Christophe Leroy: Meet the king of St Tropez

During the Fifties, St Tropez was awash with glamour, status and Brigitte Bardot. But it has since fallen out of favour with the jet set. Now a chef brandishing new money has revived its fortunes.

In mid-August, the roads along the French Riviera are slithering snakes of hot metal, and the village of St Tropez resembles a Disneyland-style theme park: "Wealthyland, where you can see the celebrities at play". Snapped here by the tabloids during the past year have been Uma Thurman, Johnny Depp, Naomi Campbell, Elle Macpherson, Hugh Grant, David Coulthard, Ralph Fiennes – if you're in Hello!, you come to St-Trop, it seems.

But in peak season, when 250,000 daytrippers descend daily on a village with a population of 10,000, celebrities are swamped by visitors who want to be in a walk-through Hello!. Robbie Williams and Kate Moss and Miuccia Prada may be there, but you're as likely to spot them on a casual stroll as be served a good meal in one of the harbourfront bistros.

Still, it was in August last year that Williams and Geri Halliwell appeared in The Sun together here (Robbie had a spot of bother in a local bar), and August is when a procession of celebrities from the US and Europe choose to parade at the Hotel Byblos, where members of the public can gawp at the swimming-pool terrace over a metal railing.

And it is also when a man they call "Le Roi de St Tropez", a diminutive, pudgy farmer's son from Normandy, holds the resort's most glamorous event. This week, if you hop on a scooter in the central square, and drive towards the hamlet of Ramatuelle on the edge of town, you might just catch a hint of how St Tropez's revival all happened, who made it happen – and how it might all go wrong again.

After a five-minute scooter ride from the centre, you reach the road leading down to the beaches at Pampelonne, the home of the world's most hedonistic beachside restaurant, Club 55, where lobster, champagne and glamour models are the dishes of the day, and to the sand at Tahiti, where Brigitte Bardot and Roger Vadim caroused in Et Dieu Créa La Femme, the movie that made St Tropez famous.

Follow the road until it curves right at an old windmill surrounded by vineyards. This is Les Moulins de Ramatuelle, a little hotel and restaurant, which is scene of the Bal Masqué (masked ball) of 15 August, the most desirable and debauched date on the social calendar.

The masked ball is one of two invitation-only events hosted by Christophe Leroy each year – the other is the more sedate "pique-nique sur la Plage" – which attract celebrities like Barbra Streisand, Quincy Jones and Charles Aznavour, as well as oil, fashion and publishing magnates, models and wannabes. The masks worn by the guests are so effective that all manner of indiscretions occur.

"There's a real frisson," says a female Parisian society jeweller who attended the ball last year. "In St Tropez where everyone's so conspicuous, it was a release being anonymous. Other people's husbands ended up with other people's wives." The guest list of the ball is so jealously guarded by Leroy that he won't say more than that its guests are "roughly the same" as those at the picnic, even though the event is "very much more grown up". Guarded by high security and shaded by a mimosa grove, guests dance until sunrise, drink the unlimited champagne on offer and make very good friends.

Leroy himself is a symbol of how St Tropez rose from being on its uppers, and the tensions that have arisen with the clash of old money and new meritocracy. A pudgy, restless 36-year-old, he is sitting on a sofa in the Moroccan-chic bar of his most exclusive restaurant, Les Moulins, where his signature cold potato-and-truffle soup costs £25 a bowl. "There is a mafia here in St Tropez, yes," he says. He qualifies his statement rapidly. "I mean, they're not the kind of mafia with guns. But they are a closed shop and they will not let you in."

Leroy is the son of poor Normandy dairy farmers, and spent his childhood on the smallholding on the opposite, drizzly, unglamorous side of France to St Tropez. When he was 16 he got a summer job as a washer-up in a local restaurant, and loved the kitchen so much he left home and got himself a hands-on education in restaurants across France and Switzerland.

Promotions took him to sous-chef under the fabled Alain Ducasse, at the three Michelin-star Restaurant Louis XV in Monte Carlo, and in 1990 he was poached by Gerard Hardy, the manager of one of St Tropez's most celebrated hotels, the Château de la Messardière, to preside over the restaurant at its relaunch. The Gault Millau restaurant guide, keen to scoop its Michelin rival, gave Leroy two "toques", equivalent of stars, before the restaurant was even opened, an unprecedented honour for a 25-year-old.

Leroy can have had little inkling that by his early thirties he would be the man to shake up the high-society "mafia" of St Tropez. After two years he left the Messardière to start his own restaurant, La Table du Marché, and it was in July 1995, at the age of 30, that Leroy, already a celebrity chef in the village, held his first celebrity "picnic on the beach".

He invited some of the more well-known of his restaurant guests, including Johnny Hallyday, the Sixties crooner who has become France's version of Sir Cliff Richard, and, "since I didn't know any models", he invited almost the entire books of a Milanese modelling agency.

"There was no large-scale event at which all the top people who came to St Tropez could sit down and meet each other," Leroy says. "They stayed in their hotels or villas and danced with their friends at La Voile Rouge or the Byblos (whose underground nightclub, La Cave du Roi, is an infamous hunting ground for Lamborghini-driving sharks)."

St Tropez was horrified and delighted in equal measure. "People were saying, 'who is this upstart, why is he taking it on himself to organise us?'" says one prominent hotelier, speaking on condition of anonymity. The following year some locals organised their own "pique-nique sur la plage". It was a flop, while Leroy's once again featured in the Parisian society gossip magazines like Paris Match and Voici. They didn't have Leroy's penchant for publicity, or organisational skills, or his sheer determination.

"You have to be incredibly stubborn," he says. "When I was looking for a site for my first restaurant, it took a year. A site would be available, I would turn up, and suddenly it wasn't available any more. Doors are slammed in your face. You don't get meetings. Then when you start, you bump into people who say, 'Oh, I am so sorry, I heard your restaurant isn't doing very well. Ha ha'."

St Tropez in the early Nineties was sunk in a mire of its own making. The village had been propelled from obscurity to worldwide fame by the success of Bardot and Vadim in the Fifties and Sixties. Sensibly, unlike the rest of the Côte d'Azur, which was to be blighted with overbuilding, strict planning laws were put in place, banning high-rises and, in most cases, new-build apartments or hotels of any sort.

Unfortunately, this gave the villagers a monopoly on accommodation, restaurants and services. Stories of roach-and rat-infested rooms at eye-watering prices became commonplace. Even air conditioning was considered a luxury. Europe's élite discovered the rest of the world: Phuket, Acapulco, Mustique and Zanzibar all took their place in the spotlight in the Seventies and Eighties, while property prices in St Tropez plummeted as fast as its status.

It was only when people like Leroy came in and helped shake the town up that "St-Trop" started to regain the glittering reputation it now has. "There's no doubt that Christophe has played an important part in the revival of St Tropez," says Gerard Hardy. "He brought new, modern thinking to a town that was living in the past."

Property prices have doubled in the last five years – and this in a country whose housing market has traditionally been much more stable than Britain's. In the village centre, Hermès, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Bulgari and Tod's shops are starting to replace the kitsch boutiques that were ubiquitous. Leroy's establishments are a breath of fresh, if very expensive, air in a town that is shaking off the last remnants of fusty complacency.

The Table du Marché is still a trendy lunch spot in town, though its Paris offshoot, started in 1996 when some locals say Leroy was "drunk with celebrity", only lasted two years. On the first floor there is another Leroy restaurant, a sushi bar – unheard of in the South of France when he started it. It is also from here that Leroy runs his traiteur (delicatessen) and party catering service, through which he gets to know most of his most prominent clients. Anyone with a villa, a party and a few tens of thousands of pounds to spare will book Leroy's catering services.

A typical Leroy party involves driveways illuminated with incense fires, and costumed staff serving champagne and caviar before leading guests through the grounds (lined with giant candles) to a beach where a band is playing on a yacht, obscured by a wall of fire. His chefs may be standing knee-deep in the sea, grilling langoustines on barbecues.

The shelves of the deli are lined with own-label products: Christophe Leroy foie gras and canned tomatoes and wine. (I tell him he seems to like the look of his own name; he looks annoyed. "Really? Why do you think that?") Opinions are divided as to whether Leroy offers value for money, or only a name. "He is a great chef when he is in the kitchen, but he is never in the kitchen any more," says one employee.

Somewhere over the mountains of the Esterel, behind the setting sun, looms the shadow of recession, blowing in from America. The last recession, in 1988-1992, helped turn St Tropez into the holiday wasteland it has only just recovered from being. To look at the girls and boys partying at next Wednesday's masked ball, you would never guess it might happen again.