Private Chefs, Butlersand Bartendersin Courchevel & Méribel

Courchevel, and the rest of the Three Valleys

Courchevel is four villages stacked up one mountain, and where you are staying changes how a chef's day works. Courchevel 1850 sits at the top with most of the large chalets; Moriond at 1650 is quieter and family-heavy; Village at 1550 and Le Praz down at 1300 keep more of the old Savoyard character and a slower pace.

We also cook across the rest of the Three Valleys, which is the largest linked ski area in the world and much of it is within reach of the same team: Meribel and Meribel-Mottaret, Les Allues down in the valley, Saint-Martin-de-Belleville, Les Menuires and Val Thorens. If your chalet is in one of those and you have been looking for a private chef in Courchevel, you have found the right team anyway.

Cooking in a chalet

A chalet kitchen is a different problem from a villa kitchen. The good ones are generous; plenty are not, and a ski-in chalet at altitude can have a professional oven and a domestic fridge, or the other way round. Your chef will ask about the kitchen before the menu, because the menu depends on it.

Altitude matters more than people expect. At 1850 metres water boils at around 93 degrees, so anything simmered, poached or braised takes longer than it does at sea level, and pastry behaves differently. It is not an obstacle, it is simply something a chef who works these mountains already knows and a chef flown in for the week finds out on the first night.

Delivery is the other constraint. In high season the roads up to 1850 are busy and the delivery windows are tight, so the shopping is done early and the day is planned around it. That is included in the working hours of the Full Time and Half Time services, not billed on top.

What Savoie gives us

This is one of the great cheese regions of France and it would be a waste to cook here without it: Beaufort from the summer pastures, Reblochon, Tomme de Savoie, Abondance. A tartiflette made properly, from the right cheese, is worth more to most tables than something more elaborate flown in.

Beyond the dairy: diots and other Savoyard charcuterie, crozets, freshwater fish from the lakes at Annecy and Geneva, and the mountain herbs. And Courchevel has one of the densest concentrations of serious kitchens in the Alps, which means the supply chain that feeds them is available to us too.

When to book

The season runs from mid-December to mid-April. Christmas and New Year, and the February half-terms across Europe, are when Courchevel fills completely and when chefs are committed furthest ahead. For those weeks, months of notice is normal rather than cautious.

January and the second half of March are the quiet stretches, with the same snow and considerably more room to arrange things at short notice.