To choose the menu, you just have to win the Masters

The winner of the Masters tournament will receive a green jacket, an elegantly engraved trophy and a lifetime invitation to play one of the most respected events in professional golf.

He will also have the chance to host a dinner for other Masters winners next spring (and to collect the check for one of the most exclusive evenings in sports).

“How rare is it to get everybody in a room like this where we’re alone?” Scottie Scheffler said hours before his dinner last year with 32 fellow Masters champions and Fred S. Ridley, the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, the site of the tournament.

“There’s no one else,” Scheffler continued. “There is the chairman and then there is us.”

And in a tournament where concessions are legendary, the pressure is always on for a new champion to choose a menu that suits the moment. Tiger Woods offered cheeseburgers and milkshakes after his debut Masters victory in 1997, but over the years has built menus that include sushi, porterhouse steaks and chocolate truffle cake. Sandy Lyle opted for haggis after his 1988 victory. Vijay Singh’s selection of Thai food has thrilled some players and baffled others.

When 2023 winner Jon Rahm shows up for dinner on Tuesday night, he’ll sit down to a meal that starts with six tapas and pintxos, including “Mama Rahm’s Classic Lentil Stew,” a recipe from Rahm’s grandmother. Later follows a Basque crab salad, a choice of rib-eye steak or turbot and a dessert of milhojas de crema y nata — a puff pastry cake with whipped cream and custard that was essentially Rahm’s wedding cake.

Spanish-born chef José Andrés helped the Spanish-born golfer develop the menu.

“He called my grandmother for the recipe” for the lentil stew, Rahm said last month. “If anyone doesn’t like it, please don’t tell me. Don’t really tell anyone. It means a little too much for me to hear it.

“I wanted to bring a little bit of my heritage and my family into this dinner, which will make it even more special,” he added. “Hopefully I can do it again, but I wanted to make sure the Basque heritage was there.”

The evening wasn’t always so bespoke. For years, the menu consisted of little more than a steak, a baked potato and flowing wine, an offering that reflected the habits, homogeneity and uninhibited nature of many professional golfers. After Tommy Aaron won the tournament in 1973, he recalled in a 2020 interview, he called an Augusta National official to inquire about the menu and found the spread to be rather predictable. He opted to offer a beef entrée, lobster bisque and a crab salad.

“After dinner, a couple of the guests said, ‘Well, we’re glad we got something other than a prime rib,’” recalls Aaron, who from then on always ordered what the champion suggested instead of a cheap main course.

Scheffler recalled brainstorming his menu with his wife and agent. They started with a starting point—Scheffler’s favorite foods—and narrowed it down from there. After consulting with an Augusta National chef, they arrived at a menu that, as the golfer put it, “would definitely not be on a nutritionist’s plan.”

When Augusta National invited The New York Times into its kitchen last April, a team of chefs was preparing what might become the most-relished meal of the year. It included dozens of dishes that had to be personalized, on time, and hot.

There were starters of cheeseburger sliders, prepared with a precision that eludes most home cooks, firecracker shrimp and bowls of tortilla soup. Texas rib-eye steaks, reflecting Scheffler’s decades in the state, or blackened red fish came next, with macaroni and cheese, jalapeño creamed corn, fried Brussels sprouts and fries. For those who still had room for dessert, there was a warm skillet chocolate chip cookie with milk-and-cookie ice cream.

“I had the soup and I had to kind of wipe my head because I was sweating,” Lyle said just before mocking the seemingly delicate taste buds of 1992 winner Fred Couples.

“I like hot food; I’m used to curries and stuff like that, so it’s not too bad,” Lyle said. “But I think Couples was holding his throat, ‘Oh my God.’ So it’s taken a few people by surprise.”

Scheffler didn’t seem to care. His menu, his rules.

“Everyone,” he reported the next day, “enjoyed the food.”