Ohoopee: The World-Class Golf Course with Michelin-Level Food

Ohoopee: The World-Class Golf Course with Michelin-Level Food

Cooking is it’s the only art form that’s gone after it’s consumed. Look at a painting on the wall for years to come and a statue is there for generations, but as soon as you consume that food, it’s gone forever. Cooking out here by the fire, we’re so far away from the clubhouse. There’s no roads nearby. You’re just kind of immersed in the elements, you There’s something spiritual about it. [Music] It’s about the golf and you get to have fun with food. We get to just kind of be a little cherry on top of that. Keith Kitt, the executive chef here at Hopie Match Club in Cobbtown, Georgia. When you look at a map or famous places in the world, nobody picks out Cobbtown, Georgia, and you question whether you’re headed in the right direction. You start seeing those little onion signs and you’re like, I think I’m close. That little glimpse at the beginning of the experience is really what can set that standard. The golf course here is a very unique to the golf world with the the match play style, the 22 holes. You get to see two different routings throughout your stay and in a in a full 24 hours you’re essentially playing two different courses. It was one of the best pieces of ground we’ve ever seen for a golf course. He’s opened up a myriad of possibilities to go off in different directions and push the envelope. When you are there, you feel relaxed. You don’t feel on edge in any way, shape, or form. Know the golf’s going to be good. But then there’s also the sort of unknown about it all of what you’re going to eat that day, what you’re going to have to drink during dinner, and what’s around the corner. It’s just the allure and the mystique of it all. Golf and cooking have kind of always been part of my my life and growing up playing golf in high school and we all had to find ways to work at the club to get free golf during the offseason was a dishwasher. my first kitchen job. Tried to hurry up and get out with the shift so I can go play and winter comes and there’s no golf to play so I kind of linger into the kitchen. During those four years took me to the rest of my career and I spent a good amount of time at the Thomas Geller restaurant groups from ad hoc to Buchanan spending some time at Blackberry Farm. The independent restaurant world is a beast of its own but being here in a private club you lose a little bit of the stress you lose a little bit of the pressure. just have a little bit more fun as a team and you get to be a little bit more creative. Once you get here and you you’ve checked in and you settle in, we make the decisions for you. Family service is an incredible way for the culinary team to create new things every day. And the chalkboard gets rewritten for each meal period. One of our lunch offerings is the crispy chicken sandwich. Everybody does one. For us, it’s just our flavors. House bread and butter pickles. We make a fresh pimeino cheese with a year old cheddar. To melt that over top of the chicken thigh, we brine it, double bread it, we fry it. The process that goes into that for just a simple chicken sandwich is it’s like 3 days. You’re going to have bar snacks. We’re going to take it one step further and we’re going to do, you know, pimento cheese with pork rinds. We’re going to cure meats in the cellar and slice up fresh venison summer sausage and we can have fresh local beef that we turn into jerky at the halfway house for something like the lamb tostada. And that lamb comes from 12 mi down the road, put it over the fire, stoke it for 6 to 8 hours, then take it and just pull it apart off the bone and then put it onto the tostada and layer in other flavors that accent that lamb and sea island red pea hummus and pickled green tomatoes and the relish. from teeing off in the morning and seeing the the raw lamb go on the fire to making the turn and and seeing it roasted and and picking off the carcass and then to be able to take that off the fire and put it on the plate and take what a normal golf experience might be and flip it on its [Music] going into the belly of the beast. This is our wine celler and the dryaging room. Everything in here is organized by varietal and then subcategorized by region. We really like to get as much interesting product in here as we can from all over the world. Some of my favorite wines come from France and the Bordeaux region. So having those here is really really cool, especially to pair with Chef Keith’s food. What you get with Chef Keith is what you get with my husband. He is passionate. He’s caring. He has a lot of empathy. He’s creative both in and out of the kitchen. Food is such an emotional thing for me. And to be able to please people through food, there’s something uplifting and rewarding about it. If you can create an experience where you can remind somebody of an experience they had through food, I think that’s pretty powerful. People come in from all over the country and around the world to get a glimpse of the hoopie and we have such a big team that cares so much about putting the onion first. The whole experience that has been built around such an amazing golf course. It’s really our responsibility to put as much care and thought into the food to continue that experience from outside to inside. It’s about the golf and we get to just kind of be a little cherry on top of that.

This story first appeared in The Golfer’s Journal No. 33. Subscribe to get access to the full story: https://glfrsj.nl/subscribe

Rory McIlroy once called Ohoopee Match Club “the best experience in golf.” Hidden deep in rural Georgia, the onion logo has become one of the game’s most sought-after invitations. And yet, as exceptional as Gil Hanse’s 22-hole match-play design is, the golf is only half the story. In TGJ No. 33, we explore how Executive Chef Keith Cabot and his team are redefining nourishment for play—whether it’s searing wagyu by the teebox or roasting lamb near the 18th green, you may leave Ohoopee remembering the food more than the shots. 

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