Here’s everything you need to know about Zuma Saint-Tropez.
There is a particular kind of alchemy that happens when a global hospitality name finds exactly the right address. For Zuma, the contemporary Japanese dining brand with outposts from London to Dubai to Hong Kong, that address is the garden of Hôtel Byblos, the property that has defined Saint-Tropez glamour since 1967. Following its 2024 debut in Cannes at the storied Palm Beach, Zuma’s second Riviera chapter opened in May 2025, and it has spent its first two summers proving it belongs.
The setting is the first thing guests notice. Fully outdoors and open nightly throughout summer, the restaurant unfolds across the Byblos gardens beneath strings of light and open sky, a deliberate choice that lets the Mediterranean evening do part of the work. The interior design, led by Azumi, interweaves Mediterranean elegance with global craftsmanship in a contemporary language, while a lighting concept by Into Lighting was built to shape the space without ever overpowering it.
At its centre sits a curved bamboo bar, dressed in custom-made Japanese ceramics, alongside bespoke Japanese tiles and a robata grill whose illuminated hood and textured granite make the open kitchen as much a part of the room’s architecture as the seating around it. Co-founder Rainer Becker has called the pairing a natural one, noting that Saint-Tropez was a natural choice for our next Riviera venture.
That sense of craft extends to the kitchen itself, which operates across three distinct stations: a main kitchen, a dedicated sushi counter, and the robata grill, each visible to guests as part of the evening’s theater. Dishes such as miso-marinated black cod and wagyu tataki sit alongside seasonal specialities inspired by Provençal ingredients, while the robata imparts a smoky depth to everything from vegetables to seafood to premium cuts grilled over binchōtan charcoal.
The black cod, wrapped in hoba leaf and a Zuma signature found across the brand’s global locations, remains a fixture diners return for, alongside a roasted lobster finished in green chilli and shiso butter, and a rock shrimp tempura built for sharing. Sushi and sashimi round out the menu’s quieter register, plated with the same precision as the more theatrical robata dishes.
Cocktails carry their own craft, with a yuzu-laced Zuma Martini anchoring a list built alongside a sake selection that runs to rare junmai daiginjo.
It is the service, though, that consistently earns the restaurant its loyal following. From the welcome at the garden entrance to the pacing of a sharing-style menu that can easily run to a dozen plates, the team manages a balance that is harder than it looks, staying attentive without hovering and warm without losing the polish expected of a Byblos address. Guests are walked through unfamiliar dishes without ceremony, wine and sake pairings are suggested rather than pushed, and the kind of small gestures, a recommendation, a recalled preference, that distinguish genuine hospitality from mere efficiency are very much part of the experience here.
Location plays its own quiet role in the restaurant’s appeal. Set within the Hôtel Byblos grounds at 25 Avenue Foch, Zumasits a short walk from the heart of the village and from Caves du Roy, the hotel’s legendary nightclub, making it as natural a starting point for a long Saint-Tropez evening as it is a destination in its own right. Reservations open well ahead of peak season and are, unsurprisingly, hard to come by in July and August; this is a restaurant guests plan around, not one they stumble into.
Two summers in, Zuma Saint-Tropez has settled into its garden home with the kind of ease that suggests the fit was right from the start: Japanese precision and Riviera warmth, brought together under a sky that neither element could claim alone.
