Horse farms and hundreds of perfect-circle hay bales line the Greene County Veterans Memorial Highway. Sure, we could take Interstate 20 from Atlanta, but this route feels much more appropriate to The Ritz-Carlton Lodge, Reynolds Plantation — old barns and tiny white Baptist churches dotting the verdant landscape, an occasional rusty pickup truck, the porches of one antebellum town after another. Winding past the porticoed homes of Madison and over the placid expanse of Lake Oconee, I think, this is the Georgia that Ray Charles had on his mind.
We hang a left off the highway and there, just past the 11th tee of one of the world's most exalted golf courses, lies Reynolds Plantation, celebrating all things Southern. But if you're thinking chicken nuggets and popsicles, think again — as I did upon spilling a flute of champagne into my lobster salad during a road-weary nibble upon arrival. ("You know you're not roughing it when … " my husband, Justin, joked, handing me his cloth napkin stitched with The Ritz-Carlton lion.)
In the late 1800s a pair of cousins purchased this formidable portion of lushly wooded lakeside land as a retreat for their families, complete with a hunting lodge and all the fish they could catch. They named the lodge "Linger Longer" to express their desire to stay on at their most beloved place when work called them back to reality. …
Click here to read more in the Summer 2012 issue of The Ritz-Carlton Magazine
It shouldn't come as a surprise that the annual gathering of Germany's greatest chefs takes place in the shadows of a car-manufacturing complex. The Volkswagen power plant, a brick structure breathtaking in its rough romanticism, is directly visible from the window of Sven Elverfeld's kitchen, which is the kitchen of the Michelin-three-starred Aqua Restaurant in The Ritz-Carlton, Wolfsburg. Since 2000, when he became Aqua's chef de cuisine, Elverfeld has invited a select group of fellow chefs to participate in his autumn "kitchen party," an informal name for what has become one of the culinary events of the year. Its ascent mirrors the progression of German cooking over the past decade and the arrival of the Neue Deutsche Schule, the new school of young German chefs who turned away from the formality of French cooking, and the excesses of Spanish modernist techniques, to examine their own heritage. The new-school cuisine isn't purely German, though it might playfully reference such old-school staples as sausage, sauerkraut and spaetzle. Its ingredients are both local and international, but at its core is a sensibility and technique that is quintessentially Germanic: precise, creative and unflamboyantly excellent.
For the 250 diners who are lucky enough to get reservations, the kitchen party is an opportunity to not only meet Germany's greatest chefs, but to hang out in the kitchen, look over chefs' shoulders and, if they are brave enough, offer some advice from their own cooking experience. For the chefs, it's a chance to share camaraderie while also quietly checking out the competition. …