Where we cook around the lake
Geneva is two places at once for a chef, and which one you are in decides how the evening runs. Along the right bank the houses sit above the water at Cologny, Vandoeuvres, Collonge-Bellerive, Anieres and Hermance: kitchens built for cooking, and terraces that will hold a long table until the light goes. The left bank does the same thing heading the other way, through Pregny-Chambesy, Genthod, Bellevue and Versoix, and the cantonal border stops meaning very much once you are past Coppet and Nyon.
Then there is the city itself. Apartments in Eaux-Vives, Champel, Florissant and the Vieille-Ville, where the kitchen is small, the lift is slow and the night depends on what the chef carries up on the first trip. Carouge, over the Arve, is its own thing again. None of this is a problem once it is known in advance, which is why we ask what floor you are on before we ask anything about the menu.
What the canton puts on the table
The lake is a larder, not scenery. Fera and omble chevalier come out of it, and perch fillets are the plate every Genevois grew up on. Inland the canton keeps two things almost nobody outside it knows about: the cardon epineux genevois, a thistle with its own protected designation that belongs on a December table, and the longeole, a fennel-flecked pork sausage that asks for hours rather than technique.
Geneva also grows far more wine than visitors expect. Satigny is the largest wine-growing commune in the country, and the Chasselas, Gamaret and Gamay from the villages west of the city are worth pouring in front of guests who arrived assuming everything good came from over the border. That border helps too: France is fifteen minutes away, and its markets are part of our week.
A working city, not a season
Gstaad and Verbier fill and empty with the snow. Geneva does not. The people we cook for here are living or working in the city — banking, the international organisations, the trade that follows both — and the year is shaped by the watch fair in spring, the weeks on the water in July and August, and Escalade in December, when the whole city eats the same thing on the same night.
That changes the shape of the work. Dinners are smaller and more often mid-week, and far more of them are a household booking the same chef again than a single holiday week booked once. Discretion counts for more here than anywhere else we work. It is usually the first thing we are asked about, and it is never mentioned again.
Shops, borders and Sunday
Geneva keeps Swiss hours, and Sunday is closed. That single fact shapes a week here more than anything on a menu: a chef cooking for you on a Sunday evening bought for it on Friday, and a request made on Saturday night is a request made against a shut city. Say what you want early in the week and none of this is ever your problem.
The border is the other half of it. France begins a few minutes from most of the houses we cook in, and the markets at Ferney-Voltaire and Divonne, along with the producers in the Pays de Gex, are where a good deal of the shopping sensibly happens. Swiss precision for the dairy and the lake fish, French prices and range for the rest: that is how kitchens here have always worked.
