Auberge Quintessence

The restaurant at Auberge Quintessence was a wonderful experience. The cuisine is modern, interesting and very skillfully crafted. Wine selection well curated and pairings make sense. Service is friendly, chairs comfortable, tables quite large with ample space between them. The view is astonishing. Usually, I would not write more on Tripadvisor than the above text, since I am a professional restaurant critic and spare my energy for the newspaper I am employed by. In that paper I have written more than 2.000 newspaper pages about good restaurants during the last 21 years, so I am not easily impressed. But Quintessence impresses me, and I wish to support the place, as I feel they are showing a new way to go, in these trying times where restaurant and kitchen staff is so hard to find. I have been travelling in France frequently for almost 30 years and watched how the gastronomic level seems to have declined. Or maybe it is just that I have gotten more demanding. To try and assess the situation and compare the old stars the the present time, I recently dined at 3 Michelin star Precatalan and Ledoyen, 1-star Laserre, Tour d’Argent, Maxims, Chez l’Ami Louis, La Coupole and Bofinger. Several of these I have visited more than once. This is what I compare Quintessence against, and of course Quintessence’s gastronomy cannot match Precatalan or Ledoyen, nor can the ambiance of the mentioned historic places be challenged by the very modest dining room of Quintessence (apart from the view which challenges Tour d’Argent..). But nevertheless, I find the precision (not the produce, this is no place for caviar etc.) in cooking quite close to these two famous restaurants, and that is impressive since Quintessence is such a small setup. The chef is also owner, and in the kitchen he has only one cook to help him. The chef’s wife is also the Maitre d’ and waiter, and when I finished the meal and went to visit the kitchen to thank the chef, I found him and the wife busy cleaning the dishes helped by their daughter of 8-10 years! Such devotion is astonishing, and this is my point: One thing is to operate a famous restaurant with lots of staff and charging high prices. Another is for a husband- and wife team to operate an auberge at a distant mountain top delivering very fine and interesting cuisine with both attentive and friendly service. Of course, they need to be practical so there is no á la carte just one menu, and everybody sit down to eat at 19.30. But if you are happy with that, I will warmly recommend the Auberge Quintessence. The settings are wonderful high in the mountains, and you will especially appreciate it if you are a biker, since there was an almost constant traffic of motorbikes on the roads. I am no longer a biker, and although I used to love the sound of my big motorbike, I now find it very annoying, especially on a mountain top. But I look forward to a visit in the wintertime, hoping there wont be a lot of snow scooters instead.