Mandarin Oriental, Geneva Unveils a Festive Season with Kévin Germanier

Mandarin Oriental, Geneva has partnered with the Swiss designer Kévin Germanier for the festive season, dressing its lobby and MO Bar in gold and white installations made from his signature upcycled material. Around the design sits a complete winter programme: a festive menu at MO Bar from 16 November to 10 January, two couture-inspired Yule logs, a Galette des Rois for Epiphany, and bookable Christmas and New Year’s Eve dining at Ottolenghi Geneva and SACHI.

The installations set the tone from the moment of arrival. A firework-inspired, tree-shaped display fills the lobby, and the ceiling of MO Bar is transformed into a festive sky. Germanier’s work is built on upcycled material, and here it is rendered in a restrained palette of gold and white, which suits a hotel whose public rooms double as the city’s meeting places through December. Anyone who stops in for a drink or an afternoon pastry spends that time inside the collaboration itself.

The partnership also carries a note of national pride. Christian Wildhaber, the hotel’s newly appointed General Manager, is Swiss himself, and he describes the collaboration as a celebration of Swiss creativity and savoir-faire. It is a fitting first season for a new general manager, pairing a homegrown couture name with the culinary teams who will carry the theme through the bar, the pastry trolley and the hotel’s two restaurants.

At MO Bar, Head Bartender Christophe Pinto has created a signature cocktail for the season that combines vodka, bergamot liqueur and citrus-verbena. In a quiet echo of Germanier’s approach, the drink makes use of repurposed citrus peels, so the upcycling idea extends from the décor into the glass. An alcohol-free version is made with a Swiss-made gin from Winterthur, keeping the Swiss thread intact for guests who prefer to abstain.

The festive menu at the bar is completed by pastry chef Michael Perrichon, whose creations for the pastry trolley include a deconstructed Mont-Blanc and a vanilla mousse with hazelnut biscuit, pear, cranberry and buckwheat crunch. Both are composed with the season in mind: chestnut-led comfort in the first, and a brighter interplay of fruit, nut and texture in the second.

For those hosting at home, or celebrating elsewhere in the city, the hotel’s Yule logs are the season’s most portable expression of the collaboration. Perrichon has created two couture-inspired logs with Julien Dugourd, Executive Pastry Chef of Mandarin Oriental, Paris: one chocolate-hazelnut, one lemon. Each serves six people and costs CHF 79, available from 15 December to 2 January. They are sold online and at Globus, and require pre-ordering 48 hours ahead, a detail worth noting before the final days of Christmas week. After Christmas comes the Galette des Rois, which combines croissant pastry, almond frangipane and a pecan praline centre. It serves six at CHF 42 and is available from 26 December to 15 January, carrying the celebrations through Epiphany.

The hotel’s restaurants offer two distinct ways to see in the holidays. Ottolenghi Geneva runs a winter menu by Chef Maxime Martin from 1 November to 28 February, making it the longest-running element of the programme and a reason to visit well before or after the festive peak. For the holidays themselves, the restaurant adds a Christmas Eve menu and a New Year’s Eve sharing menu at CHF 165 per person, a format that suits families and groups of friends who want the evening to unfold around a shared table.

SACHI takes a more formal approach to the turn of the year, with a New Year’s Eve menu by Chef Mitsu at CHF 350 per person. Between the two restaurants, guests can choose the register of their evening, from convivial sharing plates to a composed, chef-led menu, without leaving the hotel.

For travellers planning a Geneva winter, the timing rewards some forethought. The programme opens gradually, with Ottolenghi’s winter menu from 1 November and the MO Bar festive menu from 16 November, and reaches its fullest between 15 December and 2 January, when the installations, the bar menu, the Yule logs and the holiday dinners all coincide. Those set on a Yule log should order two days in advance, and anyone planning New Year’s Eve at Ottolenghi or SACHI would be well advised to secure a table early, given the fixed capacity of a single night.

Source: Mandarin Oriental