G. Y. Dryansky ties on his bib in four of Europe's Gold List hotels, each at the top of its game for food. The secret: No celebrity chefs, just great cooks working with what their own regions (and the sea) provide. And then, for dessert, there's the view...

These thoughts were on my mind as I bore past Scotland's Loch Lomond into a boulder-studded landscape on my way to Inverlochy Castle Hotel. Inverlochy, with a food score of 95.7 out of a possible 100, was one of four hotels I had chosen to visit, having selected only from those scoring above 90.0. Besides scores, there was another factor at work on my choice: place. The physical environment is inevitably part of the dining experience. But, I wondered, in this age when a dish of squid stuffed with Moroccan couscous in Paris winds up a week later on a menu in New York, how much did the stamp of a region, or of a specific culture, matter to readers in hotel dining rooms?

Along with Inverlochy in the Scottish Highlands, I chose to visit the Mediterranean resort Cala di Volpe, on Sardinia's Costa Smeralda. This choice was easy: Cala di Volpe was the one hotel whose restaurant scored a perfect 100. The Hotel Imperial in Vienna had a rating of 91.8—the weakest of the four—but if place meant anything, might not the evidence be found here, in a sumptuous nineteenth-century palace in a town with a culinary tradition almost as revered as that of France? So I added the Imperial. Only one hotel on my short list, the Plaza Athénée in Paris, had a media-crowned grand cuisinier who—like a grand couturier doing ready-to-wear—oversaw a string of restaurants worldwide. He was Alain Ducasse. Chefs at Ducasse's level, in fact, rarely cook; like a chef d'orchestre, they direct a team. Did not Ducasse, after years in a hot kitchen, have the right to an office, a Web site, and many teams? Of course. But I decided not to make him my choice for France. The Plaza Athénée had scored 91.9. Château Les Crayères, in Reims, was our readers' second favorite, with a score of 98.0—even though when Gérard Boyer retired as chef, the Michelin inspectors removed one of its three stars. Indeed, the hotel itself sits at the summit of the European properties in this year's survey. I made a reservation at Les Crayères.

If the four restaurants had one thing in common, it was that they were serving guests who, rather than driving off into the night, were eating there for several days at a time. Few restaurants have to meet that test. This common factor may help explain why the highest scorer of all, Cala di Volpe, would turn out to serve me the most conservative fare, a cornucopia of Italian delights done by a fifty-year-old chef who had been in the kitchen for twenty-five years and who was aided by a pastry chef who had been there five years longer than he had. Maybe people are not ready to experience cuisine as an art form day after day—any more than a traveler would want to spend his entire trip going from one art gallery to another. Too much.