Most charter yachts treat food as a service. LouLou treats it as the reason you are there.
She is a 35-metre Benetti Classic 115, delivered in 2001 and comprehensively refitted in 2025, and she now runs under the LouLou name — the restaurant group whose rooms in Paris and along the Riviera made a particular kind of Mediterranean cooking fashionable again. The transom carries the LouLou script and its small drawn face. The linen is monogrammed. The menus are built in the spirit of the group’s kitchens, seasonal and local rather than international-hotel, and the galley is staffed accordingly. If the food on board is usually the part of a charter you accept, here it is the part you choose.
The yacht she is built on takes that well. Stefano Righini drew the exterior and Zuretti did the interior, and the 2025 refit had the sense to keep the cherry panelling rather than paint over it. The result is warm and quietly formal: high-gloss timber, coffered ceilings, brass sconces, cream upholstery lifted with mustard velvet. It is a room language from a different decade and it has aged into something more interesting than the pale-oak consensus around it.
The main saloon runs almost the full beam, a curved white settee facing a glass table, with window bands port and starboard and the aft deck opening off the stern. Forward, past a full cherry bar with its own cold store and glassware, is a separate dining room seating ten under a mirrored ceiling panel — a real room with a door, not the forward end of the saloon. That separation is what makes a long dinner work while other guests are still on deck. Above, the skylounge is looser: white sofas, a second bar with stools, and the best sightline on board.
Outside, the aft main deck carries a table for eight under the overhang, laid against the water. The sundeck is the yacht’s other centre of gravity — a spa pool set into the deck with striped sunpads either side, a full awning that can be struck, and a curved settee that catches the light off the coast. From it you look straight at the Riviera shoreline.
Five cabins sleep ten. The master runs full-beam with a window band at bed height and a marble bathroom with a full tub; two doubles and two twins follow, all in the same cherry and burl, all with proper daylight. The twins take a chest between the berths and a porthole at the head, and they are finished to the standard of the doubles rather than a step below, which is not always true on a yacht of this vintage. Seven crew work the yacht, which for ten guests is a comfortable ratio and, given what the galley is being asked to do, a necessary one.
She cruises at twelve knots, tops out at sixteen, and carries a 9.6-metre Lomac chase tender for running into the beach clubs along the coast. LouLou charters the French Riviera and the western Mediterranean, and she is priced from EUR 95,000 per week — which, for a 35-metre Benetti with a restaurant behind it, is the most interesting number on this page.
