The Table: twin chefs take a Swiss ski village to three Michelin stars

Switzerland has a new three-star restaurant, and it is not in Geneva, Basel or Zurich. It is a 46-seat Japanese dining room inside a ski hotel in Andermatt, a mountain village in the canton of Uri. The twins who run it found out in their own town, because Michelin held its Swiss ceremony there.

The Michelin Guide Switzerland 2026 was unveiled on Monday, November 2, at the Andermatt Konzerthalle. The headline was The Japanese Restaurant at The Chedi Andermatt, which went from two stars to three, the biggest jump of the edition. It joins Memories at the Grand Resort Bad Ragaz, Cheval Blanc by Peter Knogl in Basel, the Restaurant de l'Hôtel de Ville in Crissier and Schloss Schauenstein in Fürstenau as the only Swiss restaurants at the top of the guide.

The twins at The Chedi

Dominik Sato and Fabio Toffolon are twin brothers and co-executive chefs. They took over the kitchen in 2023, and that same year the restaurant won its second star and the pair took Michelin's Young Chef Award. The restaurant first entered the guide with one star in 2017.

The cooking is an omakase menu rooted in kaiseki, the formal Japanese seasonal meal, with Japanese technique applied to Alpine and Swiss produce. Michelin's inspectors describe a sleek dining room at almost 1,500 metres and two chefs who combine Japanese influence with classical technique and carefully chosen ingredients. The resort's owners say it is the first three-star kitchen in Switzerland with a Japanese culinary signature.

"We started cooking together long before we ever shared a kitchen," Sato said. "To receive three stars together, here in Andermatt, is something we never dared to say out loud." Toffolon's line was more practical: "Tomorrow we go back into the kitchen to do it a little better."

A village with seven stars

With the new star, the village holds seven stars across four restaurants: The Japanese Restaurant with three; IGNIV by Andreas Caminada, run by Valentin Sträuli, with two; and two one-star restaurants on the Gütsch at 2,344 metres, The Japanese at Gütsch and GÜTSCH by Markus Neff. The resort says that is more than any other Alpine destination in Switzerland and level with Basel and Lucerne, and that only Andermatt and Basel have restaurants in all three star categories.

The chef who built it got his own star the same night

The best subplot of the evening was in Zermatt. Dietmar Sawyere was the chef who built The Chedi's Japanese restaurants after arriving in 2015, taking the hotel restaurant and its mountain sister on the Gütsch into the guide before he left in 2023 to run a historic inn, the Kreuz, in Dallenwil.

Last winter he moved again, with his family, to the new Hotel Welschen in Zermatt, where he cooks at Ad Lib, a gourmet room for about two dozen guests with a view of the Matterhorn. His son Tobias cooks with him, and his wife Nicole and daughter Pascale run the floor. On Monday, Ad Lib won its first Michelin star, and Nicole Sawyere won the guide's Service Award. The inspectors praised her warmth, attention and sure judgement in pairing wines. So the kitchen Sawyere built went to three stars, and his own new restaurant got its first on the same night.

The rest of the new class

Seven restaurants won their first star: MYLE in Bern, Bärenstobe in Gonten, CAAA by Pietro Catalano in Lucerne, Ristorante con enoteca Origini in Morbio Inferiore, Schlüssel in Oberwil, Ad Lib in Zermatt and rémy in Zurich.

MYLE, Markus Arnold's new restaurant in a converted 1970s cinema, was named Opening of the Year. Arnold changes destination with each menu. Mexico City runs to the end of November, and Athens follows in December. Catalano, in Lucerne, is self-taught. He trained as a car mechanic and studied classical trumpet before he turned to cooking. Guglielmo Curcio of Origini, born in 1994, won the Young Chef Award for cooking built on fermentation and wild herbs. Émeline Gigaud of Arakel in Geneva won the Sommelier Award for a list of about 1,500 wines, heavy on Burgundy and Krug.

Worth the trip

The lesson of this year's Swiss guide is altitude. The top new star went to a hotel in a ski resort and the Service Award went to a 24-seat room under the Matterhorn. Both are ski-season tables in small villages, so book early. The Chedi holds two Michelin Keys, the guide's hotel award. In the cities, rémy and CAAA are the new names, and the Hôtel de Ville in Crissier, which kept its three stars, is a short drive from Lausanne.

*Image: The Chedi Andermatt hotel, home of The Japanese Restaurant. Photo: 100Goblins, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.*

Source: Michelin Guide

The Table runs every Saturday.