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Finding Swiss Restaurants in the Land of HotelsSwitzerland is a country of hotels and not of restaurants. In most of the big towns the hotels have restaurants attached to them, and in some of these a dinner ordered à la carte is just as well cooked as in a good French restaurant, and served as well; in other restaurants attached to good hotels the table-d'h?te dinner is served at separate tables at any time between certain hours, and this is the custom of most of the restaurants in most of the better class of hotels. There is in every little mountain-hotel a restaurant; but this is generally used only by invalids, or very proud persons, or mountaineers coming back late from a climb.There is no country in which the gourmet has to adapt himself so much to circumstances and in which he does it, thanks to exercise and mountain air, with such a Chesterfieldian grace. I have seen the man who, at the restaurants of the Schweitzerhof or National at Lucerne, ate a perfectly cooked little meal which he had ordered _à la carte_ on the day of his arrival in Switzerland, and who was hoping to find something to grumble at, sitting in peace two days later eating the table-d'h?te meal at a little table in the restaurant of one of the hotels at Lauzanne or Vevey, Montreux or Territet, after a walk along the lake side or up the mountain to Caux, and four days after one at a long table at Zermatt or the Riffel Alp, talking quite happily to perfect strangers on either side of him and eating the menu through from end to end, more conscious of the splendid appetite a day on the glaciers had given him than of what he is eating. Switzerland entirely demoralises the judgment of a gourmet, for its mountain air gives it undue advantages over most other countries, and an abundant appetite has a way of paralysing all the finer critical faculties.At one period all hotels in Switzerland were "run" on one simple, cheap, easy plan. There were meals at certain hours, there was a table in the big room for the English, another for the Germans, and another for mixed nationalities. If any one came late for a meal, so much the worse for him or her, for they had to begin at the course which was then going round. If travellers appeared when dinner was half over, they had to wait till it was quite finished; and then, as a favour, the ma?tre-d'h?tel would instruct a waiter to ask the cook to send the late comers in something to eat, which was generally some of the relics of the just-completed feast, the odours of which still hung about the great empty dining-hall. ................
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