Playing within limits

The evening we are trying to produce

An evening and then three flights up is a better night for this chalet than a guest still seated at closing. That is not a motto. It is the brief the basement was fitted out to in 2023. Four tables, not ten. One o’clock, not four. No credit. No cash dispenser under this roof. The bar at the end of the stube stops serving at eleven, two hours before the tables, and guests work it out inside two evenings.

Age, on every visit

Eighteen in Switzerland, photographic identification every time, including for the guest who was eating directly overhead an hour before. A telephone holding a picture of a passport is not a passport.

What the staff do at the foot of the stair

• Hold a limit you set. Give the figure before you sit and it goes on the sheet.
• Give the hour the first time it is asked for. The clock is on the stone wall by the stair.
• Reserve your chair for twenty minutes while you go up, eat, or stand on the step in the cold.
• Bar you for a stretch of days on request, recorded where the next shift will see it.
• Take a self-exclusion at reception, in person, in force the same evening.

None of it is on this website, and that is deliberate. Each one is said to a person standing in front of you, one flight below where you are now. Doing it by form would cost us nothing and would cost the guest the conversation.

Five signs it is worth being honest about

• You are thinking about the basement while standing at 3,100 metres on a clear morning, which is what you came up this valley for.
• You went back down the stair after saying out loud that you were finished.
• You have worked out how long the walk to the machine by the station takes in ski boots.
• You have stopped telling the person you travelled with what you are staking.
• You would rather not be known by name downstairs. You are, because sixteen rooms is not many.

Training

Everybody who works that door is put through it ahead of the first shift and once a season after: the law, how to read identification, how to refuse somebody without a scene, and the guest who is drinking faster than the game is going. The manager on shift goes down twice between opening and closing. Both of ours have shut a table before time, and neither was afterwards asked to explain it.

How to ask

Put it to the person at the door, or to reception upstairs. There is no particular form of words.