PASSIONS A BLISSFUL ESCAPE FROM DECISION FATIGUE

THE TASTING MENU at Uberto ends, like many others at restaurants of this caliber, with mignardises.

- BY ADAM ERACE

Roughly translated from French, the word means “dainty preciousness.” Roughly translated from fine dining, it means the macarons, truffles, and other bijou sweets designed to soften the blow of an eye-popping bill. What makes the tasting menu at Uberto unlike most others—besides the fact that it's located in Gay, Ga., a country town known for its semiannual Cotton Pickin' Festival—is that there is no check accompanying the miso-and-chanterelle bonbon, amber canelé, and freeze-dried lemon-verbena ice cream that tastes, in the best possible way, like Trix. Provided you're staying onsite, that is, in one of the four impeccable cabins meme satirizing British tour company Jet2holidays. The humor lies in the gulf between the illusion of luxury and abundance advertised, and the sometimes rather dismal actual experience.

But in recent years, the relatively tiny ultrahigh-end segment of the all-inclusive sector has rocketed from tourism’s bottom-dweller to luxe travel industry darling.

Quercus’s version includes no all-you-can-eat buffets or spa vouchers. Instead, the biodynamic farm offers a private wood-fired sauna, horse-training lessons, and kayaking and fishing on the Flint River.

“For us, it was important that this feel like you're a guest in someone's home,” Chiara Visconti di Modrone, Quercus’s owner and a clinical nutritionist, explains as we rumble down a cow-flanked dirt road in her moss-green Ram pickup. “That feeling of home is hard to achieve when you're signing a check every two minutes.”