ST. MORITZ GOURMET FESTIVAL
Late August · St. Moritz, Engadin · Six Days · Since 1994
The St. Moritz Gourmet Festival is six days of cooking across the Upper Engadin, in which ten guest chefs are brought in from around the world and set to work in the kitchens of nine hotels.
It ran in winter for thirty-one years. From 2026 it runs at the end of August.
The Move
The festival was founded in 1994 and held every January or February until 2025, when the last winter edition was staged.
The reason for shifting it is plain enough. St. Moritz in winter is already full. The skiing, the polo on the lake, the racing on the same ice a fortnight later. A gourmet festival competing with all of that gets the hotels’ second-best week. In August the valley is at its best, the houses are quieter, and the food can be eaten outdoors.
The format moved with it and loosened. There is now a walk up a side valley to an open table cooked over fire, and a lunch served in a historic carriage on the mountain railway.
The Form
Ten guest chefs, drawn over the years from more than thirty nations. Each is attached to one of the partner houses for the week and cooks in that kitchen alongside its own chef.
The Opening Kitchen Party at Badrutt’s Palace is the event to attend. Every visiting chef cooks at once, and the guests walk through the hotel’s kitchens rather than sitting in its dining room, eating as they go.
The Four Hands Dinners put two chefs and two kitchens against six courses. The Gourmet Safaris move a party between five hotels across an evening, a course at each.
Around two thousand people come each year. Some eighty thousand have been through it since 1994.
What to Know
Events are ticketed individually and priced separately. Nothing is sold as a package.
The partner houses are spread across the valley, at St. Moritz, Pontresina, Silvaplana, Sils and La Punt, so a car or the post bus is needed.
Take the Opening Kitchen Party first. It sells before anything else, and it is the one people talk about afterward.
There is a programme for young Engadin cooks running alongside the visiting names, and the food at those events is frequently better than its billing.
The mistake is treating it as a run of expensive dinners. The chefs talk to the room about what they have made, and the explanation is half of what you are paying for.
The Court
The St. Moritz Gourmet Festival is not the Court’s own. Places at the dinners, the Kitchen Party and the safaris are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward.
