Le Panoramic, the 3,032-metre challenge

It all begins down below

It is around 8 o’clock. The resort is barely waking up as the Panoramic teams join the ski patrollers to take the first funicular.

But before going up, everything has to be loaded. Fruit, vegetables, meat, fish and fresh produce have been delivered beforehand. Some mornings, nearly a tonne of goods has to reach the kitchens, 3,032 metres higher up.

So a human chain forms. Crates pass from hand to hand, the comings and goings follow one another between the funicular entrance and the platform, and the carriage fills up.

Here, supplying a restaurant already feels like an expedition.

And you had better have thought of everything, because once up there, you cannot simply pop back down for whatever is missing.

Up there, nothing is quite the same

When the funicular reaches the top, the day can truly begin: everyone takes up their post. In the kitchen, the mise en place gets under way and the dining rooms are made ready. In winter, outside, the terrace must also be cleared of snow, sometimes every morning, before it can welcome the first lunches facing the peaks.

But at 3,032 metres, even the most familiar gestures have to be rethought: water boils at around 90 °C. Caramel takes longer to colour. The air is particularly dry. The pressure is no longer the same. So recipes, cooking, timings, techniques: everything has to adapt.

What you master perfectly a few hundred metres lower down no longer necessarily behaves the same way here. You have to observe, adjust, sometimes start again. Learn to cook with altitude as one more variable in every recipe.

At this height, the mountain makes its way right into the saucepans.

Working with the mountain

And the cooking is only part of the equation.

At 3,032 metres, the whole life of Le Panoramic depends on what makes it possible to reach the summit. Teams, supplies and guests all ride the lifts. The Perce-Neige funicular makes the restaurant accessible to skiers and pedestrians alike, and makes this organisation considerably easier.

But there is still the weather, the conditions at altitude, technical hitches, and all those things you can anticipate without ever fully controlling.

A funicular breakdown at twelve noon sharp, for example. At that hour, Le Panoramic is in the middle of service. And when, within minutes, the link with the resort is cut, a whole organisation is thrown off balance. Some guests can no longer come up, others have to wait before going down, the teams’ movements are suspended and everything that was still to travel by funicular stays down below… or up top.

The restaurant, for its part, has to keep running. So you adapt, reorganise and make do with whatever the mountain, and the unexpected, impose that day. For here, what would elsewhere be a minor setback can quickly take on a whole other dimension.

We still remember the team member who, one evening, missed the last funicular. Just a few minutes late, he discovered that here, “missing the last train home” has slightly different consequences. There would be no next departure, no taxi home: that night, he slept at Le Panoramic. Enough never to look at the time in quite the same way again…

Running an establishment here also means this: planning a great deal, and knowing that, despite everything, you will sometimes have to improvise.

And starting again every morning

What makes this whole organisation even more impressive is that it repeats itself, day after day. Every morning, the produce arrives, the human chain forms again, the teams go up, the kitchens adapt, the terrace reappears from under the snow and the dining rooms are made ready.

Then the first guests arrive… At La Table, they take off their ski boots, slip on slippers and settle in by the fire or facing the peaks. At La Cantine, trays come and go. On the terrace, the tables fill up.

And of all this machinery, almost nothing shows. Probably the sign that it works.

It still took some nerve

Setting up a restaurant at 3,032 metres was already a challenge.

Deciding to serve homemade cooking there every day, to work with fresh produce, to offer several ways of having lunch and to keep the same high standards as down in the resort was another.

It would certainly have been simpler to do things differently. But simplicity has never really been the starting point of Maison Bouvier stories.

There is often, first, a slightly crazy idea. A burst of momentum. The urge to try something without even asking whether it will be easy. The question only comes later: but how on earth are we going to make all this possible?

At Le Panoramic, the answer is reinvented every morning, with the teams, the funicular, the snow on some days, a great deal of organisation and this mountain you constantly have to work with.

At 3,032 metres, welcoming guests is already an adventure.