Zurich Fondue Guide: Best Restaurants for Swiss Cheese Fondue

Cheese fondue in Zurich is not merely a tourist attraction — it is a genuine Swiss winter social ritual, the centrepiece of long evenings spent dipping bread into molten cheese with friends around a caquelon pot, accompanied by white wine or tea (never cold water, which is said to congeal the cheese in the stomach) and the pleasant torpor that follows from consuming a kilogram of melted Gruyère and Emmental. The fondue season runs from September through April, and the best restaurants take it seriously.

The classic Zurich fondue is moitié-moitié — half Gruyère, half Vacherin Fribourgeois — thinned with white wine, flavoured with garlic and kirsch, and served with crusty white bread cubes for dipping. But the variations are considerable: fondue with champagne, with truffles, with porcini mushrooms, or the tomato-based fondue bourguignonne that uses oil rather than cheese for dipping meat are all legitimate variations found across Zurich's fondue restaurants.

Restaurant Kronenhalle (where a framed Picasso hangs near your table), Zeughauskeller in a 15th-century medieval armoury, and the mountain-hut atmosphere of various Bergbeiz (mountain restaurants) accessible by cable car above Zurich all offer the full fondue experience. Cheese fondue is typically ordered for a minimum of two people, and the tradition of the last bread crust in the pot belonging to whoever retrieves it is universally observed.