Swiss Hotel
by JOSEPH WECHSBERG
JOSEPH WECHSBERG is at home almost anywhere on the continent of Europe. Readers of these pages will recall earlier articles, written from France and Italy, and his expert advice about those qualities which set a fine hotel or restaurant apart from more ordinary establishments. His next article will sum up the peculiar virtues of Boston’s Ritz-Carlton.
THERE is a venerable Hausdiener on the fourth floor of the Suvretta House in St. Moritz who has been with the hotel for thirty-seven years. I’m not going to tell his name. Being a perfect Swiss Hausdiener, he prefers to remain anonymous, one of the 250 living cogs in the watehwork movement of a great Swiss hotel. The Hausdiener, or floor valet, makes up the rooms and bathrooms, presses men’s suits, and shines shoes. For the past thirty-seven years the Hausdiener has done just that. He has never aspired to become concierge or assistant manager or vice-president. His only ambition has been, and is, to be the best fourth-floor Hausdiener at the Suvretta House — or, for that matter, in Switzerland. Because of him, the Swiss hotels are the best on earth.
There are, of course, good hotels elsewhere: in London (did you ever witness the feudal ceremony called “afternoon tea” at Claridge’s or Brown’s?); in France, where some hotels have charm and elegance, and in Italy, where they are reconverted palazzi; in Sweden and Belgium and Denmark, and above all in America, where the best hotels are extremely efficient.
But none of them compares with a fine Swiss hotel, which succeeds in giving the guest the illusion of being in a home — the kind of home he would like to live in if he could afford it.
Absolute devotion to duty and an unfailing precision are hardly artistic virtues, but they are indispensable for the manufacture and the smooth operation of such intricate machines as watches and hotels. No watch and no hotel can be better than the people who make it. The Swiss have successfully exported watches and even hotel managers. Barcelona’s Ritz, San Francisco’s Palace, London’s Savoy and Dorchester, Claridge’s in Paris, Cairo’s Metropolitan, the Bauer - Grünwald in Venice, the Cataract Hotel in Assouan, the Excelsior in Florence, the Atlanta in Brussels, the Palace in Scheveningen, are some of the great international caravansaries managed by Swiss. But the Swiss have not succeeded in exporting a Swiss hotel, in its entirety.
“You can export all the ingredients,”I once read in a gastronomical guidebook of Genoa, “but you cannot seal in a can the shining of the sun and the blue of the sky.” In order to re-create abroad the atmosphere of a Swiss hotel, the Swiss would have to send abroad everybody in it, including the fourth-floor Hausdiener. ‘Thus you have to go to Switzerland if you want to enjoy a real Swiss hotel, and spend your money there. Which is all right with the Swiss.
The great Swiss hotels are not large by American standards. The Suvretta House has 365 rooms with 400 beds, no marble, and a minimum of chromeplated appliances. It is a massive, chalet-like building of granite that blends beautifully into the surrounding woods and Suvretta Peak in the background, after which it was called. In 1910, when it was built, machinery was limited to elevators; the bathrooms were spacious but had no running water, which was installed only after the First World War.
The Suvretta remained open during that war but was closed during World War II, at considerable expense to the owners, since a permanent staff of thirty people had to be kept in the hotel to maintain it in first-class condition.
The history of the Suvretta House really goes back to 1899 when a rich shipbuilder from Newcastle-on-Tyne fell in love with the Engadine and built the Villa Suvretta there for his ailing wife. (The Villa stands just behind the hotel, and belongs to it, but is managed separately.) I here was no railroad when the hotel was opened in 1912. People had to make the adventurous journey across the Julier Pass (7504 feet high) in a mail coach drawn by six sturdy horses. The Suvretta House thought fully provided a blacksmith’s shop for people arriving in their own carriages. Quite a few did, the hotel being popular with royally, ministers, and millionaires. No one was in a hurry in those days. Some people would spend months there.
Technological progress is still frowned upon at the Suvretta. The management takes a pleasantly dim view of radio and television. But there are compensations. Elegant simplicity is the leitmotiv. The brass lighting fixtures are hand-hammered by famous artists. The fine Persian rugs were imported from Tabriz. The dining-room curtains are hand-embroidered and repaired by expert craftsmen. The bedrooms are covered with Salubra linen tapestries that were put up forty years ago; they can be washed with soap and water and are extremely haltbar, or durable. (Haltbar, by the way, is a favorite Swiss word.) The finest linens and pillow covers were woven by the nuns of the Convent of Cazio. Other linens were made especially for the hotel by leading Swiss manufacturers, and hand-embroidered by village women in long winter nights.
The Suvretta’s lingerie — the linen shop — is a sight to behold. Some of the linen still being used was bought back in 1912. Every few years new stocks have been added, with the year of the purchase woven into the material.
The linens are stacked up high in large closets, by the year, like vintage wines in a well-stocked cellar. They are used for one season and left lying in the closets for the next. This is said to make them last longer. At the time of visit, the 24 and ‘37 vintages were being used — good years, it seems, for both wine and linen.
Two skilled seamstresses were busy turning torn bedspreads into pillowcases, and torn pillowcases into kitchen towels. I am sure they do something with their kitchen towels, too. Nothing is ever thrown away in Switzerland. All linen is washed by hand and dried in plain air and sunshine, throughout summer and winter. (The gastronomical specialty of the Canton of Graubünden and of St. Moritz, or San Murezzan, as the natives call it, is Bündnerfleisch, a side of beef dried for six months in the mountain air and sunshine.)
At the Suvretta House, they wouldn’t think of buying fruit preserves, jams, and compotes but, as in a well-run home, make their own. Some guests like them so much that they buy them and take them along. Whatever the Swiss Midases touch turns into Swiss money. The Suvretta’s coffee is bought green and roasted in the hotel’s own shop. Two elderly sisters, Kaffee-Köchinnen of long standing, have been making coffee for the past twenty years, day after day. They have experimented with electric machines, percolators, espresso boilers, various highand low-pressure cookers, and with other devices, but they always revert to grandmother’s old-fashioned coffeepot. The coffee is delicious. Maybe it’s the water.
The water comes from the private wells of the hotel. The flowers come from its greenhouses. The Suvretta has its own post office — the manager doubles up as postmaster — and its private park and private ice rink. The ice rink, one of the best on the Continent, is kept in fine shape by Herr Baumann from Grindelwald, Switzerland’s foremost ice-master, and by his crew of ten who treat the large rink like the icing on a giant birthday cake. They work all night long, figuring out the components — humidity, temperature, air density, and what not — and produce the smoothest surface this side of Sonja Henie’s Ice Revue.
The guest gets plenty of service even before he gets up to the hotel. As his train arrives at the St. Moritz railroad station, the liveried conducteurs from all local hotels stand in parade formation, their position determined by the rank of their establishment. At the head of the line, as befits his de luxe hotel, is the conducteur with the name SUVRETTA HOUSE on his cap. He takes charge of your luggage and leads you to the hotel bus. In Switzerland, thrift is the greatest of all virtues; even the wellto-do accept gratis transportation by the hotel bus.
After a 1½-mile ride, the bus drives up in front of the hotel entrance. An elaborate ritual ensues. The voitvrier opens the door and helps you out. (He does it quite well, having practiced for the past ten or fifteen years.) Behind him stand the chef de réception, the assistant manager, and perhaps even the manager, if a V.I.P. is expected.
Few people dare arrive at the Suvretta House unannounced; many, in fact, carry on a long preliminary correspondence stating their exact wishes and knowing exactly how much it’s going to cost them. Room and board, American plan, start at 26 francs ($6.50) a day for a room without bath. For 125 francs ($30) a day you get a bedroom, a sitting room, a bathroom, and plenty of foie gras, sturgeon, and poulet de Bresse.
From the moment you enter, a regiment of well-trained experts tries to outguess your every whim even before you have thought of it. Among the hotel’s 250 employees are glass washers — professors in the science of washing glasses; vacumiers who operate large vacuum cleaners from plugs in the corridors; casseroliers who clean saucepans, and passe-platiers whose job is to send the food to the rooms as quickly as possible. There are commis tournants, who take over departments in the kitchen when the regular cook has his day off, and commis de rang, and also the communard who cooks for the staff. There are chefs de gril and chefs de rang, chefs d’étage and demichefs de rang. The garderobier has charge of the gentlemen’s cloakroom and the liftier has operated his elevator for the past fifteen years. The restaurant stagiaire is a sort of waiter’s apprentice, and the économatgouvernante has charge of the pantry department. The maître de plaisir arranges parties; and there is a tennis trainer in summer and an ice-skating champion in winter.
There are Swiss, Dutchmen, French, Belgians, Germans, Italians, Austrians, Hungarians, Scandinavians, Luxembourgers, Britishers, among the Suvretta’s employees. Along the corridors, most employees speak German; in the restaurant, the language of Dante dominates; in the kitchen, most cursing is done in French, as it ought to be in all good kitchens.
The kitchen empire is under the command of M. Marcial Gaillard, a native of Savoie, a region of France which has produced a superaverage quota of good chefs. Gaillard is a veteran of Deauville’s Normandie, Claridge’s in Paris, the Splendide in Aix-les-Bains, the St. George in Beirut, and the King David in Jerusalem, where he was eating a chicken sandwich one day in 1948 when the hotel was blown up. He escaped with minor cuts and an allergy to chicken sandwiches.
M. Gaillard, who cooked for the statesmen participating in the conferences of Teheran and Cairo, calls the Suvretta a maison des fous. “Four hundred guests and each has his own whims. They write me in advance about their diet. They ask for changes and substitutions on the menu. Some want French cooking and others want Italian cooking, or Swiss cooking, or their own idea of cooking. We’ve got to make everything here, from chicken curry Bombay to shashlik Caucasienne, from piccata Portugaise to poularde Souvaroff. In a great French restaurant they serve a few spécialités de la maison. We can’t afford to serve specialties. They are said to be too ‘rich.’ Everybody wants fruit juices and steaks. Hah! The American influence.”
M. Gaillard’s staff are a cosmopolitan-minded folk. Between the short summer season and the longer winter season, they drift off to de luxe hotels in Geneva, London, Paris, or to the Villa d’Este on Lake Como. They have their separate dining room and don’t mix with the rest of the hotel staff, living in a different world. To switch from one to the other is considered high treason.
The best Swiss hotels are owned and operated en famille. In hotelconscious Switzerland, where such matters as the distribution of tips among the employees are regulated by law, the great hotel dynasties — Ritz, Bon, Seiler, Gredig, Hauser, Armleder, Pinosch, Kienberger, Fassbind, Bucher, Fanciola, Von Allmen, Badrutt — are as well known as the captains of industry are in the United States.
The average Swiss hotel manager is born to his job somewhat like the French vigneron or the Prussian lieutenant, or the American businessman.
Rudolf Candrian-Bon, the present manager of the Suvretta House, is a second-generation hôtelier who started out as apprentice at the Beau Rivage Palace in Lausanne, worked three years in the kitchen and the storeroom of the Hotel O’Connor in Nice, was cashier and night clerk at the RitzCarlton in Montreal, reception manager at the Carlton in Geneva, chef de réception at Zurich’s Baur an Lac, assistant manager of the Kulm Hotel in St. Moritz, and finally manager of the Park Hotel in Vitznau, which he operated with his wife, a member of the Bon hôtelier dynasty.
In a good Swiss hotel, the hôtelière, the wife of the owner or manager, is a priceless asset to her husband in the économat, the lingerie, or as superintendent of the chambermaids. She’s the one who thinks of sending flowers and fresh fruit to newly arrived guests; she asks whether they like to have a special painting hung in their rooms; she supervises the flower arrangements in the hall; and in general gives the hotel the warm atmosphere of hospitality that distinguishes the truly fine hotel from the merely mediocre one.
The great hôtelière of the Suvretta was the late Madame Bon, who died in 1944 at the age of eighty-seven. Up to her last years she would get up every morning at five for a thorough inspection of the entire hotel. Nothing escaped her eyes; dust under a table, provisions checked in incorrectly, the fine points of the day’s menu.
Her severe appearance never failed to send late revelers to bed when she spotted them at the bar. Once a pleasantly intoxicated Swiss officer started a shooting competition in the hall, with the hall lights and wrist watches of his friends as suitable targets. Madame Bon flew into a fine rage and demanded that the young man leave immediately. But when he came to apologize, she was charmed by him and let him stay. The story is often told by the Bon family to point out that the Swiss are unjustly accused of not having a sense of humor.
I asked the manager what makes a Swiss hotel different from any other on earth.
He thought it over for a while. Then: —
“In a good Swiss hotel,” he said, “people take pride in their work. Even in the best houses things may go wrong. A new guest, through an unfortunate chain reaction of events, gets bad service. His luggage stays behind, the windows are left open in his room when he likes them closed, his food is served cold, the bath is too hot.
“If this happens, I usually have a report here a few minutes later. Before the guest has come down to complain, a member of the management has already gone up to apologize. You see, our employees observe our guests in the same way that the doctors in a good hospital observe their patients. They worry about the guests and lose sleep when something goes wrong, In short, they care.”
