At Home in the Pines
Your Guide to Pinehurst Dining
Your Guide to Pinehurst Dining
By Alex Podlogar
You don’t have to be a golfer to enjoy a wide variety of delectable dining offerings as your heart and tastes aspire. Plan to stay awhile.
It’s not just the food that fuels Pinehurst Resort’s executive chef Thierry Debailleul, affectionately known as “Chef T.”
For all the myriad of dishes and cocktails on a menu, for all the choices that run from bountiful breakfasts to casual lunches to fine dining to nightcaps, it’s the natural setting that inspires him.
“That’s the beauty of Pinehurst,” Debailleul says. “We’re not a high-rise tower. We’re not stuck downtown. We’re kind of in a semi-wilderness in the pines, and I think it’s fun to utilize that and express that for a lot of people.”
The Deuce
Many of those people are golfers. But just like Pinehurst’s evolution of the last decade has signaled an earnestness to make the game that has been a bedrock for the North Carolina Sandhills more accessible and fun to more people, so, too, has it placed an added emphasis on its dining options.
It’s a dining scene that doesn’t need a car. Perhaps a Resort shuttle is helpful, but it’s not necessary. Imagine, in one day:
Start with a Southern-style breakfast buffet. In the stately “Queen of the South” dining room in The Carolina Hotel, a glorious breakfast has been dubbed “the best breakfast in golf” by Golf Channel. Dine under sparkling chandeliers and amidst a live pianist.
Have lunch at Pinehurst’s main clubhouse. In The Deuce, a pub with large windows that open behind the bar and onto the club’s east veranda, diners breathe in the pine-scented breeze while overlooking the 18th green of famed Pinehurst No. 2. Choose from casual entrees like Southern salads, burgers and handhelds.
“What’s important, as we have a lot of casual restaurants, is that there’s something unique in every one of them,” Debailleul says. “Every dish is uniquely made. We don’t have the same burgers everywhere, the same Reubens everywhere.
“You can be rushing between two rounds of golf, but whatever we can do to make your lunch special, we’ll do it. The speed of service will be phenomenal, the burger will be amazing, everything cooked to order, spot on. That’s what we’re after. It’s always an experience.”
1895 Grille
Enjoy fine dining, white tablecloth Italian fare at The Magnolia Inn’s Villaggio Ristorante & Bar.
Or return to The Carolina for the stylish and festive Carolina Vista Lounge, which features a dazzling bar in the center and a nightlife that spills onto the veranda wrapping the hotel.
Retreat to the Village’s winding streets a short walk away. At the cozy Holly Inn, choose the intimate dinner fare of The Tavern or its wood-paneled fine dining neighbor, the 1895 Grille. Tucked a few steps down from The Holly’s lobby, the 1895 Grille’s ingredients are brought straight from Carolina farms to the kitchen and transformed into award-winning delights day after day. Nightly specials assure a unique experience on each visit, though no one will blame you for ordering the triple chocolate soufflé at the close of dinner here.
Pinehurst Brewing Company is more than just its 10 beers brewed on-site; it’s a smokehouse full of options.
Just up the hill inside The Manor, the North & South Bar is a whiskey and bourbon bar unlike any spot in Pinehurst, with more than 70 spirits along with traditional and inspired cocktails on the menu.
“To be in culinary, you have to be passionate. You have to have a love for it,” says Chef T. Cooking is not an act of feeding yourself — it’s an experience.”
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