Masters Champions Dinner: Menus, Rules and History
The Masters champions dinner is a private Tuesday meal at Augusta National in Georgia, hosted by the defending champion, who also chooses the menu.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished The Masters24 min read
- First dinner
- 1952
- Started by
- Ben Hogan
- Held on
- Tuesday of Masters week
- Formal name
- The Masters Club
The Masters Champions Dinner is a private dinner for past winners of the Masters, held in the clubhouse at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia, on the Tuesday evening of tournament week. The defending champion is the host. He chooses the menu, works it out with the club's kitchen and, by long custom, picks up the bill. Only champions and the club's chairman attend. Ben Hogan started it in 1952, and its formal name is the Masters Club.
Haggis, mashed potatoes and neeps, served in the clubhouse at Augusta National in April 1989. Sandy Lyle, the first Briton to win the Masters, had chosen it, and the question of who ate it and who quietly ordered a steak has been retold ever since. Nothing about the evening is more Masters than that: a private meal, an unusual menu and a story everyone in golf knows without anyone outside the room having seen it.
What the Masters Champions Dinner is, and the rules that hold it together
There is no written constitution for this evening that anyone outside Augusta National has read. What exists is a set of customs, kept for more than seventy years by a club that changes almost nothing without a reason, and confirmed over and over by the men who have sat at the table.
The fixed points are few and they do not move. The dinner is on Tuesday. It is in the clubhouse, in a private room the club does not open to patrons during the tournament. It is for champions. The man who won last April is the host and his name is on the menu card. Everyone wears the green jacket.
Then there is the menu, which is the only part of the evening the public ever really sees. The club releases it, or the champion does, usually some weeks before the tournament, and it is reported as news across American sports pages in a way that no other golf dinner would be. That reporting has turned a private meal into one of the best-known rituals in the sport.
What the custom asks of the host
The defending champion has three jobs. He proposes the food. He stands up and says a few words. He pays. Nobody has ever found a document setting out the third duty, and champions who have talked about the bill have done so with a laugh rather than a figure. The custom is widely reported and has never been denied by the club, which is about as much confirmation as Augusta National offers about anything inside its own walls.
One more rule turns up in every account. A champion who does not want what the host has chosen may order from the regular clubhouse menu. That safety valve has made the adventurous menus possible. Nobody at the table is forced to eat Moreton Bay bugs, so a host is free to serve them.
| What | The custom |
|---|---|
| Night | Tuesday of Masters week |
| Place | The clubhouse at Augusta National Golf Club |
| Host | The defending champion |
| Menu | Proposed by the host, cooked by the club's kitchen |
| Bill | Paid by the host, by custom |
| Dress | Green jackets |
| Guests | Past champions and the club chairman only |
Ben Hogan's invitation in 1952 and the name the Masters Club
Ben Hogan won the Masters in 1951. It was his first win at Augusta after several near misses, and it came two years after the car crash on a Texas highway that had nearly killed him. When he came back the following spring as defending champion, he did something no previous winner had thought to do. He invited the men who had won before him to dinner.
His one condition was the jacket. Everyone was to come in green.
That instruction is the reason the evening has always felt more formal than a reunion. The green coat at Augusta is a members' garment, introduced for club members in 1937 and given to the champion for the first time when Sam Snead won in 1949; the full story is in our page on the green jacket and its rules. Hogan's request turned a meal into a meeting of something, a group with a uniform. Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts, the club's founders, were taken into it as honorary members, and the chairman of Augusta National has held that place ever since.
The gathering was given a formal name, the Masters Club, and that is still what the club calls it in its own literature. "Champions Dinner" is the name the public uses. They are the same thing: the Masters Club exists for one evening a year, and its only activity is eating.
The first table
The room in 1952 was small. Champions before Hogan were Horton Smith, Gene Sarazen, Byron Nelson, Henry Picard, Ralph Guldahl, Jimmy Demaret, Craig Wood, Herman Keiser, Claude Harmon and Sam Snead. Smith, Nelson and Demaret had won more than once. Every one of them was an American professional, which tells you something about who won the Masters in its first two decades and explains why nobody thought twice about what was served.
Sarazen won in 1935 with a shot that still has its own bridge on the 15th hole. Nelson would become the dinner's long-serving master of ceremonies. Snead won again later in 1952, the year of the first dinner, so in April 1953 he became the second host. From there the chain has run unbroken from one defending champion to the next, even in 2020, when the Masters itself was moved to November and the dinner moved with it.
Hogan's own reputation helps explain why the invitation stuck. He was not a man known for sentiment, and a dinner proposed by him carried a certain weight. Had a less formidable champion suggested it, there is no guarantee anyone would have repeated it the following year.
Who is in the room, and who is kept out
Every living Masters champion is a member of the Masters Club for life. Which of them come depends on who makes the trip to Augusta that April, and attendance in a given year has never been published as a figure. The older champions who no longer compete often come for the week in any case, to play the Par 3 Contest or simply to be there. The younger ones are in the field and are already on the grounds.
The chairman of Augusta National attends as the honorary member. He is the only person present who has not won the tournament, and he usually opens the evening.
Then there is the list of people who are not there, and it is longer than the list of those who are. No wives or partners. No children, even adult ones. No coaches, caddies, agents, sponsors' representatives or tournament officials beyond the chairman. No reporters and no television. A photographer takes a group portrait of the champions in their jackets before they sit down, and that image is released. After that the door closes.
Why the exclusion matters
A room with no outsiders is a room where men who spent their careers giving press conferences can talk without one. Accounts from champions describe it as the least guarded evening of the week, which is presumably why Augusta has never been tempted to let a camera in. The value of the dinner to the people in it depends on nobody else hearing it.
There is a practical side as well. The Masters Club is small enough to fit around one long table, and it has grown only as fast as the tournament has produced new winners: one a year, minus the repeat champions. Jack Nicklaus won six times and added only one member to the club. A list that grows by fewer than one person a year is about as exclusive as a list can be.
- 6Jack Nicklaus
- 5Tiger Woods
- 4Arnold Palmer
Each Masters win made the winner host of the dinner the following year. Counted from wins through the 2025 tournament; the totals can only rise if a past champion wins again.
What the host actually does in the months before April
The menu is not decided the week before. A champion who wins in April has most of a year before he hosts, and the club starts the conversation well ahead of time, because the kitchen has to source and test whatever he asks for.
The process runs roughly like this. The champion, often with his family's help, settles on an idea: the food of his home country, a dish from his childhood, the meal he eats every Sunday. He passes it to the club. Augusta National's chefs come back with what they can do and how they would do it, and there is a back-and-forth over courses, quantities and substitutions. Some hosts have sent recipes. Some have sent ingredients. A few have brought specific wines from their own cellars or their own country. The final menu is printed on a card at each place.
- The winThe champion is presented with the green jacket on Sunday evening and becomes host of next April's dinner.
- The ideaOver the following months he settles on a theme, usually his home country's food or a meal tied to his family.
- The kitchenAugusta National's chefs work out what can be cooked for the table and propose how to prepare each course.
- RevisionsCourses, wines and desserts go back and forth until the host signs off on a final menu.
- ReleaseThe menu is made public, usually some weeks before tournament week, and is reported widely.
- Tuesday nightThe kitchen serves it, with the regular clubhouse menu available to anyone who prefers something else.
The order of events as champions and club accounts describe it. Augusta National does not publish a formal timetable, and the gap between steps varies by host.
The off-menu clause
Every account of the dinner mentions it and every host relies on it. Any champion can order from the clubhouse's ordinary menu. In practice that means steak, or the club's fried chicken, or whatever a man in his eighties fancies more than sushi. It is the reason no menu has ever had to be cautious, and it explains why a dinner whose average guest age is well past retirement has served sushi, elk, haggis and Thai curry without a revolt.
It also takes some of the sting out of a host's gamble. A champion who serves something unusual is not asking a room of his elders to suffer. He is offering the room an option.
The speech
The host is expected to say something. It does not have to be long and it does not have to be polished. Champions who have described their first dinner tend to say that standing up in front of Palmer, Nicklaus and Player was harder than any putt they faced the previous Sunday, which is the sort of line that is both a joke and true.
The menus people remember, champion by champion
Most Champions Dinner menus pass without notice. A few have been retold so often they have become the history of the dinner on their own. The table below lists the best known, with the year the host won the tournament; he served the meal the following April.
| Host | Masters won | Main dish the menu is remembered for |
|---|---|---|
| Sandy Lyle | 1988 | Haggis with mashed potatoes and neeps |
| Nick Faldo | 1996 | Fish and chips |
| Tiger Woods | 1997 | Cheeseburgers, chicken sandwiches and milkshakes |
| Vijay Singh | 2000 | Thai dishes, including panang curry |
| Mike Weir | 2003 | Elk and wild boar, with Arctic char |
| Charl Schwartzel | 2011 | A South African braai |
| Bubba Watson | 2012 | Grilled chicken, mac and cheese and cornbread |
| Adam Scott | 2013 | Moreton Bay bugs and Wagyu beef |
| Jordan Spieth | 2015 | Texas barbecue |
| Sergio Garcia | 2017 | Spanish dishes, including lobster rice |
| Hideki Matsuyama | 2021 | Sushi, sashimi and a Japanese Wagyu course |
| Scottie Scheffler | 2022 | Cheeseburger sliders and Texas ribeye |
| Jon Rahm | 2023 | Basque and Spanish dishes, including a ribeye |
Bernhard Langer belongs on any such list. The German, champion in 1985 and again in 1993, served Wiener schnitzel; accounts differ on which of his two dinners it was, so it sits here in prose rather than in a row.
Tiger Woods, 1998
The menu everyone mentions first. Woods won in 1997 by 12 strokes at the age of 21, and the following April he served cheeseburgers, grilled chicken sandwiches, french fries and strawberry and vanilla milkshakes. The reasoning he gave was the obvious one: that was what a 22-year-old ate. It was the first menu that seemed to be a statement about who the host was rather than about what a formal club dinner ought to be, and it opened the door for every personal menu that followed.
Woods hosted again after his wins in 2001, 2002 and 2005, and once more after 2019. That last dinner, in a year when the tournament was moved, is covered further down.
Sandy Lyle, 1989
Lyle won in 1988 with a 7-iron from the fairway bunker on 18 and a birdie putt down the slope. His menu the next year was a full Scottish dinner, and haggis was a deliberate choice. Lyle has been good-humored ever since about how many of the American champions sampled it.
The international menus that followed
Vijay Singh's Thai menu in 2001 was the first that most of the room would never have encountered at home. Mike Weir's Canadian table in 2004, with elk and wild boar and Canadian beer, was a host serving his country rather than his favorite meal. Adam Scott's 2014 menu put Moreton Bay bugs, a shellfish from Queensland, in front of men who had never heard of them, and closed with pavlova. Hideki Matsuyama's 2022 dinner was Japanese from start to finish, and Jon Rahm's in 2024 drew on the Basque Country he comes from.
And the ones that played it safe
Not every host reaches for a passport. Bubba Watson served the food he grew up on in the Florida Panhandle, and nobody thought less of him for it. Scottie Scheffler's Texas menu in 2023 was close to the one he served again in 2025, which is the privilege of a repeat host who liked what he chose the first time. Patrick Reed served a bone-in ribeye in 2019. A steak is still the default answer, and the off-menu clause means the steak eaters never go hungry.
What the menus say about who wins the Masters
For its first few decades the dinner did not have a menu worth reporting. The hosts were Americans, the club was in Georgia, and the meal was what an American country club served: beef, potatoes, perhaps seafood, a dessert. Nobody thought of it as a statement because it was not one.
What changed was the list of champions. Gary Player became the first winner from outside the United States in 1961 and won twice more in the 1970s. Then, from 1980, the tournament went international in a rush: Seve Ballesteros in 1980 and 1983, Bernhard Langer in 1985, Lyle in 1988, Nick Faldo in 1989 and 1990, Ian Woosnam in 1991, José María Olazábal in 1994. A run of European winners meant a run of hosts who did not share the room's assumptions about dinner.
The menu followed. A Scottish host served haggis. An English one served fish and chips. A Fijian served Thai. A South African grilled, a Spaniard served lobster rice, a Japanese champion served sushi. Read in order, the menus of the past forty years are a map of where golf talent comes from, and a decent short history of the tournament's growing reach.
There is a judgment worth making here. The dinner has become more interesting precisely because the club never tried to standardize it. Augusta National is famously controlling about the look of the tournament, from the length of the grass to the color of the sandwich wrappers. It has left the one evening that belongs to the champions entirely to the champions, and that restraint is why the menus became news.
Inside the room: the chairman, the host and the stories that leak
What happens after the photograph is known only from what the people present have chosen to say, and the club has never published an order of events. With that caveat, accounts from different champions over many years line up on the broad shape.
The chairman welcomes the room. The host is introduced, says his piece and is toasted. The meal is served. After that the evening belongs to the older champions, who tell stories, needle each other and, by most accounts, needle the host. For decades Byron Nelson was the evening's master of ceremonies, a role Ben Crenshaw later took on. The evening runs a few hours and ends early enough for the players in the field to get some sleep before the final practice day.
Why so little gets out
Partly because there is no one to leak it. Every person present is a champion or the chairman, and every one of them has a reason to keep the room private. Partly because the stories that do emerge tend to be told by the person they flatter, or in the form of an affectionate anecdote years later.
That means much of what the public believes about the dinner is folklore. A story told by one champion about another, filtered through a reporter, retold on a broadcast and then repeated online, has passed through several sets of hands. Where accounts of a particular evening conflict, the honest position is that nobody outside the room knows which is right.
The stories that are told
Some patterns appear again and again. Older champions offering younger ones advice on the course. Arguments about equipment and distance, a running subject at Augusta for decades. Sam Snead's jokes, which by every account were not suitable for print. Champions describing the moment the host stands up as the most nervous they have felt at the club. None of it is verifiable, and none of it needs to be. The point of the evening is that it is theirs.
The first-timer: a seat beside the chairman, a locket and a portrait
A new champion is a new member, and the club marks it. By most accounts the defending champion is seated beside the chairman, a place of honor that he holds for one evening. Next year someone else sits there, unless he wins again.
Some accounts of the evening describe members of the Masters Club receiving an inscribed gold locket as a token of membership. Augusta National has not published the details, champions have rarely shown such a thing off, and this page treats it as reported rather than established. The gold medal and the silver replica of the Masters trophy, itself a model of the clubhouse, are the public prizes a champion takes home; whatever marks membership of the club is a private matter.
The group portrait
Before dinner the champions gather for a photograph in their jackets. It is the one image of the Masters Club that Augusta National releases each year, and over time the set of them has become a document in its own right. The early photographs show a dozen men. The later ones need several rows. The faces change at the edges every year, as one champion is added and, too often, another is gone.
What changes for the new member
Hosting is a one-year job. Membership is permanent. After his single evening as host, the new champion becomes one of the guests and keeps the seat for life, whether or not he is still playing in the tournament. Our guide to the full set of Masters traditions covers the other privileges of the title, from the lifetime invitation to the honorary starters on Thursday.
| Champion | Masters wins | Dinners hosted as defending champion |
|---|---|---|
| Jack Nicklaus | 1963, 1965, 1966, 1972, 1975, 1986 | 1964, 1966, 1967, 1973, 1976, 1987 |
| Tiger Woods | 1997, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2019 | 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2020 |
| Arnold Palmer | 1958, 1960, 1962, 1964 | 1959, 1961, 1963, 1965 |
| Gary Player | 1961, 1974, 1978 | 1962, 1975, 1979 |
| Nick Faldo | 1989, 1990, 1996 | 1990, 1991, 1997 |
| Phil Mickelson | 2004, 2006, 2010 | 2005, 2007, 2011 |
Back-to-back winners host back-to-back dinners. Nicklaus did it in 1966 and 1967, Faldo in 1990 and 1991, Woods in 2002 and 2003. A second straight dinner is a rare thing, and every one of those men could have served the same menu twice without anyone complaining.
Tuesday night in the run of Masters week
The dinner's place in the calendar is part of what makes it work. It falls on the last evening before the tournament stops being a social event and becomes a competition.
Monday and Tuesday are practice days at Augusta. Players play practice rounds, patrons with practice-round tickets walk the course and the champions who are no longer competing turn up and catch up with each other. Tuesday evening is the dinner. Wednesday brings the final practice and, in the afternoon, the Par 3 Contest on the club's short course, where many of the same men reappear with their children carrying the bag. Thursday morning, before the first round, the honorary starters hit the opening tee shots.
- MondayPractice rounds on the main course, with patrons on the grounds for the first time that week.
- Tuesday daytimeMore practice rounds, with players' press conferences through the day.
- Tuesday eveningThe Champions Dinner in the clubhouse, for past winners and the chairman only.
- WednesdayFinal practice, then the Par 3 Contest on the short course in the afternoon.
- Thursday morningThe honorary starters hit ceremonial tee shots, then the first round begins.
- Sunday eveningA new champion is presented with the green jacket and becomes next year's host.
The usual order of the week at Augusta National. Practice-round arrangements and start times change from year to year; the sequence does not.
Why Tuesday and not Wednesday
The timing gives the competitors two nights of normal sleep before Thursday, and it falls after the busiest practice day, when the champions who are only there for the week have all arrived. A Wednesday dinner would collide with the Par 3 and with the last night before the tournament. A Monday dinner would catch some of the older champions before they had made the trip. Tuesday is the obvious slot, and it is the night the dinner has kept in every account of the modern tournament.
The November dinner
In 2020 the Masters was postponed from April to November because of the pandemic, and the dinner went with it. Tiger Woods, champion in 2019, hosted it on the Tuesday of tournament week in November, seven months later than any previous dinner. He served a version of his comfort food, with fajitas, sushi and sashimi, and milkshakes for dessert. It remains the only Champions Dinner held outside April.
How the other majors copied the dinner, and why theirs matter less
Augusta's dinner was such an obvious success that other championships eventually borrowed the idea. The PGA of America has hosted an evening for past winners during PGA Championship week. The R&A has gathered its past champions at St Andrews in years when The Open is played on the Old Course. The Players Championship, at TPC Sawgrass, has staged a dinner for its winners. None of these is as old as the Masters Club, and none has acquired its weight.
The difference comes down to a few things, and it is worth being specific about them.
The guest list is different in kind
At Augusta the list of potential guests is the list of Masters champions, and that list is built one name a year from a single tournament played on a single course. The U.S. Open and the PGA Championship move between venues and have more winners in their histories, which makes for bigger, looser gatherings. A room that holds the same people in the same place every year builds familiarity in a way a rotating event cannot.
The host is the only person who earned it this year
At the Masters the dinner hangs on one result: the man who won last April is in charge, and nobody else could be. That gives the evening a reason to exist that a general past-champions function lacks. It is also why the menu is news. Nobody waits to learn what the PGA of America is serving.
The club controls everything
Augusta National owns the course, runs the tournament and sets every custom without reference to a sponsor or a federation. Its dinner has had seventy years to settle into routine. Other championships run their dinners as one element of a busy week of corporate obligations, and it shows.
None of this makes the other dinners pointless. They give past champions a reason to come back, which every championship wants. But a reader who wants the original should start with the Masters, and our guide to the PGA Championship's format and history covers what that tournament has done with its own traditions.
Empty chairs: deaths, absences and the room that changes every April
The Masters Club loses members as well as gaining them. Ben Hogan died in 1997. Gene Sarazen died in 1999, a few weeks after hitting his last ceremonial tee shot at Augusta. Sam Snead died in 2002 and Byron Nelson in 2006. Seve Ballesteros died in 2011, Billy Casper in 2015, and Arnold Palmer in September 2016. Each of those deaths took a voice out of a room that had depended on it.
How the dinner marks a champion who has died since the previous April is one of the details that has stayed inside the room. Champions have spoken about remembering absent friends, and it would be odd if the evening did not acknowledge them, but the club does not publish a ritual and this page will not invent one.
When a living champion stays away
Attendance is not compulsory, and a champion can miss a year for any reason: illness, age, a family commitment, simply not making the trip. Seve Ballesteros was unable to attend in the years of his final illness, and his absence was felt in a room he had helped turn international. Other champions have missed the occasional April. The club does not take a register in public, and it is not the kind of absence anyone outside the room is told about.
The pull of the evening
What stands out is how many champions do come back long after they have stopped competing. Men in their eighties have made the trip to Augusta for this one night, and some have kept coming after they stopped playing in the Par 3 Contest or teeing off on Thursday. Jack Burke Jr., the 1956 champion, was the oldest living Masters winner from 2018 until his death in January 2024, a few days short of his 101st birthday.
That is the clearest evidence of what the dinner is worth. Nothing compels a retired champion to fly to Georgia in April. The green jacket waits for him at the club whether he comes or not, and his lifetime invitation to play is the first of the routes set out in our explainer on how players qualify for the Masters. Plenty of them come anyway, for one evening at a long table in a room with no cameras.
Why the dinner has outlasted its imitators
Seventy years is a long time for an informal custom to survive without a rulebook. The Champions Dinner has done it for reasons that are partly about golf and partly about Augusta National.
The golf reason is that the Masters is the one major that returns to the same course every year, and its champions therefore share a single piece of ground. They have all walked down the 10th, all played the 12th with the wind swirling, all stood on the 18th green on Sunday. A dinner at that club is a dinner among people who have done the same specific thing, which is a better basis for conversation than having won something somewhere.
The Augusta reason is control. The club decided early what the evening was for, kept everyone else out and has resisted every temptation to commercialize it. There is no sponsor, no broadcast, no auction of menu cards. In an era when nearly everything around a major championship is for sale, the absence of that is the point.
It helps, too, that the menus are fun. They are the only window anyone outside gets, and they are revealing in a small human way: what a champion chooses to feed his heroes says something about him. A cheeseburger at 22, a braai from Johannesburg, a Basque steak, haggis on a Tuesday in Georgia. A good newspaper sports page has run them all, and readers keep looking. More on the week's other rituals, from the patrons to the pimento cheese, is on our United States sports hub and in the wider golf section.
What would change it
Very little, short of a decision by the club itself. The only true threat to the dinner would be a change in who wins: a long run of champions who did not care for the evening, or a falling-out between the club and the professional game severe enough to keep players away. Neither looks likely. A new champion has every reason to want a seat at that table, because the seat is the one thing about winning the Masters that money and rankings cannot buy anywhere else.