There is a particular kind of person who will tell you, with great confidence, that Switzerland is a country of cheese, chocolate and very little else worth putting on a plate. This person has not eaten in Zurich lately. They have not sat at a counter inside the main railway station and watched a two star kitchen turn out sixteen bites of quiet brilliance while the commuter trains rumble somewhere below. They are, in short, ordering from a menu that expired about a decade ago.
Switzerland has become, without a press campaign and without ever raising its voice, one of the most precise and increasingly playful places to eat in Europe. The precision was always there; the Swiss have never needed to be told to do a thing properly. The playfulness is the news, and it is the reason 2026 is the year to book.
Start in Zurich, which does the heavy lifting. At the Hauptbahnhof, of all the unromantic addresses, Mitja Birlo runs The Counter, a U shaped bar of a room where he cooks for a couple of dozen guests a night and calls it a restaurant. It holds two Michelin stars and eighteen GaultMillau points, and Birlo, named Chef of the Year back in 2022, spends the evening turning otoro, quail and Breton lobster into a tasting menu that behaves like a magic act. One service, one seating, no second act. It is currently among the hardest tables in the city, and deservedly so.
Up in the hills, the benchmark holds. Heiko Nieder has run The Restaurant at the Dolder Grand for years, and in a country that prizes consistency he remains the standard against which the ambitious quietly measure themselves: two stars, nineteen GaultMillau points, and, as of this spring, a five seat chef’s table with a glowing stone counter for those who want to watch him work at very close range. Nieder does not chase headlines; the cooking has done it for him for years.
Then there is the playfulness, and it has a patron. Andreas Caminada, the three star patriarch of Schloss Schauenstein, exports his most democratic idea to Zurich in the form of IGNIV, folded into the Marktgasse Hotel. The concept is fine dining with the etiquette removed: small courses arrive on a shared table, everyone reaches, nobody stands on ceremony. Caminada calls it next level finger food and he means it as a compliment. It is serious cooking that refuses to take itself seriously, which is a good deal harder to pull off than a tweezered plate and a hushed room.
And the scene keeps refreshing itself. This March, KHOURIS opened in Seefeld, Samir Khouri graduating his much loved Palestinian pop up into a permanent room, his mother Susan overseeing the kitchen and the family recipes. A short walk away, Zineb Hattab’s Kle continues to prove a point that would have sounded absurd a few years ago: a fully plant based restaurant in Zurich, holding a Michelin star and a green one for good measure. Hattab, worth noting, cut her teeth under Caminada. So did a striking number of the country’s best young cooks. Keep that name in mind; it explains a lot.
Which brings us up the mountain, because in Switzerland the good cooking does not stop at the treeline. Above Zermatt, at 2,100 metres in the hamlet of Findeln, Chez Vrony has been a family concern for more than a century. You reach it on foot or on skis, the Matterhorn arranged in the window like set dressing nobody quite believes is real. The kitchen still raises its own animals on alpine grass, and the Vrony burger has become a minor pilgrimage in its own right. It is the rare restaurant where the most famous view in the Alps is only the second best thing about lunch.
Gstaad, for its part, plays the luxury card without a flicker of embarrassment. The Alpina Gstaad keeps a Michelin star at Megu, its Japanese room, where a sake list to rival anything in Tokyo sits beneath a ceiling dressed in antique kimono. Serious sushi at altitude sounds like a stunt right up until the first piece of otoro lands, at which point the joke is on you.
The most telling development, though, is happening away from the marquee resorts. In Bern, Simon Apothéloz has taken Olympia, a restaurant, bar, café and bakery folded into a single address, and turned it into GaultMillau’s POP of the Year for 2026, the guide’s nod to the places rewriting the rules with fresh ideas rather than starched tablecloths. Apothéloz talks about Bern growing slowly but sustainably, and the phrase captures the whole national mood: no rush, no swagger, just very good cooking arriving in the cities everyone forgot to watch.
What connects all of this is less a trend than a family tree. Caminada sits near the root of it, mentoring a generation that scattered across the country and opened rooms of their own, carrying the Swiss instinct for precision and adding the one thing their teachers were often too disciplined to attempt, which is a sense of fun. The sustainability is not a marketing garnish either. It is structural, running from Vrony’s own herds to Hattab’s farmers to the general Swiss allergy to waste, and it costs the food nothing in ambition.
The World Travel Magazine view is straightforward, Switzerland has stopped being the place you eat between mountains and become a place you go for the table. Summer is the moment to have both at once: a morning on the flank of the Matterhorn, an evening at a counter that would hold its own in any capital on earth.
Which is where to end, at that counter in the Zurich railway station, Birlo working through his sixteen bites while the last trains empty out below. It is a small room in an unglamorous building in a country everyone is quite sure they have already figured out. They have not. Book it.
Rachel Owens writes Takeoff, The Host, and The First 48 for World Travel Magazine. She is based in Singapore. She knew the restaurant was overrated before the third star, and she’ll say so nicely. (Feature photo caption: The Chef’s Table at The Restaurant at the Dolder Grand, photo copyright by Fabian Häfeli, Dolder Hotel AG) ◼
Subscribe to the latest edition now by clicking here.
© This article was first published online in July 2026 – World Travel Magazine.
Article source
