Jesse is joined on the podcast by Matt Roher. Matt is the Food and Beverage Director for Sea Pines Resort. He joins Jesse to talk about the nearly year-round effort to feed 10-15 thousand people per day at RBC Heritage every April. There is a lot more to it than showing up with a couple of burgers and some shirmp.

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Jesse Blanco: Welcome back to the Eat It and Like It podcast. We are now officially beyond St. Patrick’s Day. We’ve put all of that green shenanigan-y nonsense to bed and now we move into what I like to call golf season. Yes, we have March Madness on TV, but you’ll walk into a sports bar and you’ll hear the golf claps, right? 

Joining us now to talk a little bit about what The Heritage will be offering us this year, food-wise, is Matt Roher. He’s the Food and Beverage Director for Sea Pines Resort. How are you?

Matt Roher: I am great, Jesse. How are you, sir? 

JB: I’m fabulous. I’m fabulous. Yeah, before you and I got rolling, we had a quick exchange about St. Patrick’s Day. You were working, I was hosting and doing the Savannah thing, I had family in town. And it kind of… on the 18th, everything just gets quiet. You still live over here, right?

MR: Oh, yeah, sure. We’re on Skidaway, we’re in The Landings. You know, the days of me getting into those post-work shenanigans are way, way gone. 

JB: Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. It’s a good time. But you guys are now, as we record this right after St. Patrick’s Day, you are, we could say 30 days, but the arrival is the day after, or about the end of The Master’s weekend, as guys start getting cut, they start showing up there the weekend before what is considered Heritage Weekend, correct? 

MR: That’s 100 % correct. I mean, you know, we’re considered– we really feel pretty fortunate that we have– the PGA Tour players love us, because they have this pressure cooker up in Augusta, and a lot of times they’ll come out of that, they have to get on planes and gotta go fly somewhere else. We’re kind of a family fun atmosphere, especially for their teams and for their families, so a lot of times what happens is they just hop in the car and in a couple of hours they’re down in this little slice of paradise down here. And you’re absolutely right, as the cuts start, they start arriving. So it happens, it’s real.

JB: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the champion and maybe the last group are hanging around for TV and the whole thing, but everybody else has pretty much skipped town and they’re rolling onto Hilton Head.

MR: That’s exactly right.

JB: Yeah. Yeah. So how far back? I’m sure it’s a year round thing, but how far back can we look at the calendar and say, okay, they’re starting to hunker down on what they’re going to be offering food-wise for the new tournament? When does that kick off? 

MR: For who? For ours?

JB: For Heritage, yeah, what part of the calendar do you guys start locking in on what you’re going to be doing food wise? 

MR: Yeah. I mean, we start real, real early. I mean, obviously, I think we have about at least a dozen, if not more, of the hospitality engagements on course. We have all the major sponsors, Boeing and RBC and Coca-Cola and all these big dogs out there. And then we have a couple of concessions, we run all the bars… I mean, we feed upwards of between 10 and 15,000 people a day easily. A lot of that, our partners with our suppliers, US Foods, beverage suppliers, beer, wine, liquor suppliers, I mean, we are basically, at the turn of the calendar year, as soon as we hit into ‘26, we’re prepping, we’re planning, and we’re getting the logistics under control. So right now, we feel like we’re right on the doorstep of this thing, 

JB: Of course, it’s almost over now. But you say you handle all the corporate tenting and all that, RBC and the Coca-Cola and whoever the corporate sponsors are. Do they have input on what the food is gonna be? Do you have to have meetings with them and their people and all that stuff? It sounds like a lot of work.

MR: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of back and forth. Most of them have their own internal event planners and hospitality leads. So our people, my corporate chef lead, our catering sales director, they start– you know, we work on these menus, I mean, a lot of the menus, we try to have in place months before we even start that process, because as you can imagine, we’re trying to overlap and have redundancy as much as possible. The last thing you wanna have is 200 unique items out there just based on this a la carte menu of different items. And in an ideal world, you have one shot, one kill, and one menu for everybody. That’s not ever been the case, but we’re getting better and better at it. And right now I would say we probably have, I don’t know, maybe 60 or 70 unique items that we have that go out over the course of– just to the hospitality boxes. Of course, the restaurants are a whole nother animal.

JB: Right, oh yeah. So I would think the most asked for thing is obviously seafood, but does it drill down even more and everybody wants shrimp? 

MR: Yeah, tons and tons of shrimp for sure. know, and we are a domestic East Coast exclusive environment here, that’s something that we started years and years ago. This tournament, it’s really put a tax on our local guys, so it’s tough for them to supply, but everything’s coming out of at least the region, for sure. But you’re absolutely right, in the traditional shrimp sense, we probably have, you know, like Forrest Gump, I could go on and on about the types of ways that we’re cooking it. But it’s also wings, know, they like the casual, kind of “in the hand”, sliders are big… certain locations we’re doing our defending champion burger, which is a cool concept that we came up with. You know, people are looking for healthy stuff too, there’s a lot of kind of high-end corporate environments here, so they’re coming out of big major markets. They’re coming out of, in certain cases, California, New York, and they like a lot of balance in their diet, so we have to provide that as well, especially on the breakfast side. And the players that’s a– you know, we handle all the players, the players’ family, the physio, all of their support teams, and we have very, very specific tour mandated programming that has to go along with that.

JB: That’s– We just– I mean, I’m almost speechless. We’ve just scratched the surface of all the things that you guys have to juggle in a given year to feed everybody. We haven’t even talked about my average Joe experience, walking up and wanting to get some food.

MR: That’s right. 

JB: That’s nuts. It’s nuts. So, put a number. How many pounds of shrimp would you say you do for that week?

MR: If we’re doing anything less than a thousand, I’d be shocked, honestly. But, you know, really, I mean, I’d have to get to that, I don’t want to overstate it. 

JB: No, I get it. I would have guessed more. So I guess that’s a fair number. Wow. 

MR: It could be. It probably is. 

JB: I hear you. I hear you. Yeah, I didn’t tell you I was going to ask you that question. But do we have the defending champ burger? Has that been revealed yet? I haven’t seen it.

MR:  Yeah, we have– so Justin Thomas won last year, right? So Justin Thomas won, he’s got, you know, it’s a little bit of a California twist that he’s got on it, which is pretty cool. And then we’ve got–we actually rolled out this really cool thing, Davis Love won the tournament five times, right? So we just had this big course renovation, I don’t know, you probably knew that we shut the course down for eight or nine months, and we literally went like a foot down, ripped out all the grass, a lot of reshaping, reshaping some of the greens, got the elevations back, you know, put all the sand traps back under control. And he was the designer and player consultant along with that. So we got to work with him when we grand-opened the course. He hung out with us, Davis Love hung out with us, and we came up with a really cool burger for him. 

JB: Very good. 

MR: Yeah, it’s great. 

JB: Very good. Anything new for the average consumer that’s going to be attending and looking for something different?

MR: You know, one of our concessions that’s open to the public is the Fraser’s Tavern Pavilion. If you’re familiar with the clubhouse, it’s right after you come off of hole– right in between nine green and ten tee. And it’s a really cool program, we got a lot of smoke in the air, we got the smoker down there, kind of a southern barbecue experience, but that’s where we serve last year’s Defending Champion Burger. So Justin Thomas designed that sucker, and it’s selling like crazy.

JB: Very good. Anything, let’s say a first timer who wants to come and enjoy some food down there during the tournament, what– besides the pavilion you just described, because I’ve been through there and it’s a smorgasbord. You won’t leave there hungry. Anything else that pops out, that you know you guys just really crush, that someone should get their hands on? 

MR: Well, so as far as the actual food concessions out there on the course, so, you know, Surge Group, our local Hilton Head restaurant group, they run a lot of that. So I think this year they’ve kind of themed a little bit more. I think they have something a little bit more seafoody, then they have one that’s a little bit more barbecuey. I wouldn’t be able to speak to that exclusively, my little programming there is near and dear to my heart. But obviously, before and after, I mean, I run all of Harbor Town, we have Quarter Deck, we have Harbor Side in there with all the steamed seafood and all that fun stuff. And, of course, afterwards, hitting Beach Club and the beach and all that is great too. 

JB: It’s obviously all hands on deck that week. Your management team is working how many hours that week? 

MR: All of them.

JB: Yeah, if you’re not sleeping, working, right?

MR: Our network has grown over the years, we have a really great relationship with the chef team up at Augusta, Augusta National.  And obviously, like us, you know, they bring in– the executive chef for Burkman’s and Augusta National is Roberto Bostiglia, an incredibly talented guy, legendary chef in the industry, and dear friend. So he brings in chefs from all over the country, too. So he’s kind of the opening act for us. And then we have worked it out with him where, a lot of his team and a lot of his talent that he brings in basically just kind of keeps on going. And we put them up here, we have homes within Sea Pines, we have our own employee housing now. And it’s like getting the band back together every year now. It’s really pretty neat. 

JB: That’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool. Very good. Well, I’m looking forward to coming to hang out a little bit and eating some of the food. I think I’m going to be paying a visit to, what is it, the Calibogue Club up there at 16? 

MR Yes. 

JB: Yeah, yeah. I heard from some of the people there involved with all of that stuff, and I think we’re going to collaborate on some things there. So I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be a good time. It’ll be a good time. Yeah, I won’t stop you if you’re running through because everybody’s hair on fire.

MR: We always make time for you, jesse.

JB: (laughing) I appreciate that. Very good. Anything else that I might be forgetting that people should know about food, and what you can get? There’s healthy options, I know, there’s a little bit of something for everybody, isn’t there? 

MR: Sure thing, sure thing. Yeah, for sure. Like I said, you know, we’ve got certain passes [that] are going to get you into certain places, So, you know, you mentioned Calibogue Club, you know, again, real eclectic, that’s a ticketed hospitality, that’s an elevated experience in there. Also, you have the Lighthouse Club. So Lighthouse Club is over on 18 green. You know, at the end of the day on Saturday and particularly Sunday as the winner’s kind of coming down 18 there, it’s electric, electric. So that’s also an elevated ticket experience there, but it’s lots of incredible food all in and around that 18 area, especially 17 green, 18 tee, and then as it extends out, you’ve got a lot of different really cool concession options there.

JB: Very cool, very good. Well, thanks so much, sir, for taking a few minutes to tell us all about– is that burger available, the champions burger available before the tournament at Frazier’s? 

MR: Yeah, yeah. Well, a couple of months after he won last year, we roll it out, probably the Mid-Summer as soon as we get all of his selections back, we put it on the (menu).

JB: Oh okay, so it’s been there. I missed that.

MR: It has, that’s exactly right. So the defending champion burger, it’s crispy black pepper bacon, pepper jack, smashed avocado, fried egg, and southwestern aioli, that is Justin Thomas’ masterpiece.
JB: Sounds healthy. (laughing) I’m gonna get into one of those. Alright, I’ll let you run. Thank you, sir, for taking a few minutes. We’ll see you soon.