While on his heavenly trip to Adelboden, Michael Cranmer experiences heavenly food and wine at the Bellevue Restaurant.
The Bellevue Restaurant sits, where it has for 120 years, in a slightly superior position inside the Park Hotel above the town. And so it should. Owned since 1926 by the Richard family, rebuilt in the Bauhaus style following a fire in 1931, now beautifully refurbished.
The restaurant has 15 Gault Millau points with food to match.
Chef Jürgen Willing is the Wizard behind this accolade. He worked his culinary magic up through some of the great kitchens where Michelin stars are sprinkled around like fairy dust. For the last 20 years he’s created daily gourmet menus with a French/Swiss twist culled from within a radius of 300 kilometres, encompassing the Mediterranean and other exciting culinary regions.
Fridays at the Bellvue Restaurant are Turophile’s heaven (I didn’t know either. Look it up). You should have room, after downing chef Willing’s menu which is taste but not quantity-laden, for the cheese buffet.
Manfred Schmid is the Cheese King of Adelboden who oversees, curates, lays out, designs, sets up – I don’t know what – a cheese buffet of 50 varieties: Meiringer Brie, Chällerhocker from the surrounding valleys, Emmentaler AOP, Sbrinz AOP, you name it he’s got it.
Few glory in the title ‘Affineur’ (someone who practices the art of affinage, which is the process of caring for, ripening and aging cheese). Manfred is one. I love cheese but gave it up when my pulmonary artery told me I was loving it too much, so I could only glory at the spread.
But I’m a food philistine, preferring rösti and a couple of fried eggs over more fiddly-diddly concoctions. What gets my juices flowing is wine…not quantity but quality. The archangel sent to earth as a sommelier is Marc Richard; more than an angel really, a wine God. Marc lovingly cares for a cellar of 800 vintages and was pleased to let me sample several.
A Condrieu ‘Les Terrasses de l’Empire’ Viognier Georges Vernay 2016 (CHF120) was my nectar from the Gods. His favourite? A Vosne-Romanée Domaine Méo-Camuzet 2004 (CHF135). What a man! One of the Richard hotel dynasty, his day job was at IBM, wine his eternal love. Behind the I.T. expert’s exterior, he’s a rebel.
He scattered his parents’ ashes in the forest just above the hotel, somewhat controversially since regional law forbids it. “They loved it here. That’s where they wanted to be. I’m not digging them up now!”
A Wizard-Chef, Cheese-King, and Wine-God, something for all tastes, then, at The Bellevue Restaurant.
Tell Me More About The Bellevue Restaurant, Adelboden, Switzerland
The Bellevue Restaurant, Bellevuestrasse 3715, Adelboden, Bernese Oberland, Switzerland
T: +41 33 673 80 00 E: info@bellevue-parkhotel.ch
6 course menu from CHF115 Cheese buffet CHF19
The wine cellar has over 800 vintages focusing on Switzerland, Burgundy, and the Bordelais as well as Northern Italy
