Les Étoiles de Mougins

Les Étoiles de Mougins will not take place in 2026. As of October 2, 2026, the festival’s official website, run by the town of Mougins, says so at the top of its home page and adds that no date has yet been set for the next edition. The most recent edition, the fifteenth, was held on September 14 and 15, 2024. Between festivals, the restaurants that built the village’s reputation for fine food stay open all year round.

The festival has announced no date since its 2024 edition

The website lesetoilesdemougins.com is the only source to rely on, and it gives no reason for the break. Event listings that still show September 12 and 13, 2026 are wrong, and so is the Côte d’Azur regional tourism board, which still announces a sixteenth edition this year. There was no 2025 edition planned either: since 2018, the festival has only returned in even-numbered years.

Mougins created the festival in 2006 as a tribute to chef Roger Vergé

In 2006, Mayor Richard Galy founded this international food festival to honor chef Roger Vergé, whose restaurant, the Moulin de Mougins, had made the village’s name known around the world, a story this journal tells in its article on the old village. The first edition brought together Paul Bocuse, Pierre Troisgros, Michel Guérard, Gaston Lenôtre and Alain Ducasse around him. The older chefs arrived by Rolls-Royce, young cooks escorted them to the stage as a guard of honor, and the closing ceremony ended with Roger Vergé shaking hands with Alain Ducasse.

The format has changed little since then. For one weekend in September, the village squares and lanes host demonstrations, workshops, talks and book signings; admission is free and only some workshops charge a fee. The festival’s contests showcase the next generation: in 2024, the Roger Vergé Young Chef contest and the Young Pastry Chef contest were open to professionals aged 35 or under, who cooked for three hours in front of the public. Fanny Rey, who won in 2008, reached the final of the French TV cooking show Top Chef three years later, and she describes her win in Mougins as “the start of everything.”

Each edition was built around a guest of honor

In 2008, the year of chef Marc Veyrat, the festival’s success led it to cap the number of invited chefs at one hundred. Anne-Sophie Pic was the patron of the 2010 edition, devoted to women chefs; in 2012, with chef Frédéric Anton, more than 28,000 people attended over 130 demonstrations; and in 2014 pastry chef Christelle Brua put desserts center stage, the year 700 schoolchildren made a giant tart with the region’s pastry chefs. Thierry Marx and Daniel Boulud followed, then chef Philippe Etchebest, whose 2018 edition, the year “of all records” according to the festival, drew 35,000 visitors and 170 chefs.

The pandemic left the village without a festival in 2020. It returned in 2022 around chef Jacques Maximin, with 130 chefs and guests, about forty of them holders of the Meilleur Ouvrier de France title, France’s highest award for craftsmanship, and more than 25,000 visitors.

The 2024 edition brought more than 120 chefs together around Guillaume Gomez

For its fifteenth edition, the festival invited Guillaume Gomez, head chef of the kitchens at the Élysée Palace, the French president’s residence, for more than twenty years and now France’s ambassador for gastronomy. More than 120 chefs of more than eighteen nationalities gave thirty demonstrations, fifty workshops and cooking classes, and twenty talks. From September 13 to 22, the suspended table of Dinner in the Sky made its first stop in Mougins and rose more than fifty meters above the village, serving lunches and dinners at €295. The food news site Les Nouvelles Gastronomiques counted more than 20,000 visitors.

Admission was free, from 10 am to 6:30 pm; most demonstrations cost €7, and cooking classes €25 for one hour or €50 for two. Free shuttles ran up to the village, which was closed to cars, from parking lots on the outskirts where parking was also free. These arrangements applied to 2024; none have been set for a future edition.

Mougins keeps its cooking tradition alive all year outside the festival

The festival celebrates a tradition older than itself. In the 1950s, Célestin Véran, a navy cook turned fisherman in Cannes, was already bringing his English clients up to Mougins to serve them his bouillabaisse, on the site of the old olive oil mill where Roger Vergé would open his restaurant in 1969. Several of the village’s restaurants carry on that thread.

L’Amandier, founded by Roger Vergé in the 1970s, now serves Provençal food under executive chef Sébastien Zunino on two terraces facing the Plan de Grasse, and its €29 lunch menu includes a main course, coffee with small desserts and a glass of wine. Its most intimate dining room, with sixteen seats, is named after Picasso, in memory of a ceramic piece the painter gave the house. On Place du Commandant-Lamy, Denis Fétisson, who cooked at the Moulin de Mougins in Vergé’s day, has run La Place de Mougins since 2010 in the former Feu Follet; each month he builds a menu around one seasonal ingredient, and his team cooked at the festival in 2024.

The festival’s winners turn up in the village’s own kitchens too: Alexandre Boucobza, formerly second-in-command to Fanny Rey, the 2008 winner, in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, has headed the kitchens of the Mas Candille, Mougins’ five-star hotel, since 2026. On Sunday mornings, the farmers’ market on Cours des Arts, Avenue de Tournamy, gathers producers of fruit and vegetables, cheese, charcuterie and olive oil.

Practical information

Les Étoiles de Mougins: no edition in 2026 and no date announced (official website, October 2, 2026). Contact: contactlesetoiles@villedemougins.com.

L’Amandier de Mougins, 48 avenue Jean-Charles-Mallet, +33 4 93 90 00 91. Open daily, noon to 2 pm and 7 pm to 10 pm; closed from November 8, 2026, after lunch, through November 26. The cooking school is suspended.

La Place de Mougins, 41 place du Commandant-Lamy, +33 4 93 90 15 78. Thursday through Monday, closed Tuesday and Wednesday; closed from the evening of October 19 through November 4, 2026.

Farmers’ and artisans’ market, Cours des Arts, 599 avenue de Tournamy: Sunday mornings.

Parking: all parking lots in the old village are free, including Hubac 1, 2 and 3 at the foot of the village. From the A8 highway, take exit 42.

Opening hours as of October 2026; check before you go.

Where to stay: Villa Soha and the Mas de Mougins welcome guests a few minutes from the village’s restaurants

On the heights of Mougins, Villa Soha looks across at the old village from its 2,600 m² Mediterranean garden. Every morning Muriel prepares breakfast, served by the saltwater pool or under the pergola, and she and Christophe are happy to share their favorite restaurants and the region’s markets with guests in their three rooms. The village parking lot is a four-minute drive away.

At the Mas de Mougins, a five-room family home run by Delphine and Jean-Philippe, breakfast is served by the travertine pool, or in the winter room when the weather calls for it. From June to September, the house offers cheese or charcuterie boards in the evening, with local wine, to be ordered twenty-four hours ahead. The old village is a five-minute drive away.