Judging this year’s Masters Club dinner menu
Hi, food friends!
Wednesday was exciting for anyone who, like me, loves both food and sports: The Masters shared the menu for its annual champions’ dinner.
Each year, Augusta National Golf Club holds a pretournament dinner for the Masters Club, a group that consists of past champions of the Masters. The menu is selected by the previous year’s winner and shared with the public; it always feels like a peek into the personality and tastes of one of the world’s best golfers. I wrote about it last year.
As soon as the menu is shared, it gets sent out in my college friends’ group chat. We tend to pick it apart and pass searing judgment on the choices of these professional athletes who live out of suitcases and probably eat a lot of meals at country clubs.
This year’s menu from Rory McIlroy was greeted with begrudging approval, especially the wine selection, which features a lineup of incredibly rare and expensive bottles. Like all Masters champions, McIlroy is paying for the dinner and wine himself.
My quibble with McIlroy’s menu is that it lacks a unifying theme; it’s a bit of a mishmash, even if the components are individually great. The Northern Irish golfer did include at least one taste of home with a side dish of traditional Irish champ, a version of mashed potatoes.
But it’s hard to criticize his first course: yellowfin tuna carpaccio lifted directly from the menu at Le Bernardin. The famous dish, which has been on Le Bernardin’s menu for decades, features a thin, rectangular slice of toasted baguette topped with foie gras mousse hidden under a veil of thinly pounded yellowfin tuna. The kitchen staff at Augusta National flew to New York to learn how to make the dish at chef Eric Ripert’s world-renowned restaurant, according to ESPN.
The entrees present a simple choice between a wagyu filet mignon or seared salmon, while dessert will be sticky toffee pudding. The wine list is a murderer’s row of famous French names: Vintage 2015 Salon “S” brut Champagne, 2022 Domaine Leflaive Batard-Montrachet white Burgundy, 1990 Chateau Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux and 1989 Chateau d’Yquem Sauternes, a dessert wine also from Bordeaux.
Judging the menu for a dinner I’ll never attend is a bit of a guilty pleasure, my version of leafing through a gossip magazine or watching reality TV. But it also never fails to spark a fun debate among a group of my oldest friends, and that connection is as valuable as any Masters tradition.
Do you have tips, thoughts or questions for the AJC’s food and dining team? Reach out to me at henri.hollis@ajc.com.
About the Author
Henri Hollis is a restaurant critic and food reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he covers Atlanta’s restaurants, chefs and dining culture. As part of the AJC’s Food & Dining team, he reviews new restaurants, reports on industry trends and explores metro Atlanta’s culinary scene through the neighborhoods and people that shape it.
