We said yes three times.

For years our family ran a gift shop in Myoko — two of them, actually, together with relatives. When one of those relatives passed away, we closed the shops. My parents took a year off, and it didn't suit them. Standing behind a counter had kept them going. Without it, they seemed to lose a little of their spark.

My father had cooked in a mountain lodge his whole working life and had always said, quietly, that one day he'd like a small restaurant of his own. So I said: the shop's closed anyway — let's do it together. We opened in 2023, imagining we'd serve a handful of guests over the winter.

Almost every person who walked through the door was from somewhere else. Australia, mostly. New Zealand. Brazil. We spent that first winter working everything out as we went.

Then people started asking questions that had nothing to do with food. How do we get to the next resort? Is there anywhere to leave this bag? So we bought cars. We cleared space for luggage. And somewhere in there it stopped being a restaurant and started being a base.