Flocons de Sel Megève

Flocons de sel means flakes of salt, a quiet joke in a town better known for flakes of snow. It is also a fair description of what Emmanuel Renaut does. Salt does not turn a dish into something else; it makes it taste more of itself. Renaut cooks the mountain so that it tastes more like the mountain, and over the years his presence has done the same for Megève, which tastes better for having him.

He came to it sideways. Raised between the vineyards of Reims and the mountains of Savoy, he trained in the grand kitchens of Paris and London before settling in Megève with his wife Kristine. Their first restaurant was a converted pizzeria in the village. Later they moved up to a family chalet in Leutaz, a hamlet of farms and cowbells on the slopes above town, and added a handful of rooms.

The cooking is local in the most literal sense. Renaut picks plants from the verges that most people walk past, keeps his own hens and bees, bakes his own bread and takes his milk from the Arly valley below. The signature dish is the name made edible: a féra from Lake Geneva baked in a crust of salt, cracked open beside the table, then sauced with a jus of wild hogweed that tastes, improbably, of citrus. It is the moment the whole dining room leans in.

That table has turned Megève into a place of pilgrimage. Diners plan journeys around a reservation here, some from far beyond Europe. Renaut's bistro in the village and his mountain restaurant feed the same appetite more casually, and alongside the resort's grand hotels, the town now draws travellers who would once never have thought of the Alps for a meal.

The hotel is the quiet part of the story, and the part that makes the dinner complete. Ten rooms and suites share the chalet with the restaurant, two small wooden mazots stand a few steps away, and most look out at the mountains, so after the last course nobody has to drive anywhere. There is a spa and an indoor pool for the end of the day, and a shuttle reaches the Rochebrune and Chamois lifts in minutes. The best days here run the other way round from most ski holidays: a morning on the slopes, a long, slow afternoon by the pool, and every hour after that building towards the table.

The rooms live in the restaurant's shadow, and not every guest will find that a fair exchange. Facilities are modest beside the big resort hotels, the hamlet is a drive rather than a stroll from the village, and in the evening the dining room fills with outside guests who came for exactly the same reason. A night here is only half the bill; the other half is dinner.

Centuries ago, merchants crossed the Alps in search of salt. They still do, in a manner of speaking. Only now they cross oceans rather than passes, and the salt comes in flakes, on a plate, in a hamlet above Megève.