Northeast Florida is set to host the Player’s Championship in a few short months, but unless you’re a die-hard golf fan (and really, who is), that’s probably not something you care about. What this article presupposes is… maybe you should?
Look, golf is boring. There’s really no point arguing the conventional wisdom on this one. Unlike most, I say this not from a place of ignorance. I played competitively throughout my formative years, from about 9 to 19, which seems like more than enough time to develop an appreciation. And yet, if you’re looking for someone to try to sell you on the thrill of a fairway wood or the agony of a missed putt, continue looking.
All that being said, here’s a less publicized aspect of golf: boring sports make the best live events. I think there’s actually reverse corollary between sports that are exciting on TV and how much fun they are live. Football and MMA are my favorite TV sports, but without closeups and slow-motion replay they’re kind of terrible.
Conversely, some of my most memorable live-sports experiences have been with sports I never cared much about. Car racing, horse racing, motorcross, baseball. An Australian friend summed it up best when he was inviting me to a cricket match. “Mate, four exciting things will happen all day and you’ll miss three of them.”
It sounds like an insult, but he was right. You know you’re having fun at a sporting event if you’re not really paying attention to the sport. You don’t need to enjoy or even appreciate cricket or baseball to enjoy a cricket or baseball game. Not with shining sun, green grass, and a full cup. In fact, if the sport is too action-packed it almost detracts from the experience.
Which is a long way of saying that you don’t have to find golf not boring to enjoy The Player’s Championship, which returns to Ponte Vedra Beach, in Northeast Florida, this Mother’s Day weekend. You don’t have to know that it’s one of the longest-running tour events played at the same course every year (TPC Sawgrass for 35 years, only other four other PGA tournaments have been played at the same course for as long, not including The Masters), or that it’s considered an unofficial “fifth major” (thanks to its elite field and massive purse).
Do you even know what a major is? If not, please respect my decision not to explain it.
It probably does help a little that TPC Sawgrass is so famous that you probably remember playing it on PGA Tour Golf on Sega Genesis (or at least I do), with its signature island green on the 17th†. That part is pretty cool. And even if you have no idea what I’m talking about, there are a lot worse things to stare at on a nice day with a drink in your hand than this:
Above all, though, The Players Championship is a spectator’s event. That was the entire idea behind the course, which is why it’s called “the stadium course.” It’s not really a stadium, mind you, just the closest equivalent that could be created for golf — with raised areas around the tees and greens in addition to the grandstand, so that you always have a pretty good view. A recent redesign opened it up even more, and without getting into the arcane details, let’s just say that it’s sort of like the open-concept kitchen of golf courses (side note: I’ve been watching way too much HGTV lately).
Which is to say: The Player’s Championship promises the sun/grass/booze of a baseball game and the bougie glamour and people watching of a horse race. Only with… more. More sun, more grass, and possibly even more booze. And, at the very least, better food.
In fact, the food was the reason I was there. The folks behind The Players are trying to make it as much about the food as the golf. As part of this initiative, this year’s tournament is set to include a section called “Wine and Dine on 9,” a French-American bistro setup with a menu from Matthew Medure (a James Beard nominee) where you can sip wine and eat wagyu beef sliders, tuna tartar tacos, and pork belly (some excerpts from this year’s rumored menu).
Behind the 11th green there’ll be “Taste of Jacksonville,” featuring food from local favorites. A few of the ones I got to sample were Mojo Kitchen in Jacksonville Beach, serving up Kansas City “burnt ends” — the most heavily spiced and charred ends of the brisket — and lots of the usual southern barbecue fare (their super smokey corn was a particular highlight).
View from the Four Points in Jacksonville Beach. Didn’t suck.
“Tacos on 12” is exactly what it sounds like, with the tacos in question provided by local chain TacoLu. Everyone likes to talk about the time Rickie Fowler delayed a practice round in 2014 so he could grab a taco (in 2015, he won the tournament). That story seems borne out by news reports, though I can’t confirm their other assertion, that it’s easier to get a taco from the TacoLu stand at the Players than at the permanent TacoLu’s in Jacksonville Beach.
The course location won’t be live until May, but the Jacksonville Beach location did seem pretty crowded when I visited. The first thing I noticed about the food was that they put pepitas in their guacamole, which seemed mildly sacrilegious, though not nearly as bad as peas. As for the actual tacos, I got to try the “banging shrimp” (grilled shrimp with a spicy sauce, which seems to have a million incarnations in Northeast Florida) and the chicken verde (a pulled chicken-type thing with spicy green sauce). Both were served on flour tortillas, sans accoutrements (no slaw, no salsa, no onions/cilantro). They didn’t look like much, but they both brought enough heat that I didn’t consider asking for salsa.
Putting aside my legendary bias against East Coast Mexican food, they were pretty good — the kind of taco I could imagine being indispensable after a late night drink, and perfect to mow down one-handed while stumbling around a beautiful golf course.
Bone marrow with bacon butter at Michael’s. Frankly, the bacon butter seems like overkill.
They’ll also have a stand of food trucks (a murder of food trucks?) — “Trucks on 10!” — next to a giant mobile bar, and your more pedestrian fare at the Food Court near the entrance. The only food I got to sample from the latter came from Trasca & Co Eatery, which looks like your usual wraps and salads and smoothies joint, but tastes better. Proprietress Sara Frasca, a lovable live wire who seems like someone you’d see on Shark Tank, calls herself a “third generation panino maker” (she even brought out pictures of her grandma to prove it, I think she keeps them in her purse) and claims she still uses her meemaw’s panino dough recipe.
It was good, and made me look twice at what I’d thought was your standard buffalo chicken wrap. But hey, I’m a sucker for a good dough origin story. She also boasted of mimosas made from cold pressed juice and prosecco and her “best salad in Jacksonville” award. She used the word “hipster” multiple times to describe her clientele, and I spent the next half hour trying to conjure a confusing mental image of a Jacksonville Beach “hipster” crushing paninos and cold pressed mimosas before a golf tournament. What could hipster possibly mean in this context? Someone who appreciates a good dough, I suppose.
View from the Castillo
Just down the coast from Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra sits St. Augustine. I’ll admit that when I think of Florida and especially the Jacksonville area, I imagine sun baked suburbs where nothing’s older than the seventies. But St. Augustine’s claim to fame is that it’s the oldest European city in the US, “founded” by the Spanish conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565. Since then it’s been occupied by the Spanish, then the British from 1763 to 1784 following the French and Indian War, then the Spanish again until 1821, before Florida became part of the US.
St. Augustine has been sacked at least twice by pirates, first by Sir Francis Drake in 1586 (who was technically a privateer but whatever) and later by buccaneer Robert Searle in 1668, before the Spanish finally wised up and built a real fortress. The fortress, the Castillo De San Marcos, is actually still there. As is a spot called “Matanzas” (massacre) named for the place where Menendez executed about 140 French Huguenots under the command of Jean Tibault after they’d shipwrecked near St. Augustine during a hurricane.
Anyway, if you enjoy bloody history and you’ve read a few too many pirate books (guilty), there’s something about St. Augustine’s long, flat horizons and heavy air that makes it easy to imagine a fleet of besieging ships, or picture it as a refuge from 16th/17th/18th century laws. It still exudes that swampy, lawless frontier vibe. Ponce De Leon came to Florida in 1513 looking for the Fountain of Youth, and it’s a place that seems defined by people not getting quite what they bargained for.
Naturally, St. Augustine now has a kitschy pirate museum, opened in 2006 for $10 million, owned by former Philadelphia 76ers president Pat Croce, who stocked it with “authentic pirate artifacts” from his own collection. Croce has also written several books about pirates, including My Pop Pop Was A Pirate. This seems more like an interesting detail about Pat Croce than it does about St. Augustine, but I include it nonetheless.
If the pirate museum is too kitschy, there’s always a tour of the Castillo to scratch the history itch, or a walk around Flagler College, which is more representative of St. Augustine’s more recent history as a gilded age vacation destination. Its namesake, Henry Flagler, was a co-founder of Rockafeller’s Standard Oil, who put up the money for the Ponce De Leon Hotel, which became the centerpiece of the college in 1968. Louis Comfort Tiffany was a draftsman on the project, and the Flagler College dining hall rotunda is said to be the world’s largest college of Tiffany glass. A tour guide pegged the value at $130 million, while an Antiques Roadshow segment on the place set the value at $5,000 to $45,000 per window, which at 70 windows would put the top-end value at $3.15 million.
Either way, it’s easily the coolest dining hall I’ve seen.
When I was there, someone had removed the “L” on the sign so that it said “Fagler College,” presumably just in case all the splendor tempted you to forget that it’s still a college. The kids even had hammocks set up in the quad. Hammocks! Lucky bastards.
Gilded Age treasures aside, I’ve always said there’s nothing better for the food culture of a place than being brutally colonized by the Spanish. The theory seems to hold in Northeast Florida. In St. Augustine I got to eat at Columbia Restaurant, which claims to have been in operation since 1905. It had the kind of massive menu tome you only see at really old restaurants, that combined old school elaborate seafood preparations with a mish-mash of Spanish, Caribbean, and South American influences. It kind of felt like a Latin American House of Prime Rib — probably the most old school restaurant in San Francisco, where they still spin your salad tableside, and the kind of place I like to go on my birthday. I’m a sucker for a restaurant that makes me feel like I’m in the 50s. The night I was at the Columbia, I think most of the clientele actually remembered the fifties.
Octopus and spicy sauce, tapas at Columbia
Of course, they’ve got new stuff too, like Michael’s Tasting Room, serving up fancy tapas and multiple-course meals with things like octopus and bone marrow. They’ve also got a Maple Street Biscuit Company, just so you know you’re still in the South. That’s a Southern biscuit chain where you can get all different types of biscuits slathered in your preferred combination of gravy, eggs, bacon, maple, and God knows what else. It has a hipster edge too, where instead of a name they have a “question of the day,” which was “what trend do you want to bring back,” so that instead of names, they’d call out “high top fades!” or “fanny packs!” when the food was ready.
A little too cute for breakfast, maybe, but I’ll put up with a lot for biscuits and gravy.
From Trasca to Maple Street Biscuits, getting hipper seemed to be a theme in the area. Such is certainly the case with the Jacksonville Ale Trail, which, spanning all the way from the coast to central Jacksonville isn’t a trail you can walk (at 840 square miles, Jacksonville is the largest city by area in the continental US). I didn’t make it to all nine breweries, but I did hop from Green Room, on the coast (named for the patch of wave inside the tube, not the movie, or the part of a comedy club) to Aardwolf Downtown and Intuition in the entertainment district. Green Room leaned IPA heavy (as does all craft brew, unfortunately, because half the customer base doesn’t think it’s craft beer unless it has half a pine tree in it — don’t get me started), with a cement floor and a dog patio that made me feel like I was in Portland.
That’s where I met this handsome f*ckin’ bon vivant:
Aardwolf, which calls itself a “niche sour and barrel aged brewer” was your spot for sours, though I admit I’m not quite sophisticated enough to enjoy sour beers yet. They taste a little like beer mixed with lemonade and just a whisper of armpit funk, but virtually all my friends more into beer than I am swear by them.
Aardwolf also had a barrel-aged Belgian that was quite nice. Intuition had a more downtown vibe, with a fiddle and banjo duo playing out front, and was almost as IPA heavy as Green Room. They also had a rye brown ale that was pretty solid.
Aardwolf’s Preben Olsen, with one of their wood barrels
St. Augustine also has a local distillery, housed in what used to be an ice factory, who make some interesting concoctions, like a vodka and a gin distilled from sugar cane (gin is usually distilled from barley or other grains; vodka from wheat, rye, barley, potatoes, or other grains), and a gin aged sherry barrels. It comes out sort of pinkish and makes a great martini. They also have a tour guide whose voice sounds exactly like Mike Myers’ Linda Richman character if you close your eyes. Click here if you’re into that sort of thing.
Now, is craft brew native to Northeast Florida? Is St. Augustine the only city where you could take a distillery tour and soak in some sun? Surely, the answer is no. But it’s got a bit of history, a lot of great food, just enough local booze, and — what the hell — maybe even some golf.
†According to course lore, the island green, designed by the now-famous Pete Dye, was actually suggested by his wife, Alice. He supposedly went along with the idea, even though he didn’t like it that much, and 37 years later it’s still probably his most famous hole.
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