On a Friday night in August, the shul in the Edelweiss Hotel in St Moritz is packed with black-clad men swaying to the Shabbat service.
An overflow of some 20 men sit in the adjacent lounge which doubles as the women's section, at that hour still devoid of female presence. All of a sudden, a bony elderly man wearing a dark suit and homburg bursts in, shouting in a mixture of Yiddish and Shwitzerdeutsch, the local dialect.
"Kein ist ezras noshim [this is the women's section]," he screams, gesticulating wildly. Few move, even after he repeats his performance. Most have seen similar tantrums before from the hotel's owner and regard his combination of Orthodox piety and Swiss meticulousness with amusement - and as much an establishment as the 130-year-old hotel itself.
Leopold "Poldi" Bermann, now in his mid-70s, was born into the business. His parents ran what is billed as "the world's oldest kosher hotel" and nicknamed Poldi Towers by British guests . But if anything, Herr Bermann's brand of mad comedy exceeds that of Basil Fawlty. On one memorable occasion, a guest who complained too loudly about the Shabbat cheesecake found the following day's packed lunch, prepared by the hotel's kitchen, consisted only of hunks of the offending cake.
