JOIN the AFICIONADOS
Get the insider news and lowdown on what we've been up to, where we've been, and who we've met along the way. Be the first to discover new places and get the scoop on our favourites.
Earlier this summer the celebrated German pâtissier Christian Hümbs spent three days at the BelArosa Chalet in Arosa, Switzerland, and left behind an exclusive honey cookie, baked fresh each day and sent home with guests as an edible keepsake of the mountains.
Christian Hümbs, one of the most celebrated pâtissiers in the German-speaking world, was a recent guest at the BelArosa Chalet in Arosa, Switzerland. He did not simply cook for the house. He left something behind: an exclusive honey cookie, developed on site, that will sweeten every stay to come.
Hümbs is a long-standing friend of the chalet's host, Meike-Cathérine Bambach, and the cookie began with her own memory rather than a menu. "My grandfather had a beautiful patisserie in Münster," she recalls. "I spent my childhood there, and that is where my love of good patisserie was born." The brief that grew from that memory was less about flavour than feeling: warmth, shelter, a pinch of nostalgia for unhurried childhood days.
Getting there took patience. The recipe was reworked again and again until it settled into its final form: not too sweet, yet full of aroma, with a velvety crumb and a little crunch at the edges. What goes into it reads like a map of the surrounding valleys. Honey from the Schanfigg, Swiss chocolate, the finest Alpine butter, fresh cream. Each cookie is baked fresh every day, and guests may take one home in an exclusive box, a small edible keepsake of the mountains.
"We want to give our guests an experience for all the senses," Bambach says, "and the cookie should extend the holiday feeling through the taste buds." It is a modest object asked to do a great deal, and in Hümbs's hands it manages it: comfort food raised, quietly, to craft.
The question, then, is what to drink alongside it. The chalet offers two answers. For coffee, it turns to Rast Kaffee, the Lucerne roastery, which has roasted a blend especially for the house. Like Hümbs, and like BelArosa itself, it is a family business built on tradition and handwork, and the careful roast and the sweet bake flatter one another. For those who would rather reach for a glass, the house suggests a Chardonnay from Castello Luigi in Besazio, one of its favourite wines and, again, the work of a family that binds tradition, craft and origin with real care.
The result is a new creation that slips seamlessly into the chalet's existing culinary language. In a house that measures luxury in restraint and detail rather than spectacle, a single well-made cookie is exactly the right gesture: a little Hümbs magic, baked into the everyday, waiting by the coffee.
To a wide television audience, Christian Hümbs is a familiar face from the SAT.1 series "Das Große Backen," where he sits on the jury. Within fine dining, though, his name was made long before. His path ran through some of the best addresses in Germany: the Louis C. Jacob in Hamburg, the three-Michelin-star restaurant Aqua at The Ritz-Carlton in Wolfsburg, and the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich. Named "Pâtissier of the Year" several times over, he became known for handcraft precision, inventive refinement and a gift for the memorable mouthful. After a spell as chef-pâtissier at The Dolder Grand in Zurich, he struck out on his own in November 2021. Today he shares his creations and recipes through baking books, on Instagram and via his website, christianhuembs.com.
BelArosa sits at 1,800 metres above Arosa, in the Swiss canton of Graubünden, looking down over the spa village and its glacial lakes. It is an all-suite design hotel built on a "chalet within a chalet" idea: ten autonomous suites, several with private infinity pools, each with its own kitchen, sauna and fireplace. There is no conventional restaurant. Instead, breakfast arrives in the suite from a list of more than a hundred dishes, and a private chef can cook in-chalet on request. Salvaged 200-year-old oak, hand-blown pendant lights and Aosta stone underfoot give the interiors a sense of craft over commerce, of stories held in the material itself. The honey cookie, made daily and given quietly at the close of a stay, belongs entirely to that world. Read more at The Aficionados.
Since the 14th century, the village of Mund and the UNESCO mountain region has been the quiet spice producer since it was smuggled in via Italy and the Simplon Pass.
read more
Food writer Meredith Erickson has travelled the wintry peaks and picturesque trails of the alpine region of France, Italy, Switzerland and Austria.
read more
A curated style jungle of mid-century furnishings, abstract modernism and bespoke pieces are flavoured by the original pine panelling dating back to 1848 - and all this cuteness is wrapped in a canvas of wild herbs and mountain eye candy.
read more
Zermatt’s dining scene just got fired up with flame-grilled flavours, local ingredients, and bold pairings.
read more
Our first little wonders were two collectable findings: the unique honey from the island of Astipalea featuring 80% thyme pollen grains and the honey from the mountains of Crete with 60% thyme pollen grains.
read more
Exceptional, natural goodness sourced in Greece is what Neolea is all about following the mantra: 'love more, live better and get more taste out of life'.
read more
Greece and herbary go way back in time to antiquity. Throughout its history, the aromatic and medicinal herbs described by Hippocrates, Theophrastus, Dioscorides and Galen have long been a part of their rich holistic culture.
read more
My Greek Island Home by Claire Lloyd is always out of the bookcase, an ever-present friend that tells the tale of falling in love with a Greek island and finding that a simpler life is not so bad after all.
read more
Albin Widmann is Chef at the Seehotel Ambach, the cult lakeside refuge on Caldaro Lake's shores in South Tyrol. Dramatic nature, funky interiors, and an architectural landmark are also a famed bolthole for good food connoisseurs.
read more
A slow-food philosophy that Chef Massimo Geromel describes as 'keeping things simple, pure and rooted', he presides over the culinary realms of the MIRAMONTI, a style hotel and spa destination in Avelengo/Hafling, South Tyrol/Alto Adige.
read more
Food is high on this region's agenda, also known as the Garden of the Alps - the cuisine is a menagerie of hearty Laden Alpine dishes, Italian classics and lightness from the Mediterranean. It is not Italian nor Austrian; it is an epicurean marriage that occasionally dips into Hungary.
read more
The making of balsamic is said to have been created as far back as 1046, when Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor, requested a gift of vinegar from the Tuscan marquis Bonifacio, father of Matilde di Canossa.
read more
Get the insider news and lowdown on what we've been up to, where we've been, and who we've met along the way. Be the first to discover new places and get the scoop on our favourites.