Review of Pizzeria Trattoria Alfredo in Adelboden

You can't spend a week and a half with eight teenagers without going out for pizza at least once, so I asked the trusty young staff members at Our Chalet in Adelboden where in town they would recommend we go.  The overwhelming response was Trattoria Alfredo on Dorfstrasse, the main - virtually the only - drag in town.  It's probably ordinarily not necessary, but since it was New Year's Eve we made a reservation for the eleven of us.  The restaurant, like every establishment in Adelboden, is in a traditional wood chalet, and the interior is equally charming with exposed timber framing and pretty faux windows with lighted scenes of a Swiss meadow.

New Year's Eve at Trattoria Alfredo in Adelboden.

The girls learned a few things about European restaurant dining that night.  First, pepperoni pizza is not pepperoni pizza.  "Pepperoni" in German, Italian, and I think a couple other languages, means bell pepper, not the sausage.  So if you want pepperoni - the spicy sausage - on your pizza, you have to order a cheese pizza with salami.  And a cheese pizza is usually called Pizza Margherita.  In our case at Trattoria Alfredo we ordered the Pizza Margherita and had to pay 3 francs extra for the salami topping.  It was delicious and hit the spot on a rainy winter evening.

The second thing my lovely group of girls learned was that drinking water does not arrive unbidden at the table.  (Nowadays, I guess, it doesn't always in the U.S. anymore either.  Conservation efforts.)  But boy, were they surprised when they asked for a couple of pitchers of tap water and were told they cost 2.20 francs each!  Absolutely a crime, they all insisted.

I ordered the pasta carbonara which was also very good, and whipped out my own bottled water from my backpack to drink (flavored with a Crystal Light On-the-Go Flavor Packet - essential for me when I travel).  The total bill for nine entrées shared by eleven people was 129.30 francs, about $140 at the time.  The girls also learned that the tip is customarily included in the bill in most European countries, but it's a good idea to acquaint yourself with regional tipping practices.  It would have been kind of me to give our waitress a little extra for her patience with eight indecisive and non-German speaking teenagers, but she didn't make much of an effort to smile or hide her slight annoyance, so I didn't.