Davos is not a particularly attractive town. It bills itself as the highest city in Switzerland; it’s high, but it’s not really a city, and at 1800m, it ain’t no La Paz either (and thank god for that.) The place has a constant stream of dirty expensive German cars and other miscellaneous wheels slogging down the muddy one-way main drag, no particularly good restaurants (that I’ve found, please correct me if I’m wrong) and a lot of 1960s-1970s representative Swiss holiday resort architecture (“gee, I know what would look GREAT in this picturesque mountain scene, how about a GIANT ORANGE CONCRETE CUBE?”)
So the Schatzalp, although not super-beautifully built on the outside, at least provides a bit of architectural variety, having been maintained in the original “jugendstil” encountered by Thomas Mann (as they don’t tire of letting you know) when he visited it in its erstwhile role as a tuberculosis sanatorium. More champagne with that? The dining room and bar have been amazingly renovated, while the rooms are still a bit dated and dingy (and the facilities, like the pool, are very old-fashioned and functional), but everything that’s not great is at least “ok.”
You wouldn’t go there for the rooms or the pool, though; the view over Davos and the alps is magnificent, especially when enjoyed in combination with a plate of smoked salmon and some champagne on the balcony. The cooking is nothing short of spectacular, especially so for a hotel; we ate in the (huge) main dining room all 5 nights of our stay, through menu after menu of multi-course culinary indulgence and a good wine card. The only downer was the arrogantly gay Austrian head waiter with his badly dyed mustache who tried to seat us at a horrible table (which we’d keep for our entire sojourn) with the reasoning that “people have been coming here for 20 years, we can’t just seat you at the same sort of table as theirs.” Bite me. The manager did a good job of sorting us out, though, and our waitress was stellar.
Without going into the specifics of the dishes (too many to count or describe, plus they change all the time,) the cooking alone made this a fantastic experience. All menus are fixed, with an occasional choice of 2 dishes; if it’s not a special occasion like new year’s eve (booked solid) they open the dining room for outside guests. Best hotel food ever, check it out.
http://www.schatzalp.ch/
CH-7270 Davos-Platz
Tel: +41 81 415 51 51
