Beausoleil's pay-what-you-can canteen builds community
By Laurent Duval, MonacoViews Editorial
A participatory restaurant at the new Village Charlot in Beausoleil brings volunteers and diners together around shared meals on a pay-what-you-wish basis.
Just across the border in Beausoleil, the December 2025 opening of Village Charlot brought with it something rather different from the usual neighbourhood restaurant. The "petites cantines" concept, already established elsewhere in France, has found a natural home here on Monaco's doorstep: a participatory canteen where the price of a meal is left entirely to the diner's conscience.
The model is straightforward but deliberately social. Volunteers arrive to cook, strangers sit down together at shared tables, and the distinction between those who prepared the food and those who came to eat it dissolves over the course of a meal. The stated aim is not charity but connection, building the kind of casual, cross-community bonds that are easily lost in a transient border town.
For Monaco residents, particularly those living in the Moneghetti area or along the upper reaches of the Principality, Beausoleil is effectively a neighbourhood extension. A project of this kind, focused on social cohesion rather than commercial return, adds something to the broader community that straddles both sides of the frontier.