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Eight hotel kitchens from The Aficionados Store, from a Sicilian masseria to a Perthshire estate, where a Christmas gift voucher buys the dinner, the suite upstairs, or both.
Every good dinner ends with a small logistical problem: getting home. The taxi that never comes, the last train, the friend nursing a sparkling water while everyone else orders the dessert wine. At the eight hotels gathered here, the problem solves itself with a staircase. Finish the cheese, carry the last glass up with you, and your suite is a few steps from the table.
That is the quiet luxury behind this year’s gift for foodies from The Aficionados Store. Each of these hotels sells its own gift voucher, bought directly from the people who run the kitchen, and most can be redeemed against a room, a restaurant experience or a combination of the two. A few offer a set dinner as a present in its own right. All of them sit on Europe’s culinary trails, where the cooking is the reason to make the journey and the room upstairs is the reason to stay the night.
We begin in Sicily, where farm-to-table was never a movement, simply how the island has always eaten, and travel north through the Alps to Amsterdam and the Scottish Highlands. The thread running through them is a kitchen that knows exactly where its food comes from, and hosts who would much rather you lingered.
In the Madonie foothills near Polizzi Generosa, the Saeli-Rizzuto family have farmed the same five hundred hectares since 1870. Susafa, their restored masseria, is now run by Manfredi Rizzuto under a plain credo: sow the future. In practice that means organic agriculture, biodiverse rewilding and zero-kilometre cooking, so guests eat what the estate grows, which is most of what arrives on the plate. This is Mediterranean food at its most direct, served in stone farm buildings where peasant simplicity and baroque flourish share the candlelight, out in the wheat of the other Sicily.
The Susafa gift card comes in three values, €120, €280 and €450, digital or printed, and can be personalised. The digital card downloads the moment it is bought, which makes it the most forgiving last-minute present on this list. Printed cards travel by courier, so order those by 10 December.
At 1,218 metres on a sunny slope above Engelberg, Villa Hundert is a nine-room foodie basecamp run by John, Christian and Anna Lisa, a Canadian and two Scandinavians, all snowboarders. Honeyed timber, slate floors and wood burners set the scene. Dinner is a four-course-plus menu that changes daily with the seasons: forest-fresh in spring, sweet in summer, smoky in autumn and, in winter, all pickles and ferments. The Nordic instinct for keeping the harvest meets a Swiss mountain larder, and the menu rewards a return visit in another season.
The voucher here is the most precise of the eight: the seasonal tasting menu, a curated wine pairing to go with it, or a full night’s stay, ordered online and sent straight to the recipient. Evenings begin with a drink by the fire and end a short climb from the dining room.
Close to the Liechtenstein border, Gasthaus Traube joins a 200-year-old inn and the barn beside it into fourteen timber-lined rooms facing the Margelchopf. Kathrin Schertler-Secli and Ivan Secli keep a table that draws guests from across Switzerland, and a wine cellar that keeps them there. Architect Jan Schmid and interior designer Ruth Kramer kept the crooked walls and thick masonry, then dressed them in Swiss walnut, Scandinavian classics and an Alpine palette of amber, olive and brass, so the room upstairs is as carefully composed as the plate.
Traube vouchers are ordered through a short form on the hotel’s site and sent by post. Locals can collect one in person. For Christmas, the last order date is Monday 14 December.
Buy the Gasthaus Traube gift voucher in The Aficionados Store
Named for Ullr, the Norse god of snow, Ullrhaus sits in the middle of St Anton am Arlberg between the Galzig and Rendl lifts. Franziska Alber and Michael Gfall, teenage sweethearts who both grew up in the village, built it together. Michael has been cooking since he was fifteen, and the house kitchen has the honours to show for it: Ullrs Gourmetstube, the intimate fine-dining room, gained a Michelin star in the 2026 Austria guide, while Ullrs Wine & Dine holds two Gault&Millau toques. Stephanie Thatenhorst dressed the forty rooms in hessian, smooth pine and loom-woven fabrics, and downstairs a 17-metre pool runs by candlelight beside three wood-scented saunas.
An Ullrhaus voucher is any amount, arranged by email and spent in the hotel or the restaurant alike. For the skier who eats as seriously as they ski, a day on the Arlberg, a fire in the timber bar and dinner at Ullrs make the case for both halves.
Salzburg’s oldest inn has been trading on the Getreidegasse since 1350, and Andreas Gfrerer’s Arthotel Blaue Gans now hangs its four old-town houses with more than three hundred artworks. The kitchen cooks what the house calls New Salzburg cuisine, travelling south from the home mountains along the route its fourteenth-century founders once took. Thirty-four rooms, no two alike, sit under beams, vaults and eaves above the restaurant, with the Festival Hall across the street.
The voucher is any amount, for the hotel or the restaurant, designed online with a personal dedication and delivered at once as a PDF, even on 24 December. It is valid for four years, which is a generous window for a Festival summer or a winter weekend of long lunches.
Geisingen’s oldest inn has more than seven hundred years behind it, and in that time it has served as a manor house, a farmer’s store and, briefly, a pizzeria. Owner Christoph von Bothmer and architect Markus Uhrig stitched four houses, barn included, into 1280 Krone: twenty-nine rooms of raw timber, stone and worn boards. Stefanie Baintner and Robert Müller run it together, Robert cooks at Zum Hecht nearby, and a golden tunnel leads down to a vaulted cellar bar. Geisingen sits where the Danube valley, the Black Forest and Lake Constance meet, rich eating and drinking country on every side.
A Krone voucher is made out for any amount, ordered through a short form and posted from Geisingen.
Fifteen minutes by car from central Amsterdam, Durgerdam is a fishing village of barely five hundred people, three harbours and a row of wood-clad houses facing the IJmeer. De Durgerdam opened here in 1664 as an inn for fishermen and sailors, later became a favourite haunt of Prince Hendrik, and since 2023 has been a boutique hotel of eleven rooms and three suites. At Restaurant De Mark, the open-flame kitchen works with Richard van Oostenbrugge and Thomas Groot of the Michelin-starred 212.
The voucher can be any amount and is best spent on a night that grows from there: the four-course chef’s menu at De Mark, a cheese and wine tasting in the Wine Room, a slow breakfast before leaving. In summer, a swimming ladder at the end of the jetty settles the appetite. Vouchers go out digitally or by post and are valid for a year.
Above Aberfeldy and the Tay Valley, with Schiehallion on the horizon, Dun Aluinn is a 1909 Queen Anne house stripped to its pitch-pine bones and refitted with Patricia Urquiola sofas, Black Isle bronze and a 5.5-metre dining table. Since April 2026 its nine suites have welcomed guests in ones and twos, while clan gatherings and exclusive hires carry on as before.
This winter brings a new three-course dinner from Chef Tasso, built on seasonal Scottish ingredients, and it makes the simplest gourmet gift of the eight: £125 a head, or £250 for two. Otherwise, a Dun Aluinn voucher can be any amount, spent at the table or on a night in one of the suites, roaring fires and sheepskin sofas included.
Line the eight up and the plates could hardly be further apart: zero-kilometre Sicilian cooking, Nordic ferments above Engelberg, a cellar on the Liechtenstein border, a Michelin star in St Anton, New Salzburg cuisine, a seven-century inn on the Danube, open flame on the IJmeer and a Highland dinner by the fire. What they share is a strong sense of place on the plate, and hosts who would rather you stayed the night.
For the foodie who already owns every cookbook, a hotel gift voucher from The Aficionados Store is a present that unfolds over an evening and a morning. Give the dinner, give the suite, or give both. The walk between them is the best part.
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Get the insider news and lowdown on what we've been up to, where we've been, and who we've met along the way. Be the first to discover new places and get the scoop on our favourites.