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Compared to the designer-swathed slopes and luxury boutique-lined streets of more widely known Alpine destinations like Gstaad and St. Moritz, Austria’s mountain towns are refreshingly low-key. “There are very luxurious places here,” says Alice Liechtenstein, an Italian-born design curator who relocated to the east Austrian hills two decades ago, taking up residence in her husband’s ancestral castle, “but it’s not ritzy glitzy.” Instead, Austrian resorts center on serious skiing and deeply traditional culture — which, for Austrians, are practically one and the same. “Skiing is our version of football or baseball,” says New York-based sommelier, restaurateur and winemaker Aldo Sohm, who grew up outside of Innsbruck. “It’s who we are.”
Stretching from the border with Liechtenstein (the country) in the west to the Vienna basin in the east, Austria’s Alpine region covers over 20,000 square miles. Depending on which peaks they’re targeting, visitors often fly into Zurich or Munich and then rent a car or take a train into the mountains (Munich to Salzburg is about a two-hour train trip). Sohm prefers to connect through Frankfurt to the Innsbruck airport, which is “small but very efficient,” he says. For a ski vacation here, there’s not much need for a car, notes Liechtenstein. “You walk out of your hotel and you’re at the lifts,” she says.
From November through March, winter sports are the main draw. Many vacationers also come to soak in the area’s natural springs,merryph app which are clustered in historic spa towns like Bad Aussee. “Checking into a hotel with thermal baths, soaking and eating and going for walks is the Austrian ideal of a perfect weekend,” says Liechtenstein. There are also several notable places to see art and design and explore local crafts like glassmaking and woodworking. And once the snow melts, the region is “basically paradise” for hikers and bikers, says Sohm.
With so many opportunities to build up an appetite, it makes sense that food here tends toward the hearty. (“You can at least find fish now,” says Liechtenstein. “That wasn’t the case 20 years ago.”) There are several ambitious restaurants and a local custom of notably lavish hotel breakfasts, but for Sohm as well as for the stylist Robert Rabensteiner, who grew up in an Austrian family in the South Tyrol region of Italy and considers knoedel — bread dumplings — far and away his favorite dish, it’s “homey food” that appeals. “I like a restaurant that looks the same as it has forever, where it’s like stepping into another time,” Rabensteiner says.
Perhaps the most popular places to fill up — at least during snow season — are the “huts” at the top of the slopes, where après-ski crowds wash down dumplings and kaiserschmarrn (caramelized, chopped-up pancakes served with rum-soaked raisins and sugar) with copious amounts of alcohol. “There’s this very Austrian thing about having one too many drinks on the mountain and then skiing down,” says Liechtenstein. “Coming from Italy, where after a ski day we go home and shower and put on makeup and high heels — even if it’s snowing — I thought it was insane that everyone was dancing and flirting in their ski boots. But now I get it. You can take the last lift up, dance, have drinks and then ski down again: You just ski a little slower.”
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Over the years, Ms. Judd told her son extremely little about her missing husband, who remained unaccounted for until May of this year. The Defense Department said earlier this month that her husband, Staff Sgt. John A. Tarbert of the Air Force was killed at 24 after his plane was attacked while flying over Germany 80 years ago this Friday.
The plaintiffs — who include Wendy Davislucky cola, a former Democratic state senator, along with a Biden campaign staff member and the bus driver — also testified, saying that the rolling road protest had been frightening and intimidating.