Supplying high-altitude restaurants
It’s midday! After 3 fantastic hours hurtling down the resort’s ski slopes, your stomach is starting to rumble. You don’t want to tear yourself away from your beautiful surroundings for even a second. It’s settled: you’ll have lunch in a mountain restaurant. But do you know the journey that your burger has taken to reach your plate? A behind the scenes look at the process of supplying mountain restaurants.
Essential upstream preparation
A single watchword: or-ga-ni-sa-tion! To feed thousands of hungry skiers, there’s no room for improvisation. As a result, all storable products (groceries, dry goods, drinks, etc.) are stocked well in advance of the season.
At Panoramic, between 100 and 140 pallets of foodstuffs are transported via the funicular at the end of August/beginning of September.
A race against time
Every morning, several hundred kilos of fresh produce reach the kitchens of the resort’s high-altitude restaurants by funicular (for the Panoramic), gondola (for La Tovière), snow groomer or snowmobile (for the Lo Soli restaurant).
Bringing the food from the delivery truck to the restaurant, preparing the terrace, firing up the stoves: it’s a veritable small army that sets to work to delight your taste buds.
Jean-Michel Bouvier
We have chosen to prepare the vast majority of our products ourselves, even for self-service (gnocchi, pasta, sauces, burger buns, etc.). This means that we have to bring up between 1 and 2 tons of fresh produce every morning via the funicular.
20 to 25 people are mobilized for opening… and closing! Let’s not forget that all the waste has to be taken down again.
Restaurant manager
We bought a snow groomer to bring up fresh produce. It’s the price of independence: we’re no longer dependent on the lifts.
At the Lo Soli restaurant, up to 20 people descend to receive fresh produce deliveries. And when there’s no more room on the groomer, they climb back on top of the boxes!
When all goes well, the supply takes place between 8:30 and 9:15 a.m. for the Panoramic (in winter) and from 7:00 a.m. for the Lo Soli restaurant. But nature being what it is, the plan doesn’t always go off without a hitch!
Sometimes extreme conditions
When the weather’s fine, fresh produce can be transported without a hitch. It’s a completely different story when several dozen centimetres of snow have fallen overnight! Difficult road conditions for delivery lorries, epic transport of goods to the ski lifts, almost impossible access to the restaurant entrance… Everything gets complicated as soon as the precious snowflakes arrive in large quantities.
At the Lo Soli restaurant, the coldest weather is avoided by loading fruit and vegetables into the groomer cabin to prevent them from freezing during the 10-minute ride.
Jean-Michel & Clément Bouvier
Imagine having to cross the Val Claret snow front with snow up to your knees and boxes full of fresh produce in your arms… it’s a wake-up call! Sometimes you get up there (editor’s note: on the Panoramic terrace, at 3032 m altitude), and there’s over 1.50 m of snow on the terrace. It’s not easy to make your way to the restaurant entrance… There’s a lot of snow-clearing to do before you can really start the day.
We laugh about it… afterwards!
In such conditions, high-altitude restaurateurs always have a story to tell.
Jean-Michel & Clément Bouvier
One winter, we ordered a fridge… it took us two weeks to assemble it at Panoramic! We couldn’t get it up with the funicular. So we called in a helicopter… which never landed because of the wind! In the end, we had to transport it by snow groomer.
Restaurant manager
There have been times when we’ve overloaded the snow groomer! We almost got stuck on the piste because of the weight… We finally got out of it by digging big holes in the piste. The ski patrollers weren’t exactly thrilled…
5 adives for preparing your ski season
Snow and marmots: the unusual challenges behind the preparation of the Tignes golf course!
Activities in bad weather
