At some hotels, food is an afterthought: Breakfast buffets are bland, in-room mini bars are stocked with generic snacks, and lobby bars are lackluster. But other resorts understand that we don’t simply factor food into an itinerary; many people plan their entire trip around eating, hoping to get to the heart of local cuisine and dine at the area’s best restaurants without ever leaving the property.
These culinary resorts will help you build an entire vacation around great meals. If you want to get your hands dirty, resorts on working farms have guests harvesting produce that will end up on their dinner plates that night, and some properties send visitors off on fishing and foraging expeditions to find their own meals. Other spots keep it more low-key with award-winning restaurants, special wine tastings, and wellness-minded retreats serving homegrown juices. No matter how you want to engage with the food that will power your trip, these 10 culinary resorts are the best places in the U.S. to have a truly delicious stay.
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Wildflower Farms, Auberge Collection
Gardiner, New York
Made up of 65 freestanding cottages, Wildflower Farms gives guests a taste of farm life — albeit an incredibly chic version. Guests can start the day with a complimentary tour of the 6-acre farm and a visit to feed the resort’s Icelandic sheep and chicken, then pick up a few eggs to bring over to the on-site restaurant Clay for an incredibly fresh breakfast. Other food-focused activities include suiting up in beekeeping gear to learn how to make honey, taking a guided foraging walk, or stirring up a cocktail using ingredients grown on-site in a class hosted in the resort’s cooking school barn.
Clay serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a cozy dining room that centers a massive wood-burning fireplace. The menu changes seasonally to feature lamb and pork raised just steps from the kitchen, plus a selection of the 14,000 pounds of fruit, vegetables, and herbs that the farm produces annually. The beverage program also has local roots: Wine director Vanessa Price has built a 7,000-bottle cellar that shines a light on New York’s often-overlooked Finger Lakes and North Fork wine regions, and ingredients like carrot eau de vie show up in martinis.
Quercus
Gay, Georgia
With just four cabins situated on 3,800 acres of working ranch, Quercus is a small culinary resort that punches well above its weight. Chiara Visconti di Modrone and her husband Angelos Pervanas originally launched Quercus as a regenerative farming project an hour outside Atlanta before teaming up with acclaimed Atlanta restaurateurs to morph it into a full-scale culinary escape. Now the all-inclusive experience features private saunas and cold plunge pools, holistic wellness consultations, and activities like horse training or kayaking in the Flint River.
Guests are encouraged to kick off their visit with a garden tour so they understand the property’s commitment to biodynamic farming principles and recognize the rare varieties of turmeric and uncommon peppers that will later appear on their plates. The resort offers three meals per day, along with snacks like beef jerky and gochujang okra chips stocked in each room. Each meal can be enjoyed in the restaurant spaces on the property or delivered in a wicker picnic basket through the resort’s charming take on room service. Uberto is the pinnacle of Quercus’s culinary experiences, a 10-plus course tasting menu helmed by chef Ryan Smith, whose Atlanta restaurant Staplehouse earned a Michelin star. The menu changes with the seasons, but mainstays like clarified curry made with lemongrass and galangal from the farm’s tropical greenhouse showcase an essential truth: Chefs spend all week in the kitchen and fermentation lab crafting each dish, but the garden has been working on dinner all year.
Mii Amo
Sedona, Arizona
Mii Amo is an adults-only wellness resort tucked into the red rocks of Sedona’s Boynton Canyon vortex, which is supposedly one of the most powerful hubs for spiritual and healing energy in the area. It has everything one would expect at a luxury wellness retreat: lodging in one of 23 cozy casitas, a daily credit to book treatments at the 40,000-square-foot spa, an array of sound baths and meditations, and guided hikes and mountain bike rides through the canyon.
But unlike some other wellness resorts, Mii Amo has a top-notch culinary program as well. During all-inclusive stays ranging from three to 10 nights, guests get three meals per day at the on-site restaurant, Hummingbird, along with unlimited juice bar visits to pick up protein-packed smoothies, ginger shots, and sleep tonics. While menus are rooted in seasonal produce from the chef’s garden, the resort doesn’t believe in total restriction so sweet treats, alcohol, and caviar are available to add a little indulgence to your stay. Book one of the weekly nutrition classes or juicing demonstrations to learn how to recreate the nourishing fare served at Mii Amo after returning home.
Seminary Hill
Callicoon, New York
On a hillside in the Catskills, Susan Manning and Doug Doetsch built a cidery, farm-to-table restaurant, and hotel on the same land that Doetsch’s family has farmed for five generations. Eight Shaker-inspired, apartment-style accommodations are built into two 19th-century historic buildings and each has views of the nearby Delaware River and the cidery on which the resort is centered.
The 12-acre orchard features rows upon rows of trees bearing 60 different varieties of apples and pears. The resort offers weekend tours of the orchard, plus cider tastings. Cider-maker Joshua Hinchman turns the fruit into an ever-expanding portfolio of traditional cider, while also experimenting with other beverages like fortified apple wines and cyser, a type of mead. All tastings are hosted in a barn that was built into the hillside using reclaimed wood that once supported the original Tappan Zee Bridge, and the structure is also passive house-certified, making it the world’s first cidery to receive that energy efficiency designation. Apples find their way onto executive chef and culinary director Edwyn Ferrari’s menu as well, so digging into custardy cider posset at the end of a meal in the resort’s restaurant feels full circle.
Appellation Healdsburg
Healdsburg, California
This Healdsburg hotel is the flagship property from Appellation, a hotel collection co-founded by chef Charlie Palmer and Christopher Hunsberger, who spent more than 35 years working for Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. As a self-described culinary hotel, the 108-room resort set lofty expectations for itself, but Appellation Healdsburg delivers with three restaurants, a packed schedule of food-focused activities, and a premier location in the heart of Sonoma County.
Folia Bar & Kitchen is the resort’s premium restaurant, and it offers a three-course menu of local ingredients from purveyors like Hog Island Oyster Co. and Sonoma Bee Company. For guests who want to try their hand in the kitchen, the resort offers a variety of hands-on cooking classes, some of which are taught by Palmer himself. Since the hotel counts hundreds of wineries as neighbors, it invites a different winemaker to the property every Friday to host a guided tasting. But when it’s time to venture off the property, guests can also book with the concierge to get special access to Sonoma County producers like Knights Bridge Winery, Bricoleur Vineyards, and Dry Creek Vineyard for behind-the-scenes tours and tastings.
Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Organic Farm
Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, New Mexico
Los Poblanos is a historic inn dating back to 1932 where lavender grows in wide, fragrant rows and fruit trees line the paths between buildings. The property was designed by seminal architect John Gaw Meem in classic Santa Fe style with pitched tin roofs that nod to the site’s history as a dairy farm and the original 1934 hand-painted grain silos still stand on site.
Though it no longer produces dairy or serves as the headquarters of a larger ranch, a 25-acre organic farm is the heart of the property. Guests can take a formal tour of the greenhouses or wander the resort’s gardens, orchards, and cottonwood trees, which are fed by community-managed irrigation systems called acequias that are older than the state itself. All that benefits Campo, the property’s signature restaurant, where the flavors of the Rio Grande Valley appear on every plate. In addition to homegrown produce, the restaurant sources meat and other ingredients from local purveyors including Native American Beef, a program that supports Indigenous cattle producers who faced hurdles competing in the commercial meat industry. Don’t miss the Farm Shop with lavender-scented products, hot sauce from the garden’s peppers, and the estate’s handcrafted gin, which is produced in the resort’s distillery just down the road in downtown Albuquerque.
Ojai Valley Inn and Spa
Ojai, California
The Ojai Valley Inn has long been lauded as a wellness escape thanks to its 31,000-square-foot spa and location at the center of the hippie enclave of Ojai, but the resort is also a culinary destination in its own right. With six restaurants and bars on the property, options range from a casual pub serving quintessential burgers and local beer to a renowned four-course tasting menu at Olivella, where guests will eat dessert drizzled in honey from the resort’s apiary and order wine from the 10,000-bottle cellar.
In addition to the restaurants and bars, the resort recently poured $20 million into an epicurean center called the Farmhouse, where culinary ambassador and beloved California chef and restaurateur Nancy Silverton curates a slate of cookbook talks, cooking classes, and special tasting menu dinners with visiting chefs and buzzy winemakers. It’s also the site of the annual Ojai Food & Wine festival, held in March, which brings renowned chefs from around the world to the peaceful valley.
Grand Hotel
Mackinac Island, Michigan
For travelers looking to be spoiled for choice, look no further than the Grand Hotel. Abundance is wrapped into every aspect of the resort, from its 660-foot porch that offers views of the idyllic car-free island to 388 Victorian-style guest rooms dressed up in maximalist candy-colored decor.
The property is not lacking in options on the food front either: It has 13 different bars and restaurants. The elegant main dining room serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but the peak time to visit is for nightly live entertainment from the Grand Hotel Orchestra and a five-course menu that rotates every three days to highlight a different type of cuisine. Other restaurants are just as grand; the Woods Restaurant serves cozy Bavarian dishes in a dining room that feels like a lodge with a roaring fireplace, while the Jockey Club serves seafood towers and steakhouse classics in a room outfitted in saddle leather. More casual picks are also available like Detroit-style pies at Mackinac Island Pizza Company or old-school sundaes made with scoops of Guernsey Farms Dairy ice cream at Sadie’s Ice Cream Parlor.
Windy Hill Farm
Loudon, Tennessee
When visitors check into one of the rustic cabins at Windy Hill Farm and Preserve, a retreat and upland preserve in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, there are plenty of ways to get involved in cultivating the food that will eventually end up on their plates. The all-inclusive experience features activities like beekeeping demonstrations, bourbon tastings, and cooking classes hosted by executive chef Ben Warwick, and every evening ends with an opportunity to make s’mores around a campfire. The resort has also recently launched themed dinners that offer built-in lessons on the surrounding Appalachian region. The first in the series is called Watershed, which tells the story of how water flows from the highlands surrounding the resort to the Gulf in 10 delicious courses.
But some of the most popular ways to spend a day on the 650 acres of rolling hills are more hands-on. Guests who opt to go crappie fishing on the Tennessee River will cast their reels in search of the native fish, and those who get lucky can have their catch cleaned and cooked at Wilder, the hotel’s restaurant. Quail hunting is also popular. Each hunt begins with a hearty breakfast at Wilder before guests head out with professional guides and sporting dogs. Proceeds from the hunting operation are used to fund large-scale land conservation and native habitat restoration.
Hidden Pond
Kennebunkport, Maine
Hidden Pond is a retreat where the quintessential clapboard cottages are as beloved as the property’s farm-to-table restaurant. Many of the accommodations were recently redesigned, and part of the revamp included outfitting the in-unit kitchens with top-of-the-line Breville appliances. However, you may not even bother firing up the appliances once you try the fresh-baked pastries delivered to each room by picnic basket, and dig into the menu at the on-site restaurant Earth.
The restaurant is popular with locals as well as hotel guests, and the menu is built around produce pulled from the resort’s organic garden. Summer brings heirloom tomatoes and micro basil while cooler months stock pumpkins and root vegetables like celeriac. It’s all paired with fresh-caught lobster and other local seafood, so you’ll also get a taste of the Atlantic that inspired the trip to Maine in the first place.
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