The sommelier in the Hermès tie offers slender flutes of champagne. In perfect unison, a phalanx of waiters pull silver cloches off porcelain plates. The chef, in spotless whites, cruises the dining room accepting thanks and praise with a beneficent smile.
Forget fondue, the best reason to visit Switzerland might just be for its hospitality. This, after all, is the land of the great hotel schools. The École Hôtelière de Lausanne boasts a history dating back to the late 19th century, The Glion Institute in Bulle was the first private, university-level hotel management school and Les Roches in Valais attracts students from nearly 100 countries. These are the Oxford, Harvard and MIT of hotel management schools, turning out the best, most highly trained service staff in the world.
I'm at the Grand Hotel Kempinski, a waterfront hotel in Geneva, that's renowned as having one of the largest hotel suites in Europe. At nearly 12,000 square feet, the Geneva suite sprawls over two floors, has its own gym, kitchen and pool table and costs more than $40,000 a night. My room is a little more modest, but it offers a similar view overlooking the Jet d'Eau fountain and the Swiss Alps and gives access to the same level of service as the world leaders, CEOs and royalty enjoy upstairs.
After spending a couple of days hitting the tourist highlights – sailing on the lake, people watching at the Place du Bourg-de-Four in the old city, posing for a picture on La Treille, the world's longest park bench – I want to explore a little deeper. In addition to the usual complement of concierges, elegantly decked out in their Les Clefs d'Or lapel pins, the Kempinski also has a "Lady in Red," who acts as a sort of super concierge. I ask her what locals like to do on their days off and she directs me, complete with perfectly accurate map and precise transportation directions, to the nearby town of Carouges, where it's market day.
It turns out to be one of the highlights of my visit even though I can't help but envy the well-dressed locals who bike home with whole forests worth of wild mushrooms, baskets of obese artichokes and panniers full of cheese. The only consolation is that the hotel made me promise not to miss Salam be Lafa, a pop-up falafel cart that serves its specialty in homemade laffa bread with aubergine caviar, tomato relish and taboulé that is easily one of the best things you can eat in this world.
I'll feel the same way a couple of days later about another dish, although under completely different circumstances. LeMontblanc restaurant, in the many starred LeCrans Hotel and Spa in the ski resort of Crans-Montana in southwestern Switzerland, is about as far removed from a pop-up falafel cart as possible. Here, charming waiters in impeccably cut suits and clever cufflinks oversee a hushed dining room.
I'm invited to eat at the chef's table in the kitchen. It is spotless, but also nearly silent even though there are a dozen cooks dispensing foams from siphons, calibrating sous-vides water baths and generally fussing over each dish. This is the domain of Pierre Crepaud, one of the new class of Swiss chefs who are applying rigorous technique and great imagination to their cooking in a way that combines serious aesthetic sophistication with a sense of playfulness and fun. Wafers and herbs hang from clothespins, caviar tins become serving vessels (potato mousse, quail egg and caviar), test tubes are filled with mysterious liquids that guests must determine the flavour of.
The service seems lighter, too, more relaxed than the stiff formality often found in Michelin level dining. I ask Daniel, one of our servers, about this approach to service. "I think for a long time people were taught this very regimented form of serious service where everything has to be perfect and there's no room for mistakes," he tells me. "Now it's not so formal. Our guests are looking for a more natural interaction and don't want to feel like they're being served by robots."
Even at the most classic of old school hotels there's a move toward less rigidity. The legendary Hôtel des Trois Couronnes in the town of Vevey, a registered cultural property that has hosted a king, a queen and a maharajah (hence the name), keeps the old school traditions alive even while updating them. This is the kind of hotel where the name and logo are somehow lasered into the apples that are offered as welcoming amenities.
Over coffee, Sebastien Cheneval, the hotel's assistant manager and a graduate of the École Hôtelière de Lausanne tells me, "In a city like Vevey, Montreux, it's still very formal. There's an expectation that there's going to be this level of quality of service. The quality of the hotel, the infrastructure, it still has to be very high. But I think it's more welcoming than before and maybe more natural. I believe this way of being welcoming, of having a smile for people, is not just the way we should be in our work, but also in life."
Wine tips
Most people associate Switzerland with courage drinks such as Schnapps and Goldschlager, but there's a thriving wine scene in and around the Swiss Riviera that's well worth exploring. Pinot Noir and Chasselas are the most widely planted grapes but there are also some interesting Gamay Noirs, and Chardonnay is starting to be more widely planted. The concierge or sommelier at your hotel will be able to suggest a few good local wineries to visit.
The writer travelled as a guest of Switzerland Tourism and Swiss International Air Lines. Neither reviewed or approved this story.