Welcome 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!
The coldest winter Mark Twain ever spent still wasn’t as chilly as many summer mornings at Gleneagles Golf Club, a nine-hole municipal course in San Francisco.
And when we say muni, we mean muni in the most hard-scrabble sense.
Designed by Jack Fleming, in 1962, this tree-lined track is as tough as nails, with tilted fairways and testy greens and winds off the bay blowing every which direction. The golfers aren’t exactly softies, either. Money games are legion, and regulars are fine with taking on all comers. Denim is more common here than moisture-wicking fabrics. This is the sort of place where a crusty-looking guy with a homemade swing will loop the nine holes twice and shoot his age.
Gleneagles is named after a famous course in Scotland, and its frequently grey mornings add to the Scottish atmospherics. But there’s more to the throwback mood than that. Gleneagles is also home to a cozy, no-frills pub, which sits astride what passes for a clubhouse. In that pub, a drink they like to pour is the Fog Lifter, which lives up to billing in more ways than one: it chases off the cold and helps clear your head. Gleneagles is like that. It often draws a hair-of-the-dog sort of crowd.
To make a Fog Lifter, Gleneagles style, the barkeep starts with coffee, then kicks it up with Carolans Irish Cream and a blast of Jameson Irish Whiskey. It’s a bracing libation. Why the Irish cocktail touches in a Scottish-inspired setting? Good question. We dare you to be fussy enough to ask.