FOOD AND WINE
Eating and drinking may not be the most important things on your ski holiday. Good snow, fine weather, comfy boots, not finding out that the friend you intended to ski with wears a technicolor one-piece – these are what will make or break the trip.
But food is an obsession with us. It is the one thing we control totally. Most guests wouldn’t blame us if it snowed every day, they got sunburn or their spouse eloped with a ski instructor, but if dinner weren’t the perfect end to a good day, or antidote to a bad one, they wouldn’t come again.
We start with a proper breakfast. Fruit juice, porridge, Dorset Cereals, bacon, eggs, baguettes straight from the famous local bakery, a croissant or pain au chocolat if you like, yogurts, British tea and fresh coffee from Italian espresso pots (with Nescafé and bizarre infusions for those who prefer them). If that’s not what you consider a proper breakfast, please see our Heart-Attack Breakfast option (click here).
You return from the slopes to find bread and jam, a freshly-baked cake, hot chocolate etc. left out for you.
Dinner is where we pull out all the stops. Our policy on food is straightforward. We start with the best cuts of meat and the best fresh fruit and vegetables, not really counting the cost. Everything one needs is available in Val d’Isère.
Nightly canapés are followed by a three-course, fixed-menu, dinner-party-style meal. The cuisine is largely French, though with a fusion of other influences – what Londoners call Modern British. (Foreign, in other words.)
We then check with you that we are on the right track for your party. If you prefer steak and kidney pie to boeuf en croûte, we are delighted to cook it. If you want more or less, or hotter or colder, or earlier or later, just tell us.
This is YSE’s nineteenth winter, and we honestly believe that our cooking has steadily improved from year to year. We aren’t sure why. More professional chefs work for us, but even the cooks who’ve just learnt from their mothers or on cookery courses seem to master dishes now they wouldn’t have attempted in the past.
Our pre-season in situ training course gives the cooks between two and four weeks of hands-on cooking practice – more than they’d do in a year at cooking school. This is indispensable, even for experienced chefs, at 6,000 feet, where nothing cooks the same as at sea level.
With dinner, we serve free unlimited quantities of a selection of very drinkable French AOC wines and vins de pays. This is, unfortunately, only with dinner, not breakfast, and we stop serving the wine when the coffee appears.
We also have a wine list from which you can buy everything from slightly smarter wines to Châteaux Lafite-Rothschild or d’Yquem. We sell these wines at less than they cost, because you are not drinking the house wine. The more you consume the more you save. Drink enough and you’ve paid for the holiday.
For £25 pppw, which goes straight to the cook, those guests who do not eat the same food as the rest of the chalet can take our Different Diets option (click here). And if you prefer Krug Grande Cuvée to our normal Dom Pérignon, just give the girls the dosh. They’ll be happy to get some in for you (and to help you drink it).
We are confident that you’ll eat at least as well in our chalets as in any of the local restaurants or hotels. But the toughest comparisons tend to be with previous YSE holidays. ‘Yes, she’s a wonderful cook, but you can’t beat Felicity’s roasted grapes last year, or Scotty’s Thai prawn soup the year before.’ It keeps us on our toes…
 
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