Montreval
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Montreval
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Montreval Verane — Alpine, vegetable-led
Forty-four seats, five courses, and a kitchen garden eleven metres from the pass.
Cimaise occupies the old hayloft, which gives it a five-metre ceiling, a beam structure nobody was willing to hide, and acoustics that took two attempts and a great deal of wool to solve. Forty-four seats, all of them facing either the lake or the open kitchen.
Anaïs Dupleix has run the kitchen since 2016. Her cooking is vegetable-led rather than vegetarian — there is fish from the lake and meat from the two farms above the village — and it is unapologetically local, which in the Verane Valley means a short list of ingredients treated very carefully rather than a long list treated casually.
The kitchen garden is eleven metres from the pass and supplies about seventy per cent of the vegetables on the menu between May and October. In February that figure is closer to fifteen per cent and the menu says so. We do not pretend to a growing season the valley does not have.
Residents may reserve at the time of booking their stay. Tables for guests not staying in the house open thirty days ahead and go quickly in July, August and February. Dietary requirements are straightforward for us if we have them a day in advance and difficult if we have them at the table.
Service
In the kitchen
Anaïs Dupleix
44 seats
The house
Thirty-eight rooms and suites on the eastern shore, built into a restored dairy farm. Larch, limestone, wool and water.
Montreval VeraneOn the menu
Menus change. These do not, or not much, and they are the dishes guests write to us about.
01
Char from the lake, cured briefly rather than heavily, with cucumber from the garden and an oil made from the dill that bolts every July.
02
A whole celeriac baked in a salt crust for two hours and served with butter from the village dairy, aged four weeks in the cellar.
03
Honey from the hives above the boathouse, buttermilk from the same dairy, frozen in front of you because it is better in the first ninety seconds.
Elsewhere
Montreval Verane
Lunch on the boathouse deck, decided each morning by the weather board.
Lakeside, simple — 30 seats
Montreval Calanera
Fifty-two seats on the second terrace, ninety metres above the water they are cooking.
Coastal, fish-led — 52 seats
Montreval Calanera
Breakfast among two hundred and forty lemon trees, which smells exactly as you would hope.
Breakfast and long lunches — 34 seats
Reservations
Our own team answers, not an agency. Rates fall on the fourth night and again on the seventh, which tells you what we would prefer.