Francisco "Pancho" Heinz
Founder
Argentine and Spanish, living in Val de Bagnes, below Verbier. Came up through hospitality: reception, chef de partie, guest services.
Argentine fire in the Alps
Our story
Pizca is Argentine live fire catering in the Swiss Alps. We cook asado live, over real wood, in front of the guests, wherever the party is: a chalet deck, a terrace, a vineyard, the snow. In Argentina, cooking over fire is how people gather, not a show. We brought that to the Alps, where people already gather outside, in the cold, around something warm.
“I cook for your guests like they are my own.”
Pancho comes from hospitality: reception, chef de partie, guest services. He learned how a guest should feel before he learned how to run a business.
Cooking on its own was never enough. If he could not see the room, talk to people before they ate and after, watch them while they ate, the work lost its point. Restaurant kitchens gave him the cooking and took the room away. So he put the two back together: the way Argentines host, and the way Argentines cook, which is over fire.
He cooks with Octa and a rotating crew of friends. Always friends. That is not a detail we hide, it is the reason the evening feels the way it does.
The name
Pizca means a little bit of something, an amount nobody can measure. It is what your grandmother says when she gives you a recipe. A pizca of this, a pizca of that. She says it like that because she cannot really tell you how much she puts in. There is a secret ingredient somewhere in there and it never makes the list. That is the pizca.
The first one
The first one was a lunch at the Verbier Golf Club. Eighty people. Verbier Location and Savills were putting it on and they wanted something Argentine. My friend Santi worked at Verbier Location, and I had told him I wanted to start cooking with fire, so he put my name in. They loved it.
My parents, Tony and Claudia, happened to be visiting Verbier that week. So obviously I put them to work. My mum cutting bread like crazy, my dad on the plancha with the vegetables.
Pancho
5.0Google rating
15Google reviews
The team
Octa
Logistics
Skate and snowboard instructor, blacksmith, carpenter. He stays calm when nothing else is. He runs the logistics, which means he decides what gets loaded, what arrives and when.
The crew
Friends, always
A rotating crew of friends. That is not a detail we hide: it is the reason the evening feels the way it does.