L'Hotel de Ville - Philippe Rochat

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

A Swiss Institution, Seven Decades in the Making

Few restaurants anywhere carry the weight of history that L'Hôtel de Ville de Crissier does. Seventy-one years old and shaped by five successive generations of chefs, this address in Crissier — a short distance from Lausanne — has become one of the defining references in French haute cuisine. The lineage reads like a roll call of Swiss gastronomy: Fredy Girardet, Philippe Rochat, Benoît Violier, and now Franck Giovannini, who took over the kitchen with his wife Stéphanie in 2016. That continuity of ambition is reflected in the restaurant's standing: three Michelin stars, 19 out of 20 at the Gault&Millau, and a place among the World's 50 Best Restaurants across multiple editions.

Franck Giovannini's Philosophy

Giovannini describes his approach as cuisine built on respect for the product — its freshness, texture, purity of flavour, and nutritional integrity. Ingredients arrive whole and unmanipulated; sourcing is timed to maximise freshness. His menus are structured to avoid repetition of flavours across courses, a discipline that speaks to both rigour and sensitivity. The cooking sits at the intersection of tradition and measured innovation: classic foundations, reinterpreted with restraint rather than spectacle.

His personality comes through in specific combinations. Cardons de Crissier — the thistle-like vegetable grown locally — appear on the current winter carte as a gourmande tartlet with black truffles from Provence. Agneau de lait from Bruson arrives larded with winter salsify, the shoulder braised separately, finished with a red wine sabayon. A soupe de Saint-Jacques is enriched with scallops, bouquet prawns, parsnip, and oscietra caviar. These are dishes rooted in the French haute cuisine canon, but expressed with a precision that is entirely Giovannini's own.

The Menus and the Carte

The gastronomic menu is priced at 410 CHF and moves through seven to eight courses; a menu découverte at 360 CHF offers eight surprise dishes built around the best produce of the moment. For weekday lunches, a more compact menu at 260 CHF can be completed in under two hours. The à la carte — currently on its 68th edition, a detail that signals the seriousness of the kitchen's seasonal rotation — changes five times a year, with dates announced in advance. Special evenings are programmed throughout the year: game nights in October and November, a seafood marathon in early December, a Swiss menu in summer.

Bread is baked in-house at each service using natural sourdough. A bakery bearing the restaurant's name opened in the heart of Crissier in December 2021, extending the house's craft beyond the dining room. Cooking classes offer a further way into the kitchen's world.

The Room and the Experience

The restaurant holds a private room for more intimate occasions, and a wine cellar whose depth matches the ambition of the cooking. The atmosphere, as the restaurant itself puts it, is one where cuisine is understood as an art de vivre — a phrase that, here, is not decorative. Across seven decades and five chefs, this is a place that has consistently treated French haute cuisine not as a style to be performed, but as a discipline to be lived.