La Maison du Prieur: An Enchanting Lunch Spot in Romainmôtier, Switzerland

“Bonjour,” a woman says as she grips her walker, wearing a bright yellow dress as she steps out of a hair salon. A gentleman tips his hat to us as he walks downhill towards a red tractor, perhaps noticing that we were out-of-towners. We wander along the paved sidewalk into Romainmôtier — population 450 — past a mountainous pasture of miniature ponies and, I was not dreaming, a real Swiss turkey. The nearby farm had a hand-painted “self-service” sign to purchase eggs and milk. I wondered if anyone here even felt the need to lock their doors at night.

The reason we’d driven two hours in Jeune Genevois holiday traffic was just around the corner, through an arched vault passing the 10th-century abbey where Supremes legend Diana Ross held her second wedding in 1986. I gasped as we turned right, spotting the brightly painted orange building with Bern-bear-adorned red shutters.

La Maison du Prieur was empty this Thursday afternoon, save for a few German-speaking hikers taking a break for coffee. Three homemade pies sat in a glass case, beckoning us in with the allure of a crust that wasn’t too perfect to be store-bought — slightly burned, with uneven edges, as if pressed from someone’s fingertips.

La Maison du Prieur holds a special charm, perhaps in part because it doesn’t feel victim to stampedes of tourists. It was almost as if we’d found a well-kept secret in the palm of our hands, treading carefully so as not to spill out any of its magic.

To call the medieval marvel a castle would be historically inaccurate. We learned it was a Prior’s house — after some thorough Google research, I found out this meant a dedicated space to host elites on pilgrimage routes. Romainmôtier sat on the way to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain.

A small promenade outside La Maison du Prieur holds a rusty sign etched with the name Katharina von Arx, a journalist from a village outside Zurich who, with her husband, stumbled upon the property while vacationing in Switzerland in 1956. They purchased the abandoned building for next to nothing, spending roughly 3 million CHF on renovations over the following four to five decades.

Once a reception hall for passing aristocrats and church officials of the highest order, the building’s glorious past had been left in ruins. Locals criticized the purchase — some went so far as to say the shack should be burned rather than turned into a home for out-of-towners who simply wanted a place to write, photograph, and raise their only daughter.

Reading translated German articles about von Arx’s life after her passing in 2013, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of disappointment that our paths had never crossed. She described herself as rebellious, going against the grain of what society deemed proper — refusing to write with the hand that wrote beautifully, choosing the wild one instead, refusing to eat meat, refusing school because she found the concept of grades self-deprecating.

“In order to survive, I had to build my own counter-world, in which I have lived ever since.”

Like with movies, I believe in forming my own opinion before sifting through other people’s reviews. I was glad I hadn’t seen anything about La Maison du Prieur before our day there — it let me take it in with fresh eyes. Sitting on the same side of the table in the sunshine, Laurent and I both ordered the Cornish game hen with a crunchy rösti (the chef, we learned, was Bernois after all), washed down with a local Swiss Chasselas and two espressos, with one tarte à la crème and two spoons.

The jovial server kept coming back to our table, asking about our journey from Geneva and even offering us a tour of the venue. We learned that after von Arx’s passing in 2013, La Maison du Prieur was acquired by the Fondation de Romainmôtier in 2018, and has been managed in partnership with Events & Saveurs Sàrl since 2019. Upstairs, he mentioned, a 70th birthday party was about to take over the room — the first of a season of gatherings before the venue’s autumn brunches kick off in mid-September.

La Maison du Prieur was such a special experience that we plan to return to: the history of an abandoned relic, restored for a community to enjoy all over again.