No Place Like Môme: Riviera Glamour Has Arrived at The Berkeley

Anticipation fills the air every evening at Antoine and Ugo Lecorché’s restaurant La Môme in Cannes. Oversized rattan lamps in the restaurant's outdoor seating area sway gently. A chanteur serenades the crowd with DJ-backed cool classics. Diners know there is excitement to come.

The clock strikes eleven. Waiters and diners wave napkins and sparklers as French-Italian singer Dalida’s 1974 hit Gigi l’amoroso (Gigi the lover) rings out across the restaurant. Everyone claps and sings along. Passers-by stop to watch, sometimes up to seventy cramming around the entrance to see what is going on.

“People come from all over the world to La Môme,” says Ugo. “Often the first thing a guest asks is, ‘Will you make Gigi tonight?’ Even when they might not have been with us for a few years, they never forget the atmosphere.”

The Lecorché brothers arrived in Cannes in 2004, from Lyon—one of France's gourmet capitals and home to 'the pope of gastronomy,' Paul Bocuse. They ran clubs in their twenties, “more interested in girls and bars than immersing ourselves in the city’s food culture,” admits Ugo. With a backpack and fifty Euros between them, they intended to stay in Cannes for the summer only. Instead, they never left.

The pair opened their first restaurant in 2015. “We wanted to be in business in a place where we would be able to open seven days a week, all year long,” Antoine explains. Unlike in other towns dotting the Côte d'Azur, the Cannes low season is filled with people coming and going, especially in May, when A-listers descend for the film festival.

La Môme’s name derives from ‘la môme Moineau’ (the little sparrow), a nickname of a celebrated Cannes hostess in the Riviera’s golden era of the fifties and sixties. The restaurant itself was born of the brothers’ desire to create a venue “without having to become a crazy party place where people are dancing on the tables and chairs,” says Ugo. “We wanted to do something with elegance and consistency: a restaurant where you can speak all night, even when it gets a little noisier around 11 pm.”

On the pedestrianised Rue Florian, the restaurant had just eighty-six seats plus twenty outside. “We didn’t like turning people away because the restaurant was always fully booked,” says Antoine, “so we started looking for a way to add more tables.” They snapped up other restaurants and shops on what was then a rather shabby stretch, despite being a stone's throw from the Promenade de la Croisette, an oasis of palm trees, designer stores, and luxury hotels. Soon La Môme spanned the entire street. “Like a village,” Antoine laughs.

The empire has since added La Môme Plage, a restaurant and bar off the Croisette, overlooking one of the best patches of the Mediterranean, and Mido Cannes, a Japanese-inspired restaurant in a former sushi joint on Rue Florian. A corner spot was revamped into the Moka Cannes café, with interiors by hip Parisian designer Laura Gonzalez. La Môme Monte-Carlo opened in 2022 on the rooftop of the Port Palace Hotel, and a Parisian outpost of Mido launched in the summer of 2024.

More than restaurateurs, the Lecorché brothers are creators of atmosphere. “You need to come and feel the experience.”

Discover La Môme London.