Elijah Pulley, Executive Chef, Northmoor CC
Brunch service is ditching its tired reputation, transforming into a vibrant showcase of global flavors. Creative club chefs now see this meal as an opportunity for culinary experimentation and cultural exploration.
“Most chefs hate brunch,” says Elijah Pulley, CCC, Executive Chef of Northmoor Country Club in Highland Park, Ill. “But I was a brunch cook for three years—and I really enjoyed it.”
Pulley believes a certain set of valuable and transferable skills are required for brunch, and he welcomes any chance to hone his own.
“Brunch is an opportunity to be more creative,” says Pulley. “It’s also fast-paced. With dinner service, everything’s coursed out, whereas brunch is in-your-face busy. … A lot of people think it’s just eggs, but there are hundreds of ways to cook eggs—and they have to look nice. Being able to do that at a high volume is an important skill.”
Eager to embrace new challenges across any service, Pulley stepped into the role at Northmoor CC at the beginning of 2024, succeeding a chef who had dedicated over four decades to the kitchen.
Northmoor averages about $2.8 million in annual food-and-beverage revenue. The club has 750 members and serves 70-80 covers for lunch six days a week, about 60% of which are brunch-related.
“I’ve been slowly changing the menu rather than changing the whole thing in one go,” notes Pulley. “[For] a lot of these members, [the former] chef cooked their fifth birthday, their bar mitzvah, their graduation and their wedding. He was their chef their entire life.”
beet- and horseradish-cured gravlax
Northmoor is a predominantly Jewish club, and while it’s not strictly kosher, menus reflect the culture. Brunch features several variations of gravlax in addition to frittatas, omelets, French toast and more, with a growing emphasis on scratch-made items.
“I really like the challenge of coming in and reinventing an operation,” says Pulley, “[starting with a], ‘If it’s served at Northmoor, it’s made at Northmoor’ philosophy.”
My Time to Shine
Like Pulley, when Executive Chef Carlos Matos joined Lantana (Texas) Golf Club at the tail end of the year, he assessed the food-and-beverage program for opportunities for improvement. First order of business: brunch.
“In talking to the members,” Matos says, “they’d asked for brunch before, and no one made it happen. This was my time to shine.”
On his first weekend on the job, the club’s grill offered a brand-new brunch menu on Saturday. The crowd that day was lacking, but Matos was undeterred. “The following day, Sunday, we were packed,” he says. “We had a waitlist.”
While Lantana GC is significantly smaller than Matos’s former club (Cowboys Golf Club in Grapevine, Texas), Matos sees this as an opportunity to spend more time making items from scratch.
“Basically everything on the brunch menu is made in-house—and the membership loves that.”
This includes breads and other pastries, run by a member of Matos’s team.
house-made biscuits with salted whipped butter and berry jam
“One of my cooks is doing a sourdough starter,” he says. “We are doing our pizza doughs and desserts in-house. The next step is making all of our own bread. It will take a little bit of time, but that’s the goal: I want 99% of what we provide in the club to be made in-house.”
At Northmoor CC, Pulley is currently making breads and pastries himself in an effort to show the cost savings, as well as the member enhancement opportunity. He hopes to pass the task along to a dedicated pastry chef soon.
“We ended up saving $800 [per month on bread service] by making the focaccia and making some rolls rather than buying them,” Pulley says, as an example. “It also tastes better, and it’s a nice story to be able to tell your membership. … I think we’re [reaching] a turning point, where most clubs will expect to have a pastry chef.”
Eaglewood Golf Course Executive Chef and Kitchen Manager Justin Field (left) works with Sous Chef Lucas Eiting to menu innovative items, such as duck confit waffles (below).
In Favor of Fusion
At Eaglewood Golf Course in North Salt Lake, Utah, Executive Chef and Kitchen Manager Justin Field is tasked with getting golfers on the course as quickly as possible, especially in the mornings.
“It’s a lot of grab-and-go during the week,” he says, “But it’s a far more refined menu on the weekends.”
Member-favorite menu items include sausages and breakfast burritos, which incorporate Field’s 16-hour-smoked brisket, one of the club’s most popular offers.
“[BBQ is] something that I’ve always had a knack for, and I take it everywhere I go,” Field says. “When I started here, before we even opened, I [requested] a custom-made smoker from Georgia; that’s how important BBQ is to me.”
Action stations such as Eaglewood GC’s luxury waffle bar are popular on weekends and special occasions.
“We’ll have four or five different waffles to pick from, plus premium toppings like duck or pork belly, and you can mix and match to build your waffles,” says Field. “There’ve been some crazy waffle designs, and I took a couple to refine a little bit for a more regular menu item.”
Among them is Field’s duck confit and buckwheat waffles with orange vinaigrette, which he describes as savory and rich yet deceptively light.
duck confit and buckwheat waffles with orange vinaigrette
Field generally foresees a shift away from sweeter breakfasts and toward protein-heavy dishes and savory flavors.
“I have a sweet tooth, and I love French toast, but when I eat a plate of French toast, I feel terrible for the rest of the day,” Field says. “Members want to eat something that’s going to give them sustained energy throughout the day, especially when it comes to golf. They don’t want to be weighed down or have that sugar rush and then crash by the time they get to the turn.”
This shift lends itself well to certain international cuisine, which tends to feature fewer sweet items on morning menus compared to classic American breakfasts.
“The same global influence I apply to my menus, I try to [incorporate] on every meal, whether it’s lunch, brunch or dinner,” says Northmoor CC’s Pulley. “Memberships are usually well-traveled. Their backgrounds are very cultural. I try to make a menu that reflects the culture of the club rather than [solely] traditional club food.”
At his last club, Chicago’s Columbia Yacht Club, Pulley successfully introduced a new style of cuisine to members as well as staff, including the club’s brunch cook, who’d been there 30 years.
breakfast ramen with house-made dashi
Brunch features included a banana bread fritter, made with challah and topped with peanut butter-infused maple syrup; a Columbia McMuffin, an elevated version of the McDonald’s classic, made with pastrami instead of Canadian bacon; Indian-style scrambled eggs; and breakfast ramen, with a house-made dashi.
“Teaching the [staff at Columbia YC] how to make a dashi stock, showing them how you can blend different cultures together creates a better brunch experience than just putting eggs on a plate with hash browns,” says Pulley.
Like brunch, Pulley feels ‘fusion food,’ as it was once more widely referred to, gets a bad rep.
“In the ‘90s, they called it fusion cuisine, and people hated fusion,” he says. “But I feel like clubs have the best audience for fusion. It’s about presenting [dishes] to [members] in a way that they understand and accept.”
Carlos Matos, Executive Chef, Lantana Golf Club
Consider the Chili Crisp
Lantana GC’s Matos features international flavors in his cuisine, including from his native Peru.
“I like to incorporate a little bit of my culture and some of those flavors” he says, though of course there are trials and errors. “We tried to incorporate anticuchos, which is beef heart, and I think I went a little bit overboard with that.”
For brunch, Matos hopes to menu pan con chicharrón, a classic Peruvian breakfast sandwich made with crisp fried pork and a pickled onion slaw called salsa criolla in a Peruvian bread.
“My grandparents had a bakery in Peru, and they made this bread,” Matos says. “It’s like a French bread; it’s very airy and soft on the inside and crunchy, but not too crunchy, on the outside. I haven’t been able to master it yet.”
House-made brunch items at Lantana GC include biscuits with salted whipped butter and berry jam; sourdough donuts with cream cheese frosting; breakfast poutine with black pepper gravy and smoked brisket; and a trio of sourdough cinnamon rolls, with choice of cream cheese: cinnamon, bacon or garlic chili oil.
Members were a bit intimidated by the chili oil option at first, Matos notes, so he sent complimentary rolls to tables to try.
“Eighty percent of the members who tried it liked it and asked us if we were going to make it the following week,” he says.
Because Lantana GC updates menus frequently, there’s plenty of opportunity to learn members’ preferences and adjust accordingly.
“We get to see who likes sweet stuff, who likes savory and who just wants eggs and bacon,” says Matos.
Some items stand the test of time. Breakfast poutine, for example, is a Day 1 favorite.
Special occasions spell yet another opportunity for Matos to push himself and his team. Lantana GC’s Easter brunch featured a seafood bar, with citrus-poached shrimp, snow crab claws and spicy tuna on rice cakes, in addition to a carving station as well as more traditional brunch options.
“I always come up with ideas, and when it comes to the day of, I’m like, ‘Man, what did I do?’” Matos jokes. “But it’s fun. If we are not pushing ourselves, if we are not trying something different every day, I don’t think we are doing our jobs.”
