Auberge du Père Bise

Few places invite contemplation and reverence quite like this one. Of and for that around which the entire Auberge focuses its attention and intent: the Alps. While they provide the setting, they are above all, for Jean Sulpice, a source of inspiration and expression, fostering encounters and collaborations. When he left Tignes and his two-Michelin-starred restaurant to take over in 2016, with his wife Magali, this legendary lakeside inn on the shores of Lake Annecy—opened in 1903, run by the Bise family for four generations, and crowned with three Michelin stars awarded to Marguerite in 1951—he placed himself at the service of the place. With humility, like a link in a story that will surely continue after him, he is determined to leave his mark on this land, to invent his own grammar here. With a vocabulary that requires, like that of a high-level athlete (which he also is), technical mastery combined with a razor-sharp instinct. Like a tightrope walker, he balances acidity, bitterness, and indulgence—the kind you can’t resist mopping up—reconciling purity, textures, and naturalness, drawn from herbs he and his team gather almost daily in the mountains, deep in the forest, or in the vegetable garden at Angon. It surprises, can even unsettle at first, then it strikes, and once the palate adjusts, it seduces, enchants, even comforts, like that dessert built around fennel, playfully disrupted by rhubarb and absinthe. The (very) high-level gastronomic dining room has just been revamped (ten years is worth celebrating!), with the same sense of restraint and taste for material effects by A.S.L Architecture, in a deft interplay of woodwork and alcoves that lends it the feel of a ryokan set right at the water’s edge; the Marius Bar, meanwhile, has been dressed in forest-green velvet and adorned with a Wall of Fame (and many famous names have come here—and keep coming back). Add rooms with a view, a spa (by Olivier Claire) with a view, of course, a jetty with a ladder to slip into the lake—one of the purest in the world… And here, there, and again, just two initials like two dots over an i: J.S. An address that is a member of Relais & Châteaux, a table awarded two Michelin stars.