Megève: a concierge’s guide

I’m often asked whether Megève ‘matches’ Courchevel. It’s the wrong question, and I always say so gently: they aren’t two versions of the same thing. Courchevel is a shop window: unapologetic, brilliant, spectacular. Megève is a village, with its cobblestones, its church, its horse-drawn sleighs passing under your windows and families who have been coming back for three generations. It’s the resort I recommend to those who want luxury without the display.

Megève wasn’t drawn up by a developer: it existed long before skiing. In the 1920s the Rothschild family made it France’s answer to St Moritz, and that ambition stayed in the walls without ever erasing the village that came first. In practice it changes your whole week: you walk, you dine five minutes from your door, you pass the same person twice on the square and end up greeting them. I know no other resort in the Alps where my clients ask me, after three days, whether they can extend.

Let me say it straight away, because this is where I see the most misunderstanding: you don’t come to Megève for extreme skiing. The domain is vast, gentle, wooded, spread across several massifs, with a view of Mont Blanc that on certain mornings genuinely makes you stop skiing to look. But the altitude is low. Early in the season I watch the snow cover closely and warn my clients rather than sell them a dream.

My rule is simple. If your family lives for couloirs and vertical drop, I’ll send you elsewhere, and I’ll tell you where. If you want to ski in the morning, take a long lunch and do two more runs before the spa, Megève is unbeatable.

Here is my notebook, the one I open when a client writes ‘where are we dining tonight?’. I’ve sorted it by mood, not by stars.

• The big night: Flocon de Sel. Emmanuel Renaut’s three-star table, mountain cooking that resembles nobody else’s. It’s the meal you’ll still be talking about at home. Plan it first, not last: it books the furthest ahead.
• The village tables I send people to most: Le Piaf, Le Café Megève, Vous, La Ferme Saint-Amour, Chalet Sauvage. My safe bets: you eat well, the mood builds gently, and you walk home.
• Japan: Kinugawa Megève and Kaito. My clients can’t manage a week in the mountains without one Japanese evening. These are my two addresses.
• The lunch that lasts: Idéal 1850 for the view and the light, La Sauvageonne when you want the meal to stretch out, La Folie Douce if you’re openly accepting that the afternoon’s skiing is over.

A word from experience: in Megève the good tables aren’t large. It isn’t covers that are missing, it’s the right slot, 8.30pm on a Saturday in February does not exist if you ask the day before. I book my clients’ dinners at the same time as their chalet, never after.

Everything starts in Geneva, and this is the part people most underestimate. By car, allow 1h30 on the road. By taxi or with a private chauffeur, the transfer runs between €500 and €750 depending on the vehicle: a saloon and a chauffeured van don’t cost the same, and the rate won’t bend to your mood on the day.

By helicopter, flight time is 20 minutes. The price depends on the machine: a single-engine and a twin-engine are not in the same category, in cost or in comfort. I give you both options when you ask, along with the weather constraints of the day.

Let me tell you a story. A client once insisted he needed nobody for Geneva–Megève: ‘an hour and a half, I’ll drive, it’s hardly the end of the world.’ It was the first Saturday of the February holidays. He left the airport at 2pm, reached the chalet at 6.20pm, and lost the table I’d been holding for six weeks. The following year he wrote me a single line, in November: ‘Book the helicopter.’ Twenty minutes in the air. He was settled at the chalet before the hour he’d otherwise still have been leaving the car park.

Three windows, three different stays. January: the resort is quiet, the slopes are yours and rates are the softest of the winter, it’s my favourite period, and I generally avoid saying so too loudly. February: everything is full, everything is alive, and nothing is obtained without planning ahead. March: the light, the terraces, snow still holding up high and lunches that never end. And if you’ve never seen Megève in summer, it’s another village entirely: green, silent, with Mont Blanc as a backdrop.