Run of the Mill

Williamsburg's Busch-Owned Kingsmill Resort Offers a Less-Filling Retreat

Eagles, the top-of-the-line restaurant at Williamsburg's Kingsmill Resort, is the kind of steakhouse where a choice slab of meat will set you back $40 and yet you love every bite of it, where the sunset outside the dining room window is big and emboldening, where the view down the fairway lures your eye gently to the slate-blue expanse of one of America's great wide rivers.

The inside of the room is nothing much to look at -- a bunch of posters for golf tournaments, the kind of institutional, corporate design that requires little thought or expense. And then you look closer at the menu and see that this is a place with something of a sense of humor about itself. The specials boast "beer cuisine," and the menu has a slogan that summons a million TV ads: "This Is Dinner."

Dinners come paired with beers, and you won't find any froufrou foreign brews here. The Budtini Teaser, shrimp with remoulade sauce and lump crab with Budtail sauce, is accompanied by a Budweiser. The lamb chop and filet mignon dinners come with a Michelob and cost $57.

This is Kingsmill: Big money, big river (the James), big nature, big golf, middlebrow meals, lush bedding in middle-class-size rooms.

There are resorts that steal you away from it all, grand old places tucked away in a corner of a national park or at the edge of an unfathomable sea. There are resorts that sit in the midst of it all, offering a respite from the clamor and excitement of a major metropolis. And then there are places like Kingsmill, which presents a middle course in virtually all things.

Not so blue of stocking as the Greenbrier or the Homestead, nor as woodsy as Wintergreen, Kingsmill is neither urban nor rural, secluded nor central, posh nor discounted. Kingsmill's offerings are very much in the spirit of its ownership: the Anheuser-Busch Cos., makers of Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob and other middlebrow beers that America loves, derides -- and drinks anyway.

You can hardly keep yourself from lapping it all up. Built along three miles of the James River next door to the Busch Gardens theme park, Kingsmill is home to three well-reviewed and dramatically designed golf courses, 15 tennis courts, a well-equipped marina, indoor and outdoor pools (neither particularly large), and a superbly appointed spa.

(No beer served with your massage, but the owner's hops come in handy here, too: My masseuse checked to see if I might be allergic to the stuff before she applied an oil of hops and chamomile. The shampoo in the room was spiked with hops. The room service menu includes "Your Choice of 2 Six-Packs of the World's Finest Beers" and two sixes of soda for $55. You know the selection of beers; think hairy-ankled horses. I couldn't quite detect the hops in the breakfast, but I'm sure they were in there somewhere.)

There's plenty to do at Kingsmill. We took kayaks out onto Wareham's Pond, where, if you steer in the right direction, you can sense the prehistoric power of Virginia's rivers, cutting paths into the tall old woods, the same view Richard Kingsmill had when this was his plantation in Colonial times. But now, if you look up to the bluffs above, you see the new Kingsmill, a 3,000-acre real estate development that the nation's top brewer has been building for four decades and is now home to more than 2,000 families, many of them retirees.

Throughout the resort, in the rooms, on the resort's cable channel, ads abound for Kingsmill on the James -- a planned community that looks in many places much like Reston, Columbia and other planned towns designed in the 1960s and '70s.

When Anheuser-Busch bought more than 3,600 acres along the James back in 1970 for the astonishingly low price of $6 million, the idea was to build a brewery. But that facility takes up only 84 acres, and Busch Gardens, which opened in 1975, sits on 360 acres. The rest is Kingsmill on the James, featuring gently curling streets, houses on large lots, low and discreet signage, lots of pale and gray wood, and a heavy emphasis on perfectly manicured landscaping.

At the heart of the community sits the resort, with its golf links lacing their way between houses and inlets, ponds and wooded patches. Kingsmill has a large and gracious staff, eager to serve -- sometimes too eager. Clearly, the staff has been well-trained in the art of up-selling. When we asked about a rollaway so our kids wouldn't have to share a bed, we were offered an air mattress, which we happily accepted, only to be told that we would have to upgrade to a slightly larger room -- for an extra $130 a night. Otherwise, no air mattress (even though it would have fit easily in our original room).

After Hurricane Isabel hit hard in 2003, Kingsmill shut down for a time to fix up its grounds and deal with an infestation of black mold. The result is a major upgrade in room amenities, including the kinds of linens and bathroom fixtures you'd expect of a place that charges $220 to $900 a night. Step outside the room, however, and there's a 1970s sameness to the two-story wooden structures, which look like the outbuildings of a mid-level ski resort. (Many of the rooms have been sold and are made available to resort guests in an arrangement similar to time sharing.)

It's unlikely that many visitors spend much time in those rooms, however. With four miles of jogging and bike trails, the spectacular flower beds, the saunas, the game room (though we were ushered out at 9:45 p.m.; the night may belong to Michelob, but not here) and above all, the waterfront -- at Kingsmill, there's no need to head for the mountains of Busch, or any other beer. This is vacation.