The Capra, the five-star boutique wellness hotel perched in the car-free Swiss village of Saas-Fee, has unveiled a distinctive three-night gourmet retreat that traces centuries of alpine gastronomy, in a collaboration with one of the world’s most prominent food historians.
Developed with Professor Paul Freedman of Yale University, the inaugural Culinary History Retreat will plate up a programme of themed dinners featuring long-forgotten dishes, excursions to nearby Valais vineyards, back-in-time food tours and intimate fireside conversations, all staged beneath a skyline of more than a dozen 4,000-metre peaks.
Hotel executives say the property is a natural fit for a concept rooted in heritage dining. Saas-Fee already hosts the annual Nostalgic Culinary Mile festival, a celebration of “lost” Swiss dishes, while The Capra’s kitchens have long championed natural, wholesome ingredients in place of ultra-processed foods and artificial additives.
The retreat has been spearheaded by Phaedra Letrou, partnerships and experiences director at The Capra and a second-generation member of the owning family. A Yale graduate in cognitive science, Letrou draws on neuroscience, culture and wellbeing to shape the hotel’s guest programming. Her collaborator, Professor Freedman, is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale, editor of the acclaimed Food: The History of Taste and the author of American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way and Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. His scholarship examines how food illuminates identity and the evolution of societies.
The programme opens with the first of three themed dinners, Romanticism and the Discovery of the Alps, tracing the post-1700s shift that recast the mountains from forbidding obstacles to objects of beauty, and introducing the cuisine that accompanied the earliest leisure travellers to the region. Guests may find themselves tucking into the curiously named but rather moreish cholera, a rustic pie of potato, leek, apple and cheese.
Day two takes travellers to the Valais vineyards before a fireside discussion with Professor Freedman and the second dinner, The Grand Hotel Era, which revisits the exuberant dining culture of the Belle Époque, when new railways delivered high society to mountainside restaurants serving potage à la reine, a delicate soup of chicken and almonds, and poached peach with strawberry mousse.
The final day offers a guided herbal walk gathering wild mountain botanicals used in both the kitchen and the spa, before a closing Modern Alpine Cuisine dinner that shows how Switzerland’s culinary past continues to shape its contemporary tables. Between meals, guests have free run of The Capra’s 700-square-metre Peak Health Spa, the hiking trails on the hotel’s doorstep, and the famously unhurried rhythm of a village where cars are banned.
“What has always fascinated me is how food reveals the history of a place in ways that nothing else quite can,” said Professor Freedman. “A meal carries the story of who grew and raised the ingredients, who cooked it, and what was happening in the world at the time. The Alps have such a distinct culinary inheritance, and I’m looking forward to bringing these stories to life over the table at The Capra.”
The retreat is the first in a broader slate of heritage-led offerings at the hotel, conceived as a counterpoint to the rise of fast food and ultra-processed dining. The Brasserie 1809 restaurant and bar are rolling out a seasonal Canton Classics collection of historic Swiss dishes and drinks available year-round, while privately bookable Meet the Makers tours will introduce guests to the small-scale farmers and producers whose purity-focused methods have passed down the generations. During the Nostalgic Culinary Mile in September, the hotel will also host themed communal dinners and social evenings reviving cocktails from bygone eras.
Awarded two Michelin Keys for the second year running and ranked among Switzerland’s top five wellness hotels in 2025, The Capra has quietly positioned itself as a different kind of alpine bolt-hole, where wellness is woven into seasonal cooking, time outdoors and unhurried human connection. For the business traveller in search of a substantive, slower-paced retreat between board meetings, it is a proposition with genuine intellectual heft.
Further information is available at www.capra.ch.