The restaurant, located on the hotel’s lowest level, with low ceilings, stone walls, and views onto the surrounding forest, is overseen by the Italian chef Davide Degiovanni, who built out his CV in London at the Four Seasons in Mayfair and as head chef at Gordon Ramsay’s Union Street Café. The menu marries the robust Swiss Alpine pantry with the techniques and flavours he absorbed growing up in Piedmont in northern Italy. His signatures include pillowy gnocchi made with local potatoes that swim in a silken pool of cream and black truffle, as well as crispy croquettes with trout sourced from surrounding glacier-fed streams, sharpened with a kick of spicy horseradish. Degiovanni’s insistence on local ingredients has forged a network of suppliers in the nearby Val Fex, a strictly protected valley reached by a winding forest road above the hotel. Though building there was outlawed decades ago, a handful of family-run farms continue to operate, including the organic dairy farm Crasta, set on an idyllic Alpine meadow, whose fussed-over cattle provide Chesa Marchetta with milk, fresh cheese, and beef.
Photo: Courtesy of Artfarm
Photo: Courtesy of Artfarm
But the Wirths’ cultural influence extends beyond the hotel. Chesa Marchetta is, in fact, the third property they have developed in the Engadine Valley. Their local portfolio also includes Hotel Castell in neighbouring Zuoz, as well as the Hauser & Wirth outpost in St. Moritz. Timed with the opening of Chesa Marchetta, Hauser & Wirth staged an exhibition dedicated to the artistic legacy of the region—a retrospective of Alberto Giacometti’s lesser-known early works titled Faces and Landscapes of Home. The Swiss artist, best known for his elongated bronze figures, was born just down the valley and lived here for much of his life. The exhibition includes portraits of family members, a bust depicting the head of his brother Diego, and photographs by his confidant Ernst Scheidegger, taken in his cabin studio in Stampa. Also included is a rare painting of Lake Sils—a view still encountered today on a short walk from Chesa Marchetta, which, more than a century later, retains the subdued palette and hushed sense of remoteness that define this rarefied Alpine landscape.