Where should I eat in Swiss Alps, and which local food or drink is worth trying?

The Swiss protected-designation system is small enough to be useful. Twenty-five AOP products and sixteen IGP products is a list you can hold in your head, and the federal account of it is clear about what the label is for: only specialities produced in their region of origin and according to an authentic artisan recipe now qualify, which the Swiss authorities present both as preserving traditional know-how and as a reassurance to consumers.

The first product to receive Swiss AOP status was L'Etivaz cheese — the register's founding entry, and a mountain cheese rather than an industrial one. The best-known names on the list are the two most travelers arrive already wanting: Gruyère and Raclette. Vacherin fribourgeois is also AOP, which matters at the table because it is the traditional partner to Gruyère in a fondue rather than a substitute for it.

The list reaches well past cheese, and that is where it becomes a genuine guide to eating here rather than a shopping list. The Geneva spiny cardoon received AOP in 2003 and the Rheintaler Ribelmais in 2000 — a thistle vegetable and a maize variety, both with protected status. Ordering by designation in the Swiss Alps means ordering the things a valley actually produces instead of the things a menu assumes you came for.

"Produced in its region of origin to an authentic artisan recipe" is the operative test, and it has a practical consequence: a cheese sold as Gruyère AOP is making a claim about where and how it was made that a cheese sold as "Swiss gruyère-style" is not. In a region where almost every restaurant serves melted cheese in some form, the designation is the only reliable way to tell a protected product from a generic one.

• Ask for the designation, not the dish — AOP on the label is the enforceable claim; the dish name is not.
• Try the first one — L'Etivaz was the first Swiss product ever granted AOP status, which makes it the most historically interesting cheese on any list here.
• Go past the cheese board — The Geneva spiny cardoon, AOP since 2003, and Rheintaler Ribelmais, AOP since 2000, are both protected and both rarely ordered by visitors.

With only 25 AOP and 16 IGP products nationally, many excellent regional foods carry no designation at all — the register identifies protected products, not the best ones, and a valley speciality outside it is not thereby inferior. On entry, the European Commission's short-stay rule caps a visit at a maximum of 90 days within any 180-day period across the Schengen Area, which includes Switzerland, so a long food-led tour of the Alps needs to be counted against that single allowance.

The Swiss Alps things-to-do answer in this group covers the Aletsch glacier and the Valais products that come from the property's southern side; the when-to-visit answer explains how altitude governs the season.