Perhaps it was the guest who arrived before me using not one, but two, helicopters - the first solely for his luggage. Perhaps it was the 65 vintage Ferraris, awaiting auction in the specially carpeted underground car park. Or perhaps it was the £10 price tag on a pudding of fudge brownies in the restaurant. But the moment I arrived something about the Palace Hotel in the Swiss resort of Gstaad, screamed MONEY!, louder than a city trader cashing his yearly bonus.
The Palace is a nexus of wealth and fame. It is where the celebrated come to be at rest. It is the one place Hello! magazine would most like to have an office. It is the one place to which Hello! magazine will never gain access. The Palace Hotel, which sits high above the town, has always been like this. It opened in 1913 and was partly responsible for putting the resort on the map. Back then grand extended families - Russian, French, Austro-Hungarian - would take whole floors for both the summer and winter seasons, so as to accommodate not only themselves but their servants as well. Perhaps through such long experience, the hotel somehow manages to both reek of exclusivity and wealth while dodging gaudy ostentation. The public rooms are short on marble and gilding, and long on rustic wood panelling.
'It is not the most opulent hotel in the world and we don't want it to be,' says the general manager, Andrea Scherz. 'It is up in the mountains and we want it to feel that way. We want people to remember they're on holiday.' A very expensive one.
Andrea's grandfather, Ernst, saw it first a few years before the Second World War when he was singing Christmas carols one night as a boy scout in the square below. It was then, as now, illuminated when darkness fell, and could be seen for miles around. He bought it in 1947 and soon established it as a glamorous place to be. Louis Armstrong, Maurice Chevalier and Ella Fitzgerald played here in the Fifties and Sixties and somehow the names have just kept coming. 'You can have Liza Minnelli exercising out on the patio,' says Pascal Rey, marketing director of the hotel, 'and Roman Polanski may be at the bar relaxing after the heavy night before. They know they will not be troubled.' Robbie Williams has been here, and Woody Allen and, God help us, Margaret Thatcher. Michael Jackson pops in when he is staying at Elizabeth Taylor's chalet in the town.
So it is only for the famous. 'Not at all,' Rey says. 'Ernst Scherz had a saying: "every guest is a king and every king is just a guest."' That said, it is not the easiest place to gain entry to. Money alone will not do it. For the Christmas just gone, for example, they would take no booking of less than 14 days and that could only be confirmed by full payment - at a minimum of £400 a room per night - six months in advance. (The Penthouse costs around £6,000 a night).
'And if you have not been here before you would go immediately onto the waiting list because we like to leave room for our regulars. We do everything we can to discourage our guests.' Still they come. One woman has been coming to the Palace every summer (it is closed from March to mid-June and September until Christmas) for more than 70 years. The kitchen that serves this clientele is vast, with a brigade of close to 50 and it has had just two head chefs in the past half a century.
The current chef, Peter Wyss, has been in charge since 1984. He is, he says, as much custodian of a tradition as cook. 'We like to keep the old recipes going here as much as possible,' he says. He points to a fish tank in the corner of his kitchen, bulging with fat trout. Fillets of trout à la mode du palace - in a classically French, butter and fish stock sauce - has been on the menu for decades.
'It is always served here,' Wyss says. So it shall always be. Beef and veal, served with a pepper crust or a mustard sauce, are sourced as locally as possible, as is much of the cheese used in the downstairs Fromagerie, the casual fondue joint in the basement, lined with timber from a seventeenth-century chalet. 'I like to use as much local produce as possible,' Wyss says. Many of the other dishes they cook may not even be on the menu, however. They are just those things that the regulars know the Palace has always cooked. There is no lobster Thermidor on the list but they serve plenty of it. They also do a mean Irish Stew. 'When I see certain guests arrive I immediately make a mental note that there are things they like and that we should be prepared to serve them.'
For all that consistency the Palace knows that it cannot become a museum piece. 'You always have to introduce a little change because the world is changing,' says Gildo Bocchini, who has been with the hotel 32 years, and Maitre d' in the restaurant since 1990. 'You cannot live under a glass jar.' As a result they are constantly staging festivals and events: international tennis tournaments, beach volleyball championships in the summer, the vintage car auction.
Tinkering with the regular fixtures is less easy, though. They once tried to replace Renato Samba, the lounge singer, who has been working the restaurant for decades. There was uproar from the guests. They also planned to modernise the basement night-club, Green-Go, which had not changed since it was first designed in the Sixties. Again the guests protested. They would stop using it, they said. The hotel did redecorate it, but only so it looked exactly as it always had. There is one relatively new addition, though: an extension to the dance floor which is suspended over the indoor swimming pool at night. It sounds - and, frankly, looks - like something out of a Seventies disco fantasy. So what if it's 30 years out of date? At the Palace Hotel, Gstaad, they call it progress.
Peak time
Diners past and present
Louis Armstrong
Ella Fitzgerald
Maurice Chevalier
Woody Allen
Robbie Williams
Margaret Thatcher
Phil Collins
Bonnie Tyler
What to eat
Trout à la Mode du Palace
Fondue
Veal in a mustard sauce
Grand-Marnier soufflé
It costs
If you have to ask...
What to say
Is there room on the tennis court for my other helicopter?
What not to say
Bugger me, that's Michael Jackson over there.
Getting there
Well, helicopter, what else?
