VAL D’ISÈRE — Cold, fresh air nips at your face. The sun shines in an azure sky. And the only sound interrupting the muffled silence is the scraping of skis on the snow. While the first two sensations are part of a typical winter vacation, skiers today have a harder time descending the slopes in silence. That’s due to mountain restaurants and their musical shows filling the slopes with sound.
Once off the chairlift, it’s hard not to come across a chalet whose terrace transforms into a dance floor from midday onwards. At the most modest, a DJ bundled in a down jacket mixes on a simple table. The more ambitious invite musicians and dancers to transform the snack bar — where you quickly gobbled down a sausage and French fries — into an open-air cabaret.
This is all due to the “folie douce” (gentle madness) of Luc Reversade, the undisputed pioneer of mountain partying. In the 2000s, he was the first to bring the festive spirit from the beaches of Saint-Tropez to the snow, creating the first Folie Douce bar in at the Val d’Isère resort.
A trained chef turned ski instructor and avid mountain lover, Reversade recognized that some skiers were ready to shorten their afternoons on the slopes in exchange for a good time in the sun. His mountaintop restaurant, La Fruitière, with its alpine farmhouse decor and comforting Savoyard dishes, was already a great place to eat. But the atmosphere really took off when he invited a DJ to play some vinyls in the afternoon.
“People went crazy; they loved it. The success of this formula pushed us to go even further,” Reversade says.
Starting in 2010, to fill the gap between lunch and the afternoon festivities, Reversade scheduled dancers to perform on what would become the highest stage in France — at 2,500 meters above sea level. Today, 80 artists rotate among the Folie Douce venues that have since sprung up in the largest resorts in the French Alps (Val Thorens, Courchevel-Méribel, L’Alpe d’Huez, Megève, Avoriaz and Les Arcs).
Techno above the clouds
Thanks to the Folie Douce, it’s become common to see skiers in ski suits and boots standing on the tables of mountain restaurants, swaying to techno beats.
Today, across the mountains, from 3 p.m. onward, people dance more than they ski — sometimes descending the slopes with blood alcohol levels over the limit for driving. At iconic restaurants, like Cap Horn or Bagatelle in Courchevel (a resort that has five Palace luxury hotels), the beautiful people love to extend their lunch in the sun by dancing and lining up magnums of champagne in the snow.
But you can also party at family-friendly resorts like La Plagne. La Bergerie, a mountain restaurant founded in 1984, adopted the Folie Douce concept in 2017, much to the delight of skiers.
“At first, we only played music on Wednesday afternoons, but the clients were so enthusiastic that we quickly realized we needed to offer a DJ and a musician every afternoon,” says owner Raphaël Astier. “When you’ve had a good meal in the sun, on a terrace with an incredible view of the mountains, you want to make the most of the spot, dance and have fun without waiting to head back to the lifts in the evening.”
Today, people really want to unwind and party.
The trend of festive mountain restaurants seems irresistible, and is even impacting addresses run by renowned chefs. Clément Bouvier, the talented Michelin-starred chef at Ursus in Tignes, is opening his first establishment on the slopes this winter.
Already in charge of Panoramic, a restaurant located at an altitude of 3,032 meters, at the foot of the Grande Motte Glacier, where guests enjoy lunch in the cosy decor of a traditional chalet, the chef is transforming Le Palet, further down the slopes, into a festive venue. While the Panoramic invites you to slip into cozy fur slippers for a warm lunch by the fireplace, the Palet invites you to dance on the outdoor tables.
“Today, people really want to unwind and party,” says Bouvier, whose initiative perfectly illustrates the festive avalanche that has descended upon mountaintop restaurants.
Ski fast, party hard
If skiers sometimes choose to end their day sipping cocktails on a terrace rather than racing down the slopes, it’s also because skiing has changed a great deal in recent years. Mountain professionals agree that, while the average skier covers roughly the same distance, the actual skiing time is no longer spread out over the whole day.
Skiers can now cover in one morning what they used to ski in an entire day.
“The ski lifts have become very fast. So you spend less time waiting, and you get to the top of the slopes quicker. The slopes, where the snow is well maintained, are faster to ski down, even for those with an average skill level of skiing,” says François Badjily, director of the Alpe d’Huez tourist office. “Skiers can now cover in one morning what they used to ski in an entire day 20 years ago.”
“When you’ve had a good morning of skiing, and you stop at 1 p.m. for lunch, you no longer have the energy to go back out on the slopes at 3 p.m, so you’d rather stay and dance on the terrace,” says Reversade, who has just invested 10 million euros to transform the old La Daille gondola lift station into a massive complex.
It will include a new restaurant (which is bound to be festive) and all the services typically found lower in the resort, such as equipment rental and a kids’ club, where young skiers returning from lessons can join creative and artistic workshops while their parents party on the nearby Folie Douce dance floor.
“We want to set the direction for the next 20 or 30 years. If there’s a lack of snow at the base of the slopes, we will need to offer the same services as in the resort but at a higher altitude,” Reversade says. “This is what we’re anticipating with this new facility, which will open in January 2026.”
Parties in the resort
While the party is in full swing on the slopes, it remains alive and well in the resort as well, where in recent years we’ve seen the emergence of the counterpart to festive mountain chalets. The Cocorico brand, created in Val d’Isère six years ago and now also present at Tignes. Open from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m., these festive bars aim to take over from mountain restaurants when skiers return to the resort.
“I wanted to create something complementary to the Folie Douce,” says owner Cyril Bonnevie. “We don’t have techno or bottles of champagne with smoke bombs. But we have live music to warm up, followed by a DJ playing popular hits from the 1970s-80s-90s, so everyone can dance and sing along.” The terrace at Cocorico turns into an outdoor dance hall, where you can sip a beer and party just like the good old days.
People are looking for places where they can dine and party in the same spot.
These “night establishments” had all but disappeared from the resorts. Val d’Isère once had as many as 10. But only two remain, including Doudoune, a club owned by the same proprietor as Cocorico. The Savoyard resort, which is constantly moving upmarket, has a new club this year.
It’s actually the legendary Dick’s Tea Bar, which opened in 1979. After hosting generations of partygoers, it is being transformed into IMA, a club that will host DJs familiar to Val d’Isère’s international clientele, who hear them in Ibiza, Mykonos or Saint-Tropez in the summer.
The club’s manager, Nicolas Spielmann, already plans to improve it and “add a restaurant component next year because, in the mountains, people are looking for places where they can dine and party in the same spot.”
Hotels in tune
The partying has also reached hotels, which increasingly include a festive component in their offerings. The Folie Douce Hôtel, for example, opened in 2018 in Chamonix, offering nightly entertainment, concerts and DJ sets in its many restaurants and bars. Another group has also made a name for itself with hotels where you don’t just sleep.
With the Rocky Pop brand, Romain Trollet has created mountain hotels where the common areas are designed to encourage guests to gather, listen to music, have fun taking photos in a decor reminiscent of the TV show Friends, or sing their hearts out in karaoke boxes that are always full.
Winter sports vacations have thus become mountain holidays where entertainment is a key component. This is well understood by the team behind the Experimental Cocktail Club (known for revolutionizing the world of mixology in Paris), which is opening its first hotel in the French Alps this winter. At the Experimental Chalet, opening in January in Val d’Isère, the bar is already set to be lively and musical until 2 a.m.
Managing the party
Making room for partygoers and families who want to sleep peacefully in the confined spaces of mountain resorts is not always easy. It requires monitoring bar sound systems and managing those who wander the streets late at night searching for the “last spot” for a drink.
In Val Thorens, this issue is tackled directly with the creation of a team of “ambassadors of respect” about 10 years ago, tasked with ensuring that night owls and early risers can coexist.
Yet some resorts have made not partying a selling point.
“A team of around 30 street mediators patrols from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. in the streets of the resort. They are bilingual and their mission is to combat noise disturbances and maintain calm in public spaces,” explains Vincent Lalanne, the director of Val Thorens’ tourist office. They are assisted by certified security agents who intervene in case of a problem before the municipal police or gendarmerie get involved.
Yet some resorts have made not partying a selling point. That is the case in La Plagne, which does not organize any music festivals and closely monitors establishments that could cause noise disturbances.
“I have to manage a population of vacationers who, overwhelmingly, do not want noise after 11 p.m. and want to enjoy the mountains for its vast spaces, calm, and nature,” says Jean-Luc Boch, mayor of La Plagne as well as president of France Montagnes and the Association of Mountain Resort Mayors.
For Boch, the 30 or so festive resorts should not overshadow the other 250 family-friendly resorts that need to find a good balance between those who want to dance and those who want to dream.
