Unknown places

The hidden terraces

To live happily, let’s live hidden but outside! Sheltered from the torments of traffic, cut off from the world, between the parentheses of a stolen moment from the daily routine, we review some of the most beautiful space-time hideouts of the queen of the water cities and its surroundings. On sunny days, opt for the refueling in the air…

Golf courses

and their terraces

Restaurant Le Montpensier

And his eponymous golf course

The most tangible element that marks the second birth of the Golf Vichy forêt de Montpensier is the realization of its clubhouse. Both singular and yet perfectly integrated into this forest that its vertical lines suggest. By its ingenious design, the clubhouse covers a vast terrace, very widely open on the greens, which take in this forest false air of clearings. The resemblance is so striking that even the deer are taken in. If the journey had not been made with the watch in hand, one would not believe that we are in the middle of the forest, but we are only 10 minutes drive from the entrance to Vichy.

The Montpensier

Golf restaurant

of the Sporting Club

My first memory of Vichy, apart from the Sunday shopping sessions, goes back about thirty years. That day, I must have eaten 3 kilos of Werther’s Original, so much so that I felt like an exceptional person. In fact, it was not these famous sweets that made me feel this way, but a summer lunch, in good company, in an exceptional place: the terrace of the golf restaurant. Very precisely under the catalpa trees… I don’t remember precisely that day, I only remember an unreal white and green light, bursts of laughter, the refreshing shade of the big leaves in the already hot summer of this end of the 20th century, the feeling of having had lunch with Jay Gatsby himself.

Golf Restaurant

The walk

When he bought La Promenade in 2013, Cédric Bacholier thought he could put his stamp on the kitchen as he had on the decor by completely renovating the establishment. Yes, but here’s the thing: by way of paws, they’re not quite the ones that customers were expecting… When the restaurant reopened, they flocked to the restaurant to ask for fried bleak and frog legs! Cédric then wisely packed up his gastronomic dreams to satisfy those of his customers. It must be said that La Promenade is an institution on the left bank, one of those Auvergne straw huts that line the entire course of the Allier, where the eyes and taste buds revel in the seasonal pleasures of the river. Contrary to the establishments which border the lake of Allier, terrace and river are here invisible since the street.

The Promenade

The Gardens of Enghien

and its pavilion

In this collection of secret terraces, there is one establishment that has a master card. Do you know a more exotic and at the same time more quintessential summer experience than lunch on a terrace, in the heart of the city, around a swimming pool? Between Lake Allier and the heart of the city, this is the very honest proposal of the Jardins d’Enghien (restaurant of the Pavilion of the same name), as soon as the temperature rises above 22°. Lunches are bathed in sunshine from above, while dinners take on a blue hue when the pool lights counterpoint the limpid twilight of a summer sky. The setting is idyllic, the pool heavenly, but for all that, the appetite does not fall to the water.

The Gardens of Enghien

Yacine's smile

The Kasbah

It arrived in the local gastronomic landscape on tiptoe, without making any noise, with the discretion that characterizes Yacine Remili, its owner, yet in a few years, La Casbah has taken over the vacant throne of La Medina. As soon as you walk through the front door, Yacine welcomes you with a smile. But not a school mimic, nor a carnivorous grin… a true oriental smile: simple, authentic and warm. Well, that’s it, everything is said, because this smile alone embodies the philosophy and the cuisine of La Casbah, whose couscous would bring tears to the eyes of a Nile crocodile.

The Kasbah

Also to be discovered

Pursuing the escape

Storyteller of starry flavors

A dynasty of confectioners