incentivetravel

The Top Ten Restaurants in the World

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Everyone enjoys a good meal at a nice restaurant, but there are “nice” restaurants, and then there are the best of the best. If you’re planning an incentive travel trip for your company’s top performers, and you want culinary thrills to be a part of the adventure, consider booking a reservation at one of the eateries below. As reported on theworlds50best.com, panels of gastronomic experts around the globe agree these are the top ten restaurants in the world.

  1. Asador Etxebarri

Practicing his specialty in Axpe, Spain, chef Victor Arguinzoniz is a master of the barbecue cooking method. As destiny would have it, the experienced tastemaker was born just minutes from the restaurant’s location. Today, he sends the establishment’s enticing aromas wafting into the sleepy village of his boyhood, using fresh ingredients straight from his garden.

Style of cuisine: Spanish wood-fired barbecue

Acclaimed food: crunchy corn and sea urchin, grilled eel, Palamós prawns

  1. Steirereck

Located in historic Vienna, Austria, Steirereck boasts a modern atmosphere, and chef Heinz Reitbauer serves cuisine that’s modern in both preparation and presentation. The meals often look too pretty to eat, but you’ll be glad you let hunger take over. Some of Reitbauer’s entrees are quite unlike anything else, featuring eccentric combinations that are somehow perfect.

Style of cuisine: Modern Austrian

Acclaimed food: char with beeswax, yellow carrot, “pollen” and sour cream

  1. Narisawa

Chefs Yoshihiro Narisawa and Takahisa Yuyama are the culinary brains behind Japan’s top restaurant. Located in Tokyo, in the non-touristy district of Minami Aoyama, Narisawa is known for two things above all: creating seasonal dishes based on the availability of homegrown ingredients, and fine Japanese wine. Combine them, and you have an unforgettable meal.

Style of cuisine: innovative Satoyama cuisine

Acclaimed food: Satoyama scenery, pinot noir from Nagano, riesling lion from Iwate

  1. Mugaritz

Located in San Sebastian, Spain, is Mugaritz, a restaurant that takes its cue from Basque cuisine, which combines ingredients from mountain and sea. The result is mouthwatering, gorgeously presented fusion food by chefs Andoni Luis Aduriz and Juan Vargas. Served in the restaurant’s scenic garden seating, a meal can include as many as 20 fabulous courses.

Style of cuisine: techno-emotional Spanish

Acclaimed food: bitter ideas of velvet, chocolate petit fours, oyster and young garlic omelette

  1. Mirazur

We often see a French restaurant higher on the list than this, but Mauro Colagreco may take his establishment all the way to the top. Mediterranean cuisine is popular worldwide, and Colagreco and his team prepare it amazingly well in Menton, on the French side of the Riviera, using just picked heirloom vegetables and fresh seafood found from an acclaimed food market nearby.

Style of cuisine: Mediterranean

Acclaimed food: oyster and pears, fried anchovy fillets, green

  1. Noma

Chefs René Redzepi and Benjamin Paul Ing reenvision traditional Nordic cuisine through a contemporary, eco-friendly lens. In a nod to the hunting and gathering tradition, They like to “forage” for ingredients instead of buying farm-raised. The food is fantastic, and the atmosphere is remarkably laid back. The chefs even leave the kitchen to bring food to your table.

Style of cuisine: seasonal, terroir-led Scandinavian

Acclaimed food: sweet shrimps wrapped in ramson leaves, apples and lemon thyme

  1. Central

Chef Virgílio Martínez and his world-renowned team source their menu’s ingredients from the local area to create the latest, greatest Peruvian cuisine. If any of the places on the list emphasize the eco-friendly, health conscious approach to creating cuisine, it’s Central. They even serve you water that they purif on-site with a multi-step reverse osmosis process.

Style of cuisine: Contemporary Peruvian

Acclaimed fare: Cosecha y recolección (harvest and gathering)

  1. Eleven Madison Park

It’s only fitting that the world’s most cosmopolitan city would have a top ten restaurant. Chefs Daniel Humm, Chris Flint, and Mary Welker team up to serve up some of the best contemporary style European cuisine the Big Apple has to offer. The team also likes to personalize dishes for individuals, so feel free to order like you own the place.

Style of cuisine: Modern European influenced by New York

Acclaimed food: Honey lavender roasted duck, Mast Brothers chocolate

  1. El Celler de Can Roca

Located in the provincial city of Girona, Spain,  El Celler de Can Roca previously held the #1 spot. The trio of brothers who run the establishment are world renowned in their respective specialties. Joan is a chef, Josep is a sommelier, and Jordi is a patissier. When it comes to fine food, the brothers don’t the “best of both worlds”, but the best of three.

Style of cuisine: modern freestyle

Acclaimed food: vegetable stock, Iberian suckling pig, multi-layered prawn compositions

  1. Osteria Francescana

Located in scenic Modena, Italy, this restaurant reclaims the #1 spot after spending two years waiting at #2. Owner and chef Massimo Bottura opened Osteria Francescana in 1995. Since then, he’s showcased the art of blending Italy’s traditional, most revered recipes with fine trends in contemporary cuisine. Dining here is a new experience in Italian culinary arts.

Style of cuisine: contemporary Italian

Acclaimed food: mallard, partridge, and bollito

Feeling Hungry Yet?

Everyone needs to eat, and when you’re dining on an incentive travel trip, it’s a great time to fare on the best. This is what you find at the world class restaurants above. Incentive travel trips are designed to be unforgettable, which makes dining at unforgettable restaurants a perfect option.

To learn more about our services and how we help you plan a truly unique trip, call us today at (704) 540-1482, or use our contact form. The trip of a lifetime awaits!

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Incentive Travel Trips Deliver Exotic Foods to Match the Destination

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green mango salad in thailandOne of the best experiences involved in traveling to an exotic location is the opportunity to taste several different local foods. If you are lucky enough for the chance to go to a French Polynesian country, those wonderful and beautiful places serve a variety of unique, one of a kind tastes and treats that will have your taste buds craving for more. French Polynesian countries, including Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora, and even the Tuamotu Atolls are specific destinations that boast the absolute best in exotic foods, which you and your family (if you have one) can partake and savor. After the first bite of the local dishes, you will immediately come to understand why savoring the flavors of these island locales is one of the “must do” activities. Traveling to a location like Tahiti, may seem out of your league, but if your company offers incentive travel trips, you may just be headed there. Continue reading, and you will get an idea of what awesome dishes you can expect in Tahiti on your next incentive travel trip through Incentive Travel Solutions.

  • Seafood: A Tahitian diet staple is fresh fish, especially from such fish as tuna, mahi-mahi, and grouper. You can also taste more exotic lagoon and deep sea dishes, including parrotfish, barracuda, octopus, and sea urchin.
  • Poisson Cru: The national dish of Tahiti, it is a South Pacific twist on ceviche. Poisson Cru consists of raw red tuna marinated in a splendid and aromatic blend of limejuice and coconut milk.
  • Hima’a: Almost every South Pacific culture uses an underground oven to prepare traditional feasts. In Tahiti, locals typically prepare traditional feasts on Sundays, which are cooked in baskets woven from banana leaves over hot rocks in a big ground hole called a hima’a. The menu will consist of Chicken Fafa with coconut milk and spinach, fish, suckling pig, shrimp, lobster, banana, breadfruit, taro, and yams.
  • Pineapple: Tahiti is famous for its growing of sweet and juicy pineapples, which is unlike anything you can purchase from your local supermarket.
  • Coconut: Locally known as the “tree of a hundred uses,” coconut palms are the sustenance life source of Tahiti. Tahitians use coconut for so many food preparations food preparations, and even beauty products. You can replenish yourself with coconut water, which is great for rehydration after being in the hot sun; experience coconut milk, which is used as a marinade; and devour coconut flesh, which can be eaten raw, or grated and cooked into coconut rice and coconut bread).
  • Breadfruit: Known in Tahiti as “uru,” this starchy, vitamin-rich fruit is normally eaten as a side dish after being cooked in a hima’a.
  • Taro: Probably less familiar to most Americans reading this blog, the Taro plant is valued for both its large, arrow-shaped leaves, which is called “Callaloo” in the Caribbean, and its starchy root. In Tahiti, Taro leaves are used in soups and stews, while the root is used to make fried chips and creamy pudding, which is called po’e.
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Choosing the Best Exotic Location for an Incentive Travel Program

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incentivetravelHow to choose the best exotic location for an incentive travel program depends heavily on what a person’s personal definition of the word “exotic” is. When most people think of an exotic location, they think of tropical islands that have never been heard of. The truth of the matter is that everyone’s definition of “exotic” is subjective, meaning one person might think a tropical island is exotic, while another might think that a hard to reach, mountainous terrain with heavy snowfall is exotic. Choosing the best exotic location for an incentive travel program relies on the evaluation of the corporate executive responsible for putting together the program and issuing the incentive to the company’s employees. Therefore, if a company wishes to choose the most popular overall opinion of the best exotic location to send its employees deemed worthy of its benefit, they can opt to have a vote on the type of location where everyone should go. As an example, the company can have a vote to see how many more people prefer going to a warm, beached filled destination versus traveling to a mountainous location where snowboarding and skiing is considered the best in the world. In this manner, at least the majority will be satisfied.

Another way to go about choosing the best exotic location for an incentive travel program is the person in charge of putting this together for his or her business can contact an incentive travel company, such as Incentive Travel Solutions, and find out the types and availabilities of locations to where employees who are rewarded this benefit can go. This way, employees can get a specific virtual tour of each city or location, as well as what these places have to offer and what can be expected when arriving at the destination and spending time there. Contacting an incentive travel expert is a great ideas because they can give you specific facts as to whether a location will be tropical alone or perhaps include a city within a country rich with culture and sights.

Alone with location details, a representative from an incentive travel company such as Incentive Travel Solutions, can tell you which destinations and locations have been the most successful and rewarding, or which places are the most popular to which to travel. This way, you can avoid the back and forth that may come from providing several options to your employees, plus it will give you a solid idea of which vacations have been the most enticing, exciting, and rewarding for other businesses and employees.

Incentive Travel Solutions can help your business narrow down the options available concerning the locations your employees can be sent. An abundance of information will be made available for the locations offered through the incentive travel programs, which will help whomever is putting this all together for your company pinpoint the best place that will appease the masses.

Isn’t Half the fun of Vacation the Food?

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incentivetravelThere are so many reasons why people love, crave, and clamor for a wonderful trip to an exotic destination. While most of the popular reasons for wanting to experience an exotic destination for a vacation have to do with tropical locations, beach atmosphere, fun in the sun, sun tans, or perhaps even huge accumulation of snowfall that amounts to the best powder for skiing and snowboarding, there is one reason that might be escaping your thoughts, but you surely enjoy when you get there: the food. People get a chance to experience local, cultural dishes from places all over the world that you might never find back home. Everyone loves food, and most everyone loves to try food from other places in the world that has special cultural ingredients, including herbs, vegetables, and fruits that might be hard to come by back home. Some people actually plan an entire vacation around a location only because of the type of food that can be found there. For example, this writer lives on the south, and a lot of people come to visit this city for only one specific reason, and that is to eat at a particular restaurant (which will not be named) because it offers “deep south, traditional southern soul food.” If people are willing to take their whole family to this southern city to eat fried southern food, imagine what other people who have exotic tastes would be able to experience if they got the chance to travel to a part of the world where the cultural food is considered the best in the world?

For all the food lovers out there who’s dream it is to be able to travel to a location somewhere in the world where you believe the food would be absolutely delightful, but might not have the resources to put the trip together on your own, perhaps it is time to take this plight to your boss. Yes, you read the last line correctly – it is time to tell your boss to look into an incentive travel company that provides information on locations all over the world, many of which have the best dining experiences of anywhere you can possibly imagine. Inceincentivetravelntive travel companies, such as Incentive Travel Solutions, offer a method of rewarding a company’s best and most successful employees with options for travel destinations around the world. How it works is simple: First, the company head agrees to offer incentive travel solutions to a choice number of employees who are deemed worthy to receive this one of a kind rewards service, then a company like Incentive Travel Solutions provides information of places that can be chosen as destinations.

Half the fun of a vacation is definitely having the opportunity to consume food that you will most likely never find back home. Through Incentive Travel Solutions, food lovers employed by generous owners will now have the opportunity to go to those places you may have never thought would be possible, but soon, it will become a most wonderful reality. Bon appetite!