The garden first

Today there are six houses in three language regions. Each has its own garden, its own partner farm and its own kitchen. What links them is the order of things: first the garden, then the plate.

1. 

   2009

   The garden first

   A courtyard in St. Gallen's old town, twenty raised beds, a restaurant with forty seats.

   St. Gallen was no accident. Only a few steps away is the Abbey Library with the Plan of St Gall, the oldest surviving drawing of a monastery garden north of the Alps: kitchen garden and herb garden side by side, cooking and healing as one craft.

   Nora Steiger had learnt in Lyon that great cooking begins with great produce. Jonas Wehrli knew how to grow it. The first menu had twelve dishes, eight of them without meat — a gamble at the time, the heart of what we do today.

   «We planted before we had a table. That has not changed.»

2. 

   2013 – 2021

   One house after another

   Zürich, Lucerne, Geneva, Locarno — each house only once there was a garden and a farm nearby.

   A second house came only when a vegetable grower on Lake Zürich was ready to sow for us. The rule still holds today: no new house without a partner farm within forty kilometres.

   In Geneva and Locarno we learnt that a concept is not translated but cooked anew. Our first dish, the Risotto alla salvia, found its Ticino rice and its Zincarlin from the Valle di Muggio in Locarno — and every house has cooked it that way ever since.

3. 

   today

   Six houses, one outlook

   Interlaken joined in 2024. Around 140 people now work at Salvia: in the kitchen and front of house, in the café and in the garden.

   Half the menu is vegetarian, a quarter vegan, and the origin of fish and meat is given with every dish. We cook with what grows in the region, and with the time it takes.

   What is new: orders go from the table straight to the kitchen, the bill comes to the table, and anyone in the café who only wants a coffee orders at the kiosk. All so that more time is left for what matters.

   «Good cooking is, first of all, about doing things in the right order.»