Bernerhof Inn

The Hotel

The Bernerhof Inn occupies an 1880s farmhouse on US Route 302 in Glen, the unincorporated village inside the town of Bartlett that sits at the foot of the Bear Notch road, between Jackson Village and Bartlett proper. The building opened as Pleasant Valley Hall in 1893 as a Bartlett-area summer-boarder inn; the Irving family acquired the property in 1928 and ran it as Pleasant Valley Farm through the Depression and the Second World War. Claire and Charles Zumstein purchased the inn in 1955, renamed it Bernerhof, 'the house of Berne', for the Zumsteins' Swiss home city, and ran it for the next forty years as the Mount Washington Valley's Swiss-themed restaurant-with-rooms.

The Zumsteins introduced the fondue-and-raclette dinner programme that ran every Friday and Saturday from 1955 onward, the cookery-school programme that brought guest chefs from Bern and Zurich for the alpine-cuisine demonstrations, and the four-hundred-bin wine cellar that runs an unusually deep Swiss-and-Austrian and Alsace selection. The inn changed hands several times after the Zumstein sale; the current ownership took the property in 2014 and ran a multi-million-dollar phased restoration through 2017, the kitchen rebuilt to commercial-grade for the cookery school, the twelve guest rooms reconfigured to en-suite (the original 1893 building had shared baths down the hall), the wine cellar climate-controlled, the dining room and pub-bar re-panelled.

Twelve rooms run across the original 1893 main building and the adjacent 1920s addition. All twelve have en-suite bathrooms (the 2015 restoration's signature upgrade), gas fireplaces in the seven larger categories, and the Mountain View aspect on the upper-floor rooms. The Bartlett Junior Suite (the corner room at the front of the main building, with the gas fireplace, the soaking tub, and the Bear Notch view) is the property's signature accommodation. No two rooms are the same, individual eaves, dormers, and floor-plates throughout the 1893 building, and the inn is adults-preferred (children twelve and over) in the main building, with the two larger Carriage House rooms accepting families.

The Bernerhof Tap Room and the candlelit dining room run the Friday-and-Saturday fondue programme (the Zumstein original recipe, Gruyère and Emmentaler base, the kirsch on the side), the Friday-night raclette, and the rest-of-the-week three-course prix-fixe (the menu rotates to the season, the Swiss-and-French alpine emphasis intact). The cookery-school programme runs every other Saturday afternoon May through November; the wine cellar tour runs Tuesday and Thursday evenings. The inn is dog-friendly in the two Carriage House rooms, Wi-Fi runs property-wide, and the location at the foot of the Bear Notch road puts Storyland (the children's amusement park), Attitash alpine ski area, and the Wildcat River for trout fishing within five minutes by car.

Best Occasion Fit

Practical Information

Also Great in Bretton Woods