Cherry On Top

Keith Cabot does not do hot dogs and hamburgers. On a gray and chilly February afternoon at Ohoopee Match Club, he is roasting a full lamb carcass over an open fire, in plain sight of golfers as they come off the 18th green. Over the course of six hours, Cabot, the club’s executive chef, meticulously bastes the meat—slaughtered 48 hours ago at a farm 12 miles away—with a combination of house-made chile blend and rotates it over smoldering oak wood on a massive barbecue pit that was custom-made from cast iron and galvanized steel by a forge down the road in Sea Island. As the last of the groups shake hands and wrap up the first half of what many consider to be the best 24-hour experience in golf, Chef Cabot trims off a few pieces of crispy lamb skin and hands them to a foursome to try. “Tomorrow, for lunch, you’ll be having lamb tostadas with a Sea Island red-pea hummus, cucumber tzatziki and green-tomato compote,” he tells wide-eyed guests as they throw their heads back in approval. It’s not a choice: They will eat what Cabot serves, they will love it, and they just might remember it more than any golf shot they hit at Ohoopee.

If this is your first time dining with Ohoopee, allow me to give you some context. In 2016, after making it big in the tech world, Michael Walrath pulled the trigger on a 3,500-acre plot in Cobbtown, Georgia, situated roughly in the middle of nowhere, just outside Vidalia and 75 miles west of Savannah. The property had been on the radar of developers for years, but, until Walrath, no one had put together a compelling enough vision or the funding to turn it into anything other than an onion farm. As one with big dreams and a budget does, Walrath ended up enlisting Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner to build his personal golf paradise under one condition: Throw par out the window. 

The final result was not 18 but 22 stunning golf holes cut into the sand and scruff, each purposely built to play a variety of lengths and directions. Long par 4s one day can be short 5s the next, just as easily as short 4s can become long one-shotters. It all depends on who has the honors: Win the hole, set the next tee box. With match play at the center of its onion, the official club motto has become, “No one cares what you shot.” It’s a rare, liberating concept, and it contributes greatly to the feeling that something different and better is happening here. 

I once asked Rory McIlroy about his favorite golf course. He rattled off some of the usual suspects: Royal County Down, Augusta, Seminole. “But the best experience overall is, hands down, Ohoopee,” he said. “From the drive in to the golf, to the food, to the lodging, it’s just the best.” McIlroy is one of roughly 80 members, part of a collection of big-name athletes, musicians and titans of industry you’d expect to receive an invite. It’s elite, yes. But once you drive past the wooden guard shack on its now-famous dirt road, Ohoopee is far from fancy. You can wear a T-shirt to dinner. You can fish in the river separating the first and second holes. You can pull your car up to the clubhouse and leave it there all weekend. There are no televisions in the cabins. All of this plus no scores to post on the GHIN app creates a relaxing, fun and ultra-present environment. Knowing this, it then makes perfect sense that everyone, whether you are McIlroy or an unaccompanied guest, eats together when they are at Ohoopee. 

After his first call about a job there, Cabot could barely believe what he’d heard. Family-style dining? Small groups? Summers off? A private golf club? It sounded too good to be true, so he and his wife, Ashley, went to see it for themselves. “I took a left onto a dirt road and said, ‘I am not in the right place,’” Cabot recalls as he prepares lunch for a group of 48 guests—a busy day by Ohoopee’s standards. “Then you see the onion signs. Then you get to the gate. Then you drive down another dirt road. Then the clubhouse appears. My palms were sweating with anticipation. That experience is emblematic of everyone’s when they arrive here.”

For Cabot, the idea of cooking at a golf course was both a steep departure from the fine-dining world he and Ashley were absorbed in and a full-circle journey. 

His first job in a kitchen was really just a ploy to play more golf. His high school team was practicing at Shenvalee Golf Resort in New Market, Virginia, but unless he was an employee of the club, he couldn’t play there in the summers. So, Cabot took a job as a dishwasher, and he raced to the course after his shifts to get in as many holes as the fading sun allowed. Over time, though, his shifts became more than a means to a golfing end—he began experimenting with fryers and pans, and he fell in love with the process of using ingredients to create something new. He enrolled in culinary school at Johnson & Wales, which led him to the culinary hotbed of Napa, California, to train under chef Thomas Keller at his legendary restaurants Ad Hoc and the French Laundry. Cabot eventually returned to Virginia to cook at the Inn at Little Washington, a three-Michelin-star restaurant.

“The Michelin world is a beast,” says Cabot. “But out here, we are removed from all that. There’s less stress. A little bit less pressure. And we get to have fun with food. Ohoopee is about the golf, and we get to be a little cherry on top of that.” 

Despite his award-winning background, Cabot is far from the tortured-artist/tyrant stereotype that often follows elite chefs. This isn’t The Bear. He’s calm, affable, humble and focused on his craft. His staff consists of 35 people between back of house and dining. All 15 team members in the kitchen have been with him for the last three years. In a small operation 45 minutes away from the nearest civilization, the lack of turnover is a testament to his management style. “What you get with Chef Keith is what you get with my husband,” says Ashley. “He is passionate. He’s caring. He has a lot of empathy. And he’s really creative.” 

In Ohoopee’s kitchen, ideas are encouraged to come from anywhere. Recently, one of Cabot’s youngest chefs mentioned that she knew how to make vanilla wafers from scratch. Cabot and the team dropped everything to explore the idea. A few experiments later, they had a knock-your-socks-off banana pudding with house-made vanilla wafers on the menu. Not long after, Cabot served it to an NFL Hall of Famer who was celebrating his birthday at Ohoopee. “Don’t tell my wife,” he whispered to Ashley in the dining room, “but that was the best damn banana pudding I’ve ever had in my life.” 

Cabot’s formative time at the Inn wasn’t solely about recipes. That’s where he met and fell for Ashley, who was then the Inn’s pastry chef. Now the dining manager at Ohoopee, she’s tasked with overseeing the waitstaff and bar staff, writing up the popular chalkboard menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner, curating Ohoopee’s growing collection of 3,500-plus bottles of wine and ensuring every member and guest has the best experience possible. “There’s some mystique about this place, so everyone that comes is excited to be here,” Ashley says. “Once they are here, they don’t really have that many decisions to make, which makes it easier for them to just sit back and relax. And the family-style meal allows for people of all walks of life to sit around the table together and enjoy community and camaraderie, just as they would on the course.” 

The most important chalkboard of the day is lunch. The majority of unaccompanied guests stay at Ohoopee for 24 hours, or, as the staff calls it, “lunch to lunch.” After the dirt road and onion signs and clubhouse reveal, Cabot’s food is the next step of the Ohoopee experience. Today, lunch is a life-changing fried-chicken sandwich. Locally sourced chicken thighs get brined, battered and double fried. A honey-chile glaze coats the chicken, which is topped with melty pimento cheese, bread-and-butter pickles and pickled jalapenos and then slid onto toasted brioche buns. Everything other than the bird is made in-house, and it tastes even better than it looks. “Everyone makes a chicken sandwich,” Cabot says. “We thought, ‘How can we make it better?’” 

Cabot makes it a point not to be tied only into Southern comfort or Asian fusion or any other cuisine. Instead, he focuses on sourcing the best possible ingredients from on and around the golf course, then creating global flavors that work in a golf setting. Perhaps the best example of this is the open-fire cooking he’s recently started doing between the ninth and 10th holes. On days with split-tee starts and limited time for lunch in the clubhouse, Cabot lights a fire in another cast-iron barbecue pit, just across from the halfway house—and dangerously close to any blocked tee shots off what many play as the drivable ninth hole. Once the fire roars, Cabot lays down a wagyu spinalis dorsi, better known as the outer cap of a rib eye. He steams local Carolina Gold rice with a touch of nori and sesame. Soft-boiled eggs are marinated in a mixture of soy, mirin, rice wine vinegar, sugar and sesame oil overnight. Cucumbers are tossed around in a togarashi chili blend. With every flip of the meat, Cabot brushes it gently with a bulgogi sauce and lets it caramelize over the crust. When golf balls appear on the ninth green, Cabot sticks a needle in the rib eye, removes it and places it against his chin. He is a feel player, and the sting of the needle on his skin tells him the steak is a perfect medium-rare. He lets the meat rest until all putts are holed (or, in Ohoopee’s case, conceded). He then plates it up and walks his elevated Korean rice bowls across the tee box to the picnic benches behind the green for players to enjoy before they make the turn. We are miles removed from a boiled dog at the snack shack. “This is nourishment for play,” Cabot says. “We want to cook like how Ohoopee looks and feels.” 

That evening, the heart of the same rib eye will be served for dinner. With family-style service and tee sheets booked months in advance, there’s minimal food waste at Ohoopee—something that’s deeply important to Cabot. Along with the beef will come locally caught steelhead trout, loaded potato pavé, tomato-stewed green beans and Ashley’s devastatingly good chocolate-caramel tart. Before that, players will indulge in Cabot’s revelatory collection of bar snacks. There’s no serve-yourself trail mix here. He’s recently been experimenting with dry-aging duck breast, sausage and other meats in the wine cellar. Homemade pork rinds are provided to dip out the same pimento cheese that topped the chicken sandwich. Cabot and his team have been playing with making chips out of an African blue-grain rice that a local farm recently harvested. It’s a resilient grain and requires less water than others; the sustainability factor has intrigued Cabot, so he’s trying to make it work. He boils the rice, smashes it down into a paste, layers it on a baking sheet and roasts it in the oven. “This will go great with our smoked-fish-dip bar snack,” he says, breaking off a piece of the bluish-gray slab. 

Throughout the day, the lamb for tomorrow’s lunch is still roasting on the open fire around 18 green and getting occasional spice baths from a brush made of fresh rosemary sprigs. The sun is setting, and players are watching the pit with cocktails in hand on the clubhouse patio. The conversation happily bounces from Cabot answering their questions about the cooking process to guests giving him the highlights of the day’s matches and fawning over the chicken sandwich. Watching all this, I begin to wonder: At some point, does Ohoopee become an award-winning restaurant with a golf course attached? Will a Michelin star or James Beard winner someday arise from a clubhouse? Cabot has no interest in going back to that world.

“It’s not something that drives us,” he says while stoking the fire under the lamb. “When you get rid of accolades, you have much more opportunity to excel in so many other areas.” 

But it’s clear that Ohoopee and its kitchen don’t need awards to have their influence reverberate throughout golf. Just as Ohoopee has inspired other personal golf playgrounds, like Grove XXIII, Ladera and the Tree Farm, folks from other top clubs are now trekking to Cobbtown to ask about its food-and-beverage operation. Keith and Ashley welcome them all and share how things work. But anyone who has tried to emulate a special recipe knows there is a certain amount of magic that is impossible to replicate.

The following day, after the lamb tostadas have been eaten and all 48 guests have packed up, exchanged pleasantries with the staff, settled their bets and exited down the dirt road back to reality, the Cabots take a brief breather around the horseshoe bar in the dining room. Prep is about to begin for tomorrow’s lunch-to-lunch group. “I hear it all the time when people leave Ohoopee,” Ashley says. “‘The golf is great, but the food is awesome. Who is the chef?’”