This delicious Spam-based snack (yes, Spam!) will fuel your game on the golf course

Welcomes to Clubhouse Eats and Drinks, where we’ll introduce you to our favorite food and drink at some of the best golf courses, golf resorts and golfy locations around. Cheers!

With Kapalua in the rearview mirror, the PGA Tour is headed to Oahu, home of the Sony Open and hotspot for the world’s greatest golf course snack. Consider the culinary marvel known as spam musubi.

Like Hawaii itself, it’s a cultural mishmash, melding elements of Japanese cuisine with America’s favorite mystery meat. There isn’t much to its preparation: a slab of grilled Spam over rice, wrapped in seaweed. Sometimes, the Spam is brushed with teriyaki, or layered with a scrambled egg, or the whole shebang is dusted with a sweet-and-briny seasoning called furikake. No matter. In every iteration, it’s a bundle of ambrosia, portable, flavorful and filled with all you need of the four essential food groups: salt, sugar, starch and grease.

As a turn-stand grab-and-go, it puts the hot dog to shame. According to one familiar origin story, Spam musubi was invented in the 1980s by a Honolulu resident named Mitsuko Kaneshiro (another account credits a Kauai woman named Barbara Funamura with creating the dish), who first dreamed up the concoction for her kids and later started selling it in a local market. People know a delicacy when they try one. Before long, it was almost everywhere on the islands. Counter service lunch spots. Convenient stores. And, lucky us, golf courses, where the humble combo of Spam and rice and seaweed somehow tastes better than it does anywhere else.

To receive GOLF’s all-new newsletters, subscribe for free here.