Elevated dining at Gurgl
There’s a particular kind of skiing holiday where lunch matters as much as the lift pass – where you’d rather linger over a long, slow plate than hammer down to the bar at three. If that sounds like you, Gurgl might be the next name to add to your list.
Sitting at 1,930 metres at the very top of the Ötztal valley, where the road runs out, and the glaciers take over, Gurgl is one of the highest villages in Austria. Its altitude gives it two things in abundance: snow that lasts well into spring, and a stillness you don’t tend to find in the bigger, busier resorts further down the valley.
Roman Huber
What you also find here, surprisingly, is some of the most serious cooking in the Alps. For a small mountain village, Gurgl punches well above its weight: a Michelin-starred restaurant, several toque-awarded kitchens, and a wider line-up of dining rooms that take their work seriously. The cooking covers a real spread, too – from rib-sticking Tyrolean classics done properly, to contemporary tasting menus that read like a love letter to the surrounding valley.
On the traditional end, you’ll find Gröstl crisped in dripping, Kasspatzln glossy with mountain cheese and fried onions, and game from the surrounding forests slow-cooked into ragùs that have clearly had time and care lavished on them. On the modern end, kitchens are leaning into the produce of the Ötztal: alpine char, mountain herbs, hay-smoked dairy, and stone pine – that resinous, faintly piney note Austrians thread through everything from sorbets to schnapps to devastating effect.
It helps that the setting does half the work. Eating dinner at this kind of altitude, with the peaks lit pink at sundown and the valley quiet below, gives even the simplest plate a sense of occasion. There’s also something about the cold, clean air and short growing season up here that seems to concentrate flavour – ask any of the chefs, and they’ll tell you the same.
The skiing and snowboarding, of course, is excellent. Gurgl’s height makes it one of the most snow-sure resorts to visit in the Alps, and there’s plenty to do beyond the pistes: ski touring, snowshoeing, ice climbing, and cross-country skiing through the woods. But the rhythm of a stay here is much gentler than at the big-name resorts. The pace is slower, the crowds smaller, and the focus, refreshingly, is more on quality rather than volume.
Gurgl bills itself as the Diamond of the Alps, and the description fits: small, polished and unassumingly luxurious, with a tight focus on doing a few things as well as it possibly can. Come for the snow, by all means – but stay for the food.