A newly renovated grand hotel in a car-free Swiss alpine village you reach by cog railway. The wagyu bresaola will stop you cold. The outdoor pool in the snow will finish the job.
The first thing Wengen does is remove you, from your car. You park it in Lauterbrunnen, in the valley floor at around 800 metres, and then you board the Wengernalpbahn — a cog railway that has been running since 1893 — and it lifts you up through forest and snow to the village at 1,274 metres. No cars in Wengen. No through traffic. The streets are quiet and the air is different. That 20-minute train ride is not just the transfer. It's the beginning of the separation from real life, and it works.
The Belvedere sends a small electric vehicle to the station to collect you. It is slightly Wes Anderson in character, which is correct and good. By the time you arrive at the hotel, something has already shifted.
By train from Geneva: Intercity to Interlaken Ost, then Berner Oberland Bahn to Lauterbrunnen, then the Wengernalpbahn cog railway direct to Wengen. Total journey around 2.5 hours.
By car: Drive to Lauterbrunnen. Leave your car in the covered car park at the station. You won't need it again until you leave.
The Wengernalpbahn: Opened 1893. It's a metre-gauge rack railway — the cog engages the track on the steep sections. The same line continues up to Kleine Scheidegg at 2,061m, where you can connect to the Jungfraubahn, the highest railway station in Europe at 3,454m.
The Grand Hotel Belvedere is old — it has the arched windows, the carved wood balconies, the ornamental ironwork that belongs to a certain era of Swiss alpine grandeur. But it has been recently renovated, and the hand of Tyler Brûlé is somehow in the mix. You can feel it in the details: the thoughtful wallpaper in the bar, the way the spaces are edited rather than stuffed, the sense that someone with genuine taste has been through here and made decisions. It doesn't feel like a heritage property that has been preserved in aspic. It feels like somewhere that knows what it is.
Switzerland is not the place you come for the food. It is a bread, cheese, and keep-it-moving kind of country. Even the best restaurants here often don't quite land that certain thing — you know what I mean — and my expectations are always calibrated accordingly.
So when we arrived and sat in the lobby while the room was being prepared, I ordered a beer and the wagyu bresaola without much expectation. Say it out loud: wagyu bresaola. When it arrived and I put it in my mouth I genuinely stopped talking mid-sentence. Thin-sliced cured wagyu, soft and fatty and deeply savoury in a way that is just not what you expect to happen to you in Switzerland. I thought about it for the rest of the stay. Every meal that followed was excellent. This is a significant statement in the Helvetic Confederation. Eat all your meals at the hotel. Maybe one dinner out in the village for pizza, just to walk around. But come back here for everything else.
The bar is properly beautiful. Dark floral wallpaper, a chandelier, good stools, a long mirror. The cocktail guy is Greek — he works at Scorpios in Mykonos in the summer, and he is very good at his job. The smoky negroni arrives in a small decanter and a glass with a large cube. It costs 22 CHF. Pay the money. Enjoy the cocktail. This is not the place to be thinking about the exchange rate.
The sommelier is also Greek, friendly, and serious about wine. He pours from Switzerland and from Germany, and the German bottle he opened for us was so good that we ordered a case to be sent home. I didn't expect to leave Wengen with a case of German wine. It happened.
"The cocktail guy works at Scorpios in Mykonos in the summer. The smoky negroni costs 22 CHF. Pay the money."
— Dave
The rooms look out over the village and the valley. On a clear day you are looking directly at the Jungfrau — 4,158 metres of it — with the church steeple of Wengen in the foreground and the Lauterbrunnen valley dropping away below. On a cloudy day, snow-covered pine trees disappear into white. Both versions are fine.
I am not a big skiing person, but this place has all you need. You take a small train further up the mountain from the village and can ski all the way back down to Wengen if you want. I watched other people do this and felt satisfied on their behalf.
What I am is a sauna and steam person, and both were excellent — very hot, clean, the way they are supposed to be. Cold plunge, nice showers, pool. The spa wing is new concrete brutalism attached to the 19th-century hotel exterior, and the contrast is correct. My wife gave the massage an A+, and she is a picky customer for these things.
On the walls: original alpine oil paintings, framed in pale wood. Small landscapes, mountain huts, streams over rocks. Not reproductions. The kind of thing you look at properly, which is unusual in hotels.
"You can come here, skip the skiing, use the spa, eat well, drink well, and leave very happy. Switzerland just got harder to leave."
— DaveTyler Brûlé was involved in this renovation in some capacity and the taste and attention to detail is unmistakably his — which is to say that someone has thought about what a grand alpine hotel should actually feel like to stay in, rather than just how it should photograph. It photographs well too, for what it's worth.
You can come here and skip the skiing entirely. Use the spa. Eat the wagyu bresaola. Sit in the lobby with a glass of something good and look at the mountains through an arched window. That is a complete holiday. Book it, go there, and stop wasting your time looking at other options.