Hotel Scheizerhof, Zermatt review: First In ~ Conde Nast

1 ~~~ Hotel Scheizerhof, Zermatt review: First In ~ Conde Nast Traveller ~~~ 

Charm. a tricky quality to pin down. Elusive. Subjective. Yet, however you define it – or if you prefer to nod in agreement with Justice Potter Stewart, late of the American Supreme Court, who coined the phrase ‘I know it when I see it’ – I think it is safe to say that the village of Zermatt has it in spades.

This is not simply a visual thing, though it would be absurd to deny that its mountains are, at any time of year, whether blanketed in snow or strewn with wild flowers, magnificent. The charm has a human aspect as well. I recall being greeted one luminous afternoon in February, years ago, at Chez Vrony – for my money the loveliest restaurant in the Swiss Alps – by a complete stranger. As I stomped up the creaking wooden steps, a crinkly fellow, a local I supposed, addressed me by name, extended a protective arm, ushered me to a table with an unobscured view of the Matterhorn and said gravely: ‘But my dear boy! You must be exhausted! Come! Sit down! May I bring you a glass of Petite Arvine? A bottle?’ This was Max Cotting-Julen, who, with his wife Vrony, runs the restaurant that bears her name in a meadow dotted with wonky farmhouses near the Sunnegga lift station, and into which I plodded so gracelessly. For a moment he made me feel like a millionaire or a movie star or what PG Wodehouse might have termed an om seerioo. Now that, I thought, is charm.

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