"Do you remember the first time you ate a tartiflette?" The odd question was put by Stéphane Chalabi, the president of the Amis du Val de Thônes, to a few friends gathered in a large and beautiful room of the Thônes media-library museum, at the gateway to the Aravis mountain range in Haute-Savoie, in the French Alps. "It must have been at a ski club party in the 1980s," said one of the members of the organization, which promotes the region's history and heritage, after a few seconds' thought. "My mother cooked one just after discovering the dish in a restaurant," said Chalabi, dating the experience to the same decade. "But she'd never made it before, and neither had my grandparents."

Before the 1980s, then, the tartiflette was largely unknown. And yet, some 30 years later, in 2017 to be precise, tartiflette appeared at the very top of the list of recipes most searched for by French internet users on Google. Its entry and success in French popular culture have been meteoric.

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