La Brisolée in Switzerland: The Story of the Swiss Chestnut Feast

The view from the restaurant—Le Café-Restaurant Plan-Cerisier—just outside of Martigny, Switzerland, where we enjoyed our brisolée. October 13, 2021.

One October, I got an invitation to join a group for a tour of a town here in Switzerland called Martigny, which is in the Valais region. The visit culminated in a traditional mid-October regional feast called “la brisolée.”

Sounded lovely. I like walking tours, I like seeing new places, and I like feasts. (Who doesn’t?) I especially like feasts that have a regional or seasonal or cultural flavor.

Invitation accepted. Even though I didn’t know what exactly a “brisolée” might involve or include.

Actually, I didn’t even think to ask until the group and we had started our walking tour, and I didn’t fully believe I understood the response until I saw it for myself at the restaurant.

What’s La Brisolée?

La brisolée, dear reader, is a feast of nuts. (Yep, really.)

Traditional to the Valais region of Switzerland, it’s a meal featuring buckets of fire-roasted chestnuts as a main course. You crack them open and eat them at the table, family-style, with side snacks of rye bread, regional cheeses and cured meats, and grapes and other seasonal fruit.

I didn’t get a picture of the table, but here’s a link to a website from the region that has a photo.

As you can see for yourself, it’s just as I said: A nut feast.

To partake, people go to a restaurant that hosts the festival over a series of days or goes to a specific event offering la brisolée—it’s not something you do at home, in other words.

The restaurant or organizers have a huge fire going, on which they’ve either set a massive pan pierced with holes to let the flames and smoke through or have turning a large metal cylinder with holes in it. They roast massive quantities of chestnuts in their shells over the fire and then have a large buffet table with the rest of the feast on it for guests to create their plates.

Servers deliver bowls of roasted nuts to the table—the nuts arrive far too hot to touch—which the guests them peel and eat along with their plates of fruits, cured meats, and cheeses plus a glass of white wine or another type of alcoholic drink made from grapes, called “moult,” all from the region.

If you get an opportunity to enjoy a brisolée, absolutely go—just wear dark clothes and prepare to get messy; peeling blackened nuts with your hands makes for a dirty project. (For a comparison, though with a different odor and flavor, imagine the messy of a U.S. crab or crawfish boil.) It’s fun, it’s social, and you get to linger in a gorgeous landscape for hours. (After all, it’s not a brisolée, not really, if it doesn’t happen in the Valais region of Switzerland.)

An important note, though: While it could seem like a bowl of nuts, some cheese, and a few pieces of dried meat wouldn’t amount to much—as I’d thought—this is actually a very heavy feast! I’d say I was full for the rest of the day and even felt a little overloaded into the next day as well.

The History and Origins of La Brisolée

Though this sounds—and seemed, during my experience—like something that would have a long history rooted in tradition, it’s relatively recent in origin.

According to the Musée du Vin in Sierre, Switzerland, la brisolée came into existence in the 1960s in the Martigny-Fully area of the Swiss region called the Valais and spread widely in the last decades of that century.

Originally, restaurants in the area organized la brisolée to celebrate the harvest for the grapes that become wine from the region, a harvest that takes places mid-October. They wanted to highlight the area’s fruits of the moment as well—and mark the change in the seasons and the full arrival of autumn and the coming of winter.

Where to Enjoy La Brisolée

If you’d like to experience la brisolée, you’ll find a handful of restaurants in Fully and Martigny, in Switzerland, that feature the feast over a few days each year, typically on weekends.

How do you find one, if you’re making a special trip just to have the chestnut-feast experience? If you call or e-mail the tourist office in Martigny just ahead of the season, they will hook you up with addresses and dates.

And if you go, don’t get your hands so messy that you forget to take photos of the feast itself—like I did!