actual beach IN St. Tropez, you need to take the shuttle or in the case of some daring and perhaps idiotic people, attempt to drive home plastered. The beach and attendant beach clubs are actually in Ramatuelle which is a 5-15 minute drive from the Byblos depending on the traffic. As I mentioned there are 3 main beach clubs. Cinquant Cinq (don't call it Club 55 in English, people think that makes you look like a rookie) is one of the oldest beach clubs and while they have good food there isn't really a party scene. It's the place you go to have a relaxing lunch with some wine, or a place you bring your family. As such I completely avoid it when I'm in St. Tropez because if I'm going to the beach clubs I'm going hard or not at all and I also don't want to be drunk around families. The next most popular is Nikki Beach. Nikki is fun sometimes but it is really big, not on the beach (they have a pool and are a few feet from actual beach which another low brow beach club owns) and too "posey" if that makes sense. The best way to explain it is this, as I mentioned there is a centrally located swimming pool at Nikki Beach but no one ever goes in it. The pool is always ringed with throngs of people but the object is to sit around the pool and try and look disaffected and hip while drinking, not to actually go in and cool off. I guess the problem with Nikki is the people going there try to take themselves waaaay too seriously and they are usually the type of people who have no business doing such (not that anyone really does). Voile Rouge is my favorite, the service is slow and highly mediocre, it's not as good as it was a few years ago (and as I'm told by other people nowhere near what it was 10 years ago) but it is fun. They have pretty good food and when we arrived I was pumped to see if the Spaghetti Napolitain was as good as I remembered. It was good, but not like I remembered. Perhaps I was drunker before all of the lunches I had at Voile Rouge last visit. 1-2 bottles of the omnipresent Domaine Ott Rose went with lunch and as is always the case around 4 or 5 in the afternoon things started to pick up. Voile Rouge (Red Sail in French) is little more than a Shack-Like building with some deck space (with a bar and all the lunch seating tables on it) and then lounge chairs on the beach. People generally arrive between 2 and 4 for lunch and between 4 and 5 people are finishing their meals, they've had their bottles of wine and there's a moment when you can audibly notice that the volume of the music gets kicked up a notch and things start to spin out of control. The scene is primarily driven by large groups, usually Russians or Arabs (but also sometimes big groups coming in from the mega yachts moored in the bay), because they tend to be the flashiest. By that I mean they buy the huge expensive bottles, punch bowls of booze and magnums that fuel the champagne fights (yes people buy champagne just to spray on other tables and their friends) which in turn raise the bar for the atmosphere. With my peasant sized tab for lunch out of the way, I started drinking at the bar and that moment came when the music jumped up a bit. Shortly thereafter the Superman theme started to play (they play superman, star wars and some other themes along with the bottle presentation for some odd reason) and out came one of the employees dressed in an overly tight superman costume with his hair slicked back carrying bottles with sparklers. When people buy enormously expensive bottles, large #'s of bottles or other ridiculously priced things they make a huge presentation of it with the music and sparklers (they do this everywhere). Voile Rouge however is the only place where the presenter wears a costume (sometimes many). So Superman brings them their first round of bottles and I head down to drink on the beach for a bit and take a quick dip in the ocean. The ocean seemed noticeably dirtier this year, but as I say almost every year, when you come down from Voile Rouge half drunk (or more) and stand in the light blue water and look out on the mega yachts (also way fewer this year, thanks credit crunch!) and the villa's in the hills you are very glad you came. By the time I got out of the water and back to my drink, the theme music was playing again and the same guy now dressed as Zorro (complete with sword) was bringing more bottles to this group (I think they were boat people but may have been Russians). His next costume involved an orange flight suit, a parachute and a leather flight helmet, complete with fat cigar in his mouth Curtis LeMay style. While in the flight suit he climbed up to sit on the roof over the bar and proceeded to throw the bottles to the people at the table. The people were opening bottles and pouring them on their heads, spraying their friends at close range and everyone else within champagne striking distance. I briefly counted at one point and saw at least 15 empty bottles of champagne lying on the table spent, in addition to what they were drinking and what was in the buckets of ice. I've said it before and I'm sure i'll say it again...the largesse and waste from one day at these beach clubs could probably feed a good chunk of Africa but hey, it's les vacances, quelle domage. Right? Towards 7 people start to get worn down and realize they are going to need a nap (the smart ones at least, powering through is not recommended) so I called for the hotel shuttle. I confirmed dinner with the concierge for 10:30 at Villa Romana for the group which had now swollen to 6 people and then set a wakeup call for 9:30. I woke up, took a bath (surprisingly good bath tub), got ready and of course drank half of what was in the minibar. Villa Romana is my favorite restaurant in St. Tropez and it certainly isn't because of the food (which is mediocre and overpriced). I forgot to mention, but at Voile Rouge they also have "models" who are constantly walking around the club in a perpetual fashion show hoping you will buy the incredibly overpriced things they are wearing. At lunch on this day, these Brazilian girls at the table next to us actually bought something from one of the models, I think it's the first time I've ever seen anyone get duped into that. Anyway, they do this at Villa Romana also and it is basically like Voile Rouge: Dinner Edition. We arrived probably 45 minutes late for our reservation (par for the course), then had to give our name to the restaurant bouncer (who also bounces at Voile Rouge) before going inside and finding the Maitre'D (if you can even call him that) and being led to our table. More bottles of Rose came with dinner and Eric (from Luxembourg) joined us with this Russian girl (Olga) he had met earlier in the afternoon. Olga was an odd one to say the least. She kept talking to these people at another table, claiming she was a "consultant" but having no info as to how consulting works or what exactly she consults on. She also had a sketchy back story about where she lived and what she was doing here. There is a rebuttable presumption that any Russian girl you meet on the Riviera is a hooker. By the end of dinner we all decided she had not met her burden. Dinner was amusing though, everyone gets drunk, they bring out the bottles with sparklers and all the usual pomp and circumstance. There aren't champagne fights but our waiter was bringing drunk people hats. I was given a football helmet. It's tougher than you would imagine to drink rose with a helmet on. At one point during dinner one of the Germans as an aside asked me "she's rather stupid isn't she?" about Olga, indeed she was, but hey it makes for a good story. If Eric wasn't convinced of his new "friends" occupation by the conclusion of dinner, he soon would be. Eric had a car, a two seater Mercedes AMG of some variety, so he took Olga and the rest of us waited for a taxi. We were all meeting back at the pool bar at the Byblos to wait for Eric's friend Roland and kill time until it was late enough for Les Caves (1-2am). When we got to the pool bar, from the way Olga was gushing over Eric's car and the fact that (no joke) when he asked where she was staying she named a hotel and then said "but I can stay with you" it was set. We spent most of the next 2 hours making jokes at her expense whenever she left the table to talk to potential clients. Roland had an excellent story that was somewhat on point. That morning he had been having breakfast in Places Des Lices and he said some E.European girl started talking to him, he said the second thing she said to him was "do you have a boat?" Now Roland is Austrian so he speaks english with a German sounding accent, so you have to imagine him saying this in english, with a german accent while trying to put on a female russian accent. He told her no, he didn't have a boat and that he was poor. Then she insisted that wasn't true because she saw he had a nice car. He tried to tell her whatever and she asked if he would buy her some champagne. Roland said no and that he had no money to which she responded (no joke again) "that is not true, you have two hundred. I saw it in your pocket." Hilarious. With Olga safely removed from the situation (she would later drunk dial Eric at like 6am, then somehow end up in Cannes and vanish forever...though she did continue to txt Eric for a few days.) the rest of us headed to Les Caves. There are a lot of Brazilians in St. Tropez this year, because apparently the Rial has greatly increased in value over the last few months. They filled the void left by the lower # of French and Italians (again, thanks credit crunch!) and provided some amusing moments. As always America, Russia and The middle east were well represented. As it were, Eric knew some of these Brazilians so we joined them at their table in the VIP area at Les Caves. It turned out one of the Brazilian girls who Eric was in love with had actually been the one who bought the clothing at Voile Rouge from the model. Amusing. The only thing I really remember from this part of the evening is one of the Brazilian guys maybe named Rodrigo? Asked where I was from, then said he loved New York. After this every time he saw me for the rest of the night he would just yell "New York!" and high-5 me. We got pretty trashed and the official songs of the summer for the Riviera (based on # of plays) are "American Boy," "No Stress" and "All I Need." I vaguelly remember the sun being just past up when I left Les Caves and headed to my room in the pale blue precursor to sun.

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Photos

St. Tropez
From some distance

La Voile Rouge
Not the same day, but same place. View is from the beach. The Indian Head is on top of the bar, you can't see most of the seating area.

Dusk
Dusk in St. Tropez