How a Massive Team of Chefs Feeds 350,000 Fans at Golf’s Biggest Event — Large Format

How a Massive Team of Chefs Feeds 350,000 Fans at Golf’s Biggest Event — Large Format

More than 350,000 people attended the 2025 RDER Cup back in September. The RDER Cup is one of the biggest golf tournaments in the world with teams from the United States and Europe competing against each other. And with large attendance comes large food operations. To handle the sheer volume for this massive event, 16 on-site kitchens were built and they brought in over 600 cooks. We have more firepower in a makeshift tent than most restaurants will ever see in their life. These kitchens operate 24/7 throughout the week as culinary teams race against the clock to prepare food in staggering numbers. We have 160,000 hamburgers either here or on their way here. It’s literally 18 tractor trailers of burgers. The numbers almost sound impossible. 160,000 burgers, 100,000 hot dogs, 80,000 chicken sandwiches, 70,000 Italian sausages, and 10,000 bottles of vodka. It never gets less mind-blowing when you’re feeding this amount of people. And it’s not just all hamburgers and hot dogs. These highly skilled chefs are serving up omacas sushi platters, a barerico porkloin, and prime steaks. This is how they feed 350,000 fans at the Ryder Cup. This is Stephanie Edens. She’s the vice president of catering and events for Patina Group. Her day starts early at 6:00 a.m. We just arrived here at the production office for our operations at Ryder Cup. Today, unfortunately, we look like we’ve got rain projected for the entire day. Our modifications are really just keeping morale up more than anything else. Production and execution and hospitality and service go on no matter what. So, this is our main compound. This is our main loading dock for the operation. So what we have is every single day we have tractor trailers coming in with massive amounts of product. They’re received here, distributed, broken down, and then brought into the kitchen for production and then the uh prepared food is pushed out and then overnight it’s taken out on course. This is the main production hub. All of the food comes into this kitchen, gets prepped, and then sent out to the multiple kitchens located throughout the golf course, where it will then get finished and served. At the center of this kitchen is Chef Antonio Pontelli. He is in charge of quality control, timing, and delivery to the rest of the kitchens across the course. So, where this kitchen differentiates from all of the other kitchens out on the course, we are the backbone for all of the restaurants out there. We do their full production. This way they could execute at a high level. So we are the first line of preparation. We usually have two major proteins every day and they range of 3,800 to 4200 lb of each a day. And then we sprinkle in a couple hundred lbs of every other protein for the different different venues, specialties and all of that. So here we have a tilt skillets. We have a battery of of fryers, stoves, ovens. As you can see, they’re on both sides, double-deckers. We have more firepower in a makeshift tent than most restaurants will ever see in their life. On today’s menu, we’re doing a baked pasta with zucchini and eggplant. This is a specialty item for one of the sweets. This isn’t a major production. This is more of a smaller customized unique uh request. We’ll customize everything. So, we could flex from every event, right? It’s not, you know, hamburgers and hot dogs. We do the whole gamut. I don’t think people have any idea of what goes on behind the scenes, which is great, right? They don’t need to. If they don’t know, we do we did our job. So, typically we start about 2 years out. We start with menu development and we try and, you know, source locally. We try and write menus that make sense to to where we’re serving essentially pulling in the culture of what’s local. Everything we’re doing is thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds. It’s astronomical. I mean, if if you estimate like what you eat in a day, I eat 6 ounces of protein for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You as one human, multiply that for like the four days that we’re here, and then multiply that times a couple hundred thousand people to like give you an idea of just like it’s mind-blowing. It never gets less mind-blowing when you’re feeding this amount of people. You know, like a lot of celebrities, they have their their rider and their green room or whatever. Tony’s only stipulation is that he has an espresso machine on my table. I’ve never seen anyone drink so much espresso. So, uh, the fact that he’s not constantly shaking or anything. It’s just, look at that. Steady. Once the food is prepped and ready, it is then sent across the course to the production kitchen next to the sweets and chalets. These chalets offer a more premium and private dining experience for guests. This kitchen services 64 different chalets, all with their own breakfast, lunch, and snack menus. Chef Lou, Chef Yui, and Chef Alex are responsible for those premium meals. Right now, I’m trying to build the sashimi plates. So, this is all my base. Today’s fish selection is a blue fin tuna from Mexico. Beautiful blue fin. You see the nice marble. Then you got the yellow tail, the Spanish mackerel and seam, golden eye snapper, which I have the bone. Then uh I got the stripe jack and the kachi from Hawaii only from Hokkaido. This prime I got lucky. I don’t have no budget. Not something people would expect to get on the golf course, right? That’s the whole idea. You know, you don’t you know that’s how we trying to do every every time. That’s why the menu always change. Every day is different menu. On the other side of the kitchen, Chef Lou Puji is overseeing multiple chalet stations. It’s Chef Lou’s job to facilitate that the food gets sent out on time. So, this team is putting together um sliders for lunch for one of our for one of our chalets. We’re turning over from lunch to dinner so that all of our chalets are full. And then our teams in the chalet make sure that the food is maintained, it looks neat, clean, buffets are clean, and they’re personally taking care of all of our guests and letting us know what the cadence is. We have to get in tune with the way their guests are coming. The other challenging piece for our team is that we need to be in constant communication to understand where the play is, right? Because you’ll find that, you know, on a on a nice day, some guests will will follow the players or across the course, but they’ll also come back, you know, at lunch or meal periods. We’ve got a team here that’s taking care of desserts. These are our black cupcakes for of course the black course. But on the on the back table we have some sandwiches that we’ve made. So Yui slicing some uh Barerico pork loin here. And this is the command post. So he works here because everyone he’s got to juggle not only m making sure that things are maintained and that we are on target with the timelines but he also is making sure that he can see the quality of things that are going out because our folks come in ask him for their food and he expedited the food out. So right now with four different menus being activated, we’re plating up all of it simultaneously because lunch starts at the same time. And so what we’re trying to make sure is that we’re sending the right food to the right chalet because all of their menus are different and they’re all customuilt. From there, we basically start off with all the cold dishes first, including desserts. Then after that, we go finally into the hot food, uh, sending it out as well, too. So, we will call out certain items. They’ll respond back just like if it was a regular restaurant. Wherever the golf goes, the crowds follow. The chalets, sweets, and concessions will swell with thousands of hungry fans all trying to eat at the same time. When that happens, the kitchens shift into overdrive, operating with precision and maintaining quality. Right now, the Golf Play is near the First Fairway Market, where executive chef Ed Milan is stationed. Ed is the mastermind behind this entire operation, overseeing the menu development, the kitchen design, and the hiring of staff. So, we’re at the uh one market where uh everything kind of starts up by the clubhouse. It’s a huge fan flow through here. Obviously, everyone likes to uh watch this uh event begin. So, we do everything in the uh markets fresh every day on a continuous cooking basis. So, breakfast, sandwiches, then burgers, dogs, etc. For lunch, we have a full crew at the back here. Fresh burgers, fresh chicken, fresh sausages, everything cooked to order. Blow it inside. Uh, average day we’ll do six to 7,000 hamburgers, 4 to 5,000 pieces of chicken, couple thousand hot dogs, couple thousand sausages. Everything comes off the hot grill, cooked fresh. Comes here, brief holding into the lines. They assemble everything fresh to order. A burger is one bun, one 8 oz patty, three pickle slices, one slice of cheese, one top into the window. And they put out thousands upon thousands of these a day exactly the same. People absolutely love them. On the opposite side of this is the guests. So the guests will come through the market. They have their dogs, their burgers, whatnot. They just grab what they want, circle right around and out. So here we have the Italian sausage. So, grilled sausage, bring it up to temp in the ovens, sauteed peppers and onions, and it’s just a simple assembly line. We have chefs, executive chefs in the grill tent and in the kitchen, monitoring temperatures, quality, making sure everything’s the exact spec we want. Uh, some of them are on baseball stadiums, our parks department, um, casinos, coming from all over the place. These people, some of these people are running Lambo Field when they’re not here. So, everything’s precise. The quality is to the utmost. While the rider cut made headlines for the dramatic golf and the passionate fans, the real excitement happened behind the scenes in the kitchens that fueled it all. Powered by the unsung heroes, the chefs. Someone has been waiting their entire life to come to a rider cup. We are a very small part of that, but we are that small part that can make it really special. So, we take that very serious. You got to see any of the golf? Very little golf. I don’t even know how to play golf. I I couldn’t I couldn’t tell you who’s out there. Better to be here. It’s great to see the team bring together and lead all of these great folks. And that’s that’s a great success. [Music]

Introducing “Large Format,” Eater’s newest deep-dive series. For our first episode, we go behind the scenes at the 2025 PGA Ryder Cup to uncover one of the largest food operations in all of sports. With 16 on-site kitchens running 24/7 and culinary teams preparing tens of thousands of meals for 350,000 fans, the scale is staggering. While the world focuses on the dramatic golf and passionate fans, the real action happens in these kitchens, where chefs and staff power the tournament from behind the scenes.

#golf #food #event

Chapters:

00:00 350,000 Fans at the 2025 PGA Ryder Cup
01:20 The Main Prep Kitchen
04:45 Cooking for the Suites & Chalets
05:07 Special Omakase Sushi Set
07:55 Main Concession Market
08:45 Thousands of Hot Dogs and Hamburgers

Credits:

Producer/Director: Connor Reid
Camera: Murilo Ferreira, Gregg De Domenico
Production Sound Mixer: Michael Guggino
Editor: Howie Burbidge
Additional Footage Courtesy of Patina Group, PGA

Executive Producer: Stephen Pelletteri
Head of Production: Stefania Orrù
Supervising Producer: Connor Reid
Post-Production Supervisor: Lucy Morales Carlisle
Director of Production: Michelle Fox
Senior Director of Photography: Murilo Ferreira
Supervising Producer, Social Video: Jordan Shalhoub

Download the Eater App: https://shorturl.at/Rz1pN

Eater is the go-to resource for food and restaurant obsessives with hundreds of episodes and new series, featuring exclusive access to dining around the world, rich culture, immersive experiences, and authoritative experts. Binge it, watch it, crave it.

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel now! http://goo.gl/hGwtF0