August's New Openings — and Which Ones You Can Actually Book for an Event

A log-built chalet on the slope above Lucerne, gutted and rebuilt by hand over four months by host and caterer Dominik Schmitz, founder of Fine Dining by Schmitz. It runs on three words he keeps coming back to: Genuss, Privatsphäre, Gastfreundschaft — pleasure, privacy, hospitality.

The privacy part is not marketing. There is one table, up to ten people, and only ever one party on site. No other guests, no passing traffic, no second seating waiting for your room. A large terrace runs the length of the house into a garden with lounge corners, a Feuerring for cooking over open flame, and vegetable beds and edible flowers that go straight into the menu. It feels rural. It is in the middle of the city.

Behind the Stube sits a full professional kitchen — combi steamer, induction, grill — which you can hand to your own caterer or leave to the house. That flexibility is rare at this size, and it is the reason the room works as easily for a board meeting or a confidential client dinner as it does for a fiftieth birthday.

Best for: board dinners, strategy days that need to stay off-site and off-record, milestone birthdays, and small wedding dinners. If you have no occasion to fill it with, the Saturday "Samstags zu Gast" evenings sell the ten seats individually — six courses, pairings included, 6pm to 10.30pm.

Five floors, five different worlds, in a building the owner is lending out rent-free for roughly two and a half months before the renovation crews arrive. Ground floor: a bar and a courtyard, with work by Mexican artist Piero Lagonigro. First floor: Not So Romantic, an artist-run space with rotating exhibitions. Second floor: a dinner apartment built for eating together. Third floor: Lauter, a music listening studio. Top floor: Raven, a work lounge for technology, design and innovation.

Individual rooms can be requested through the booking form on the site, which is what makes this more than a nice place to have a drink. An offsite that starts with a workshop in the work lounge, moves down to the dinner apartment, and ends at the bar is a genuinely unusual day, and the building does all the work of making it feel like an occasion.

Best for: creative offsites, launch evenings and culture-adjacent brand events that want a room with an edge to it. Also worth the Wednesday 6pm talks on architecture and urbanism if you're scouting.

One caveat, and it matters: this is an interim use with a hard end date. The run finishes at the end of September, so it is a September plan, not a Q4 one.

A villa first documented in Zurich's records in 1447, long tied to the city's silk trade, now reborn as the city's first Lalique Boutique Hotel — 13 individually designed rooms and suites, Relais & Châteaux, tucked between the Old Town and the university quarter on a lane most people walk past.

Downstairs, the Florhof Bar & Brasserie opened at the same time under chef John-Benjamin Schiffmann — previously Restaurant Buech in Herrliberg and The Dolder Grand — with souschef Christian Hoffmann. Honest, seasonal cooking built on Swiss produce with the odd detour through Italy and France, served daily from noon to midnight, and a large planted terrace for the months that deserve it.

If you follow the trade press you'll know the opening was bumpier than the finished house suggests: three-star chef Christian Jürgens had been announced as culinary director and co-general manager, and he and the house parted ways by mutual agreement days before the doors opened. Tanja Wegmann now leads the property with hotel manager Kilian Rainalter, and the fine-dining Signature Restaurant is still on for late autumn with its concept to be announced. None of which changes what you can book today.

For events, the interesting room is the one underground. The historic barrel-vaulted wine cellar was preserved and restored during the renovation, and it can be taken for private tastings and small dinners — enquiries go through reception rather than any booking platform. There's also the Davidoff cigar salon, which is a very specific kind of after-dinner room and exactly right for a certain kind of evening.

Best for: small, high-end client dinners and celebration dinners where the address is part of the point. Terrace apéro in summer, wine cellar in winter.

The name is a promise the room then quietly overdelivers on. Chaat is India's street-snack tradition — the sharp, sweet, sour, crunchy things eaten standing up at a cart. What's opened on Seefeldstrasse is the opposite setting: an Indian dining room, in their own words, built for sitting down properly. Zurich has no shortage of Indian takeaway and very few rooms like this one.

The cooking is refined and unapologetically flavour-forward, with the tandoor doing a lot of the talking — grilled lamb chops, breads that arrive warm enough to be worth waiting for, and the kind of butter chicken people come back for. Lunch and dinner run as separate menus rather than one list served twice, so a midday client table and an evening one are genuinely different experiences, and the drinks list has clearly been built by someone who cares rather than assembled from a distributor's catalogue.

For an event, the appeal is that this food wants to be shared. Order across the menu and the table stops being a row of individual dinners and becomes one long conversation with everyone reaching for the same breads. Private bookings are available on request — worth an early email to hello@chaat.ch, since the room's regular hours are already tight: Tuesday to Friday for lunch and dinner, Saturday evenings only, closed Sunday and Monday.

Best for: team dinners and client dinners where you want the food to carry the evening, and anything that benefits from a room nobody at the table has been to yet.

The Basel modern-streetfood restaurant brings its Bangkok-inflected Asian fusion to Lucerne, in the new Rösslimatt quarter a few minutes from the station. Thai, Japanese and Vietnamese plates, a sushi counter, and — the part that matters here — a garden bar.

A large new restaurant with an outdoor bar, two minutes from a main station, in a brand-new quarter with no established queue for it yet: that is a very good set of conditions for a company apéro in September, while the evenings are still warm enough to stand outside.

Best for: late-summer and early-autumn apéros, and group dinners where people are arriving by train from three different cantons. The grand opening on Saturday 29 August runs apéro and bar from 4pm, dinner from 6.30pm, with live music and a DJ — dinner tables bookable in advance.

On the first floor of Zurich's main station, in the space that used to be the Time Lounge, run by Candrian Hospitality — Brasserie Lipp, Brasserie Schiller, Au Premier — in partnership with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Sixty seats, a front-row view of the platforms, and a menu that runs from sourdough breakfast through bowls and beef tartare to signature cocktails.

The reason it's on this list: two bookable meeting rooms, Debatte and Perspektive, available by the half or full day. A meeting room inside the station is a slightly boring idea that turns out to solve a real problem — when your participants are coming in from Bern, Basel and St. Gallen, the walk from platform to table is about ninety seconds, and nobody has to find an office. Orders also come with up to two hours of complimentary nzz.ch access, which is a nice touch for a workshop day.

Best for: half-day workshops and board meetings with participants travelling in, interview days, and the kind of client catch-up that has to happen between two trains. Open Mon–Fri 7.30–22.00, Sat 9.00–22.00, Sun 9.00–21.00.

Billed as Switzerland's largest multisport hall for freestyle and trend sports: 13,000 m² and ten activity zones, including basketball, parkour, trampolines, climbing, paddleball, pickleball and a zipline coaster. Indoors, year-round, weather irrelevant.

What makes it a venue rather than a leisure centre is that they've planned for groups from the start. Five Mind Spaces for the sitting-down half of the day — FOCUS and BOOST for four, FLOW for six, IMPACT for ten, VISION for twelve — and an event zone, THE STUDIO, at 205 m² for up to 75 people, offered for large events, workshops and training as well as sporting formats. There's an on-site eatery, and group bookings are handled explicitly for corporate events, clubs, school classes and birthdays.

This is the format we get asked for constantly and rarely find: a team day where the activity and the meeting are the same booking, in the same building, and the afternoon doesn't require a coach transfer. About 20 minutes from Zurich by car.

Best for: team days and offsites of 20–75 that need to be active without being a ropes course, kick-off events, and family days. Book the Mind Space and the movement block together — that's the whole advantage.

A Mediterranean restaurant and bar a minute from St. Gallen station. The kitchen describes its plates as a journey along the Greek coast, through the souks of the Levant and over the hills of southern Italy — fire first, then acidity, everything shared at the table.

Two details make this genuinely useful for company dinners in eastern Switzerland. First, everything is built for sharing, which is the most forgiving format there is for a table of twelve with twelve different appetites. Second, all meat is halal-certified — which means one restaurant works for the whole team without a separate conversation, and that is far harder to find than it should be. The bar runs to midnight, so the evening doesn't have to end when the plates are cleared.

Best for: inclusive team dinners and client evenings in St. Gallen where the group is mixed and you'd rather not negotiate the menu. Kitchen Tue–Sun 11.30–21.30, bar until midnight, closed Mondays.

A three-week Vietnamese street food pop-up from Sportklub, running Thursday to Saturday evenings inside the Werkstatt Augustin event space. CHF 62 for a shared three-course menu — appetisers, mains with rice, dessert — with add-ons like grilled skewers, kingfish sashimi and shrimp toast. Vegetarian by default, vegan on request, Vietnamese beer and traditional iced coffee to finish.

It's a group dinner that has already been designed as a group dinner: one price, one menu, shared plates, in a room that is an event space rather than a restaurant borrowed for the night. For a small team dinner in Lucerne over the next two weeks, that removes most of the decisions.

Best for: team dinners of six to twenty in Lucerne, 6.00–10.30pm on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays — but only until 5 September.