Hyatt Regency Palais de la Méditerranée

The Palais de la Méditerranée is back, to add at least another chapter to its already storied history. The “Méd” opened in 1929, just months before the great stock market crash — and what months those were, for its American owner Franck Jay Gould, as well as for guests like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, and even Maurice Chevalier. Good and bad years alternately befell this glitzy Art Deco edifice, until it finally closed its doors in 1978, and spent the rest of the century vacant, before returning with a slightly more elaborate name: Hyatt Regency Nice Palais de la Méditerranée.

The Art Deco facade still stands, though everything behind it is brand-new, rebuilt in a sort of modern/Deco hybrid style. Rooms are perhaps not the largest on the Riviera, but are more than comfortable enough, and in this most competitive of markets, space comes at a premium. Generous bathrooms with separate showers and tubs will more than compensate, as will, if you’re lucky, astonishing sea views.

Most of the action, suitably, takes place outside the rooms — the casino is back in business, the restaurant, Le 3e, is a hot spot. Healthier diversions are available as well — the courtyard pool, with its colonnaded sea view, is a social scene all its own, and there’s another indoor pool in the fitness center, in addition to a well-equipped gym, sauna and steam room.

As any investment banker will tell you, past performance is no indication of future results — it’s possible that the Méd is straightened out for good, and that nothing but the best of times await, or this may just be another crest on the Palais’s long roller-coaster ride. One thing is for certain — at the present moment, the hotel is on a roll, and there’s no harm in making like Josephine Baker, and partying like it’s 1929.