USA TODAY International Edition
A taste of home while on road
Golden Bear shows off wife’s cooking in new restaurant
Jack and Barbara Nicklaus are sitting side- by- side in front of a stone hearth in the guesthouse just steps from the home where they’ve lived since 1970, so many home- cooked meals ago. He likes to eat. She likes to cook. And now, after all these years, they’re opening a restaurant.
“I wouldn’t say ‘ after all these years,’ ” Jack mock- objects. “We’re still young.”
The happy couple trade sunny smiles, hers suggesting she’s heard this line before. He is 76. She is 38 days younger.
He says her meatloaf is the world’s best — her Key lime pie, too. To hear Jack tell it, she makes magic with a baster the way he did with a driver. That’s why Jack Nicklaus Golden Bear Grill, at Fort Lauderdale- Hollywood International Airport, offers several of her homespun recipes.
“She couldn’t boil water when we got married,” Jack says. “But she learned very quickly.”
The grand opening is Wednesday, and Jack and Barbara will be there. The restaurant bears his name — Golden Bear — but the heart of the operation bears hers. Barbara’s Kitchen is where executive chef Juan Velez and his staff whip up meatloaf with mashed potatoes, vegetable and warm ketchup for $ 17.95 and Key lime pie with freshly whipped cream and graham cracker crust for $ 7.99.
The golfer who won 18 majors — four more than anyone else — and the wife who feeds his fierce appetite spent time with USA TODAY Sports recently to tell the tale of how they came to open their first public restaurant. The story begins, naturally enough, with a golf course.
BUILDING BEAR BRAND
Jack and Barbara founded The Bear’s Club, a private golf club in Jupiter, Fla., in 1999. Jeremy Jacobs, owner of the Boston Bruins, is one of the founding members. Jacobs is chairman of Delaware North, the Buffalo- based concessionaire that runs roughly 300 restaurants and retail stores at airports and travel plazas in the USA, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
The Jack Nicklaus Golden Bear Grill is an exclusive license agreement between Delaware North and the Nicklaus Companies; a second one is set to open at Charleston ( S. C.) International Airport this summer. Delaware North offers the airport concession contracts and the know- how. Jack offers the brand name — and Barbara the warmth.
“I didn’t pay much attention to brand as I was growing up,” Jack says. “I wish I had started my brand a lot earlier. I had a brand and didn’t know it.”
The Nicklaus brand includes designing golf courses — 400 worldwide — plus a variety of consumer products from golf balls to ice cream and lemonade to wine. Jack says he’d long thought about a Nicklaus- branded restaurant. The question was finding the right partner.
Jack’s and Barbara’s son Gary, 47, played golf at Ohio State, where he roomed with Rob Sample, who is today a vice president of business development for the Nicklaus Companies. Sample struck up a close friendship years ago with Charlie Jacobs, Jeremy’s son who is CEO of Delaware North’s Boston holdings. They hatched the idea of the restaurant over a round of golf some years ago.
“We didn’t play well,” Sample says, “but something came of it.”
That something is in Terminal 3 of the Fort Lauderdale airport, with 74 seats at tables, 15 more at the bar and 10 puffy lounge chairs. The restaurant opened for business last month, but Jack and Barbara won’t get their first peek until Wednesday.
“I drove by ( the airport) the other day,” Jack says, “but I knew I didn’t have a ticket to go anywhere, so I couldn’t get in.”
He and Barbara will have special passes to get in for the grand opening. Jack already knows what he’ll order.
“The menu,” he says, laughing. “We’re going to sample a little bit of a lot of things.”
FROM BARBARA’S KITCHEN
The Golden Bear Grill had a soft opening June 24, and it is on a recent weekday that Leslie Haak, 33, of Austin is eating there. She has never heard of Jack Nicklaus.
“I was walking by, and it looked like a nice place,” Haak says.
Score one for Barbara, who played a role in picking out the stone, tile and millwork.
“I was looking for a place with nice food,” Haak says. “Most airport food is overpriced and poor quality.”
Her midbite verdict: “Not fourstar or anything, but for airport food, very good.”
The restaurant is decorated in golf memorabilia and pictures aplenty: Some of Jack playing golf, some of him with other famous faces — and some that look plucked from a family album. One of these is Jack, Barbara and their five kids as a smiling array of blondness in front of a longago Christmas tree. A caption says Jack considers family the most important part of his legacy.
His family’s longtime gathering place is Barbara’s Kitchen — the one at home, not the airport.
Jack calls it “the true heart of our home” in the foreword to Well Done!, Barbara’s 2015 cookbook. “Our kitchen,” he writes, “is just like yours — the focal point.”
Barbara’s recipes and décor preferences were first exported from her kitchen to the private restaurant at The Bear’s Club. Jeremy and Peggy Jacobs liked the food and atmosphere so much they’d often drive an hour each way to dine there.
Charlie Jacobs mentioned this to Sample during that round of golf — and the idea of matching Delaware North’s reach with the Nicklaus brand was put in front of Jack and Barbara the next day. The concept took three years to get to market.
In June 2013, a consulting chef and three members of Delaware North’s development team met with Jack and Barbara in her kitchen, where they tried more than a dozen dishes.
“They were trying different things, and they kept varying Barbara’s recipes,” Jack says. “And I said, ‘ No, don’t vary Barbara’s recipes. Her recipe is better than what you just fixed.’ I think we got our message across.”
The menu is a mix of Delaware North’s recipes and Barbara’s, including her chicken salad ( over greens or in a baguette), chicken Parmesan and the meatloaf she adapted from Jack’s mother’s recipe.
“Will they produce it exactly as Barbara does?” Jack says. “I don’t know. That’s one of the things I want to see when we go down there for the opening. Because I am going to test a lot of that stuff to make sure.”
That’s more pressure than a birdie putt at the Masters. “Just a little bit,” says Velez, the chef, grinning widely.
A BUSINESS PARTNER
The Nicklaus Companies and Delaware North are family businesses with like- minded families.
“Jeremy and Peggy have become good friends,” Barbara says. “We have the same interests and the same likes.”
Their shared interests include philanthropy — and the Buffalo Bills. Jack is an original season ticketholder with the rival Miami Dolphins, but grandson Nick O’Leary is a second- year Bills tight end. Jack and Barbara sat in the Jacobs’ box at some Bills games last season. Roast beef on kummelweck rolls and crispy chicken wings sluiced in hot sauce, classic Buffalo fare, were served.
“Jack is, first and foremost, a family man,” Jacobs says. “He and I have similarities in that regard. Jack has five children and I have six, and I think he has 20- odd grandchildren, and I think he outdoes me on that. I have 18. More importantly, though, is that he sees successorship in that next generation. He brought them up that way. He’s a very tight family man.”
Nicklaus and Jacobs share more than business and the Bills. They were born on Jan. 21, 1940.
“Jack and I were born on the same day, and his wife and my wife were born one day apart,” Jacobs says. “My wife is Feb. 27 and his Feb. 28. He, of course, married the younger woman.”
Don’t ask that younger woman to name her favorite recipe.
“That’s a hard question to answer,” Barbara says. “People will ask Jack what is his favorite golf course, and he says, ‘ That’s like asking who’s my favorite child.’ ”
Then she answers anyway: “Probably the Key lime pie. It’s a very, very simple recipe, but I think it’s a good pie.”
“Better than any Key lime pie you’ll ever have,” Jack says.
Bookcases flank the fireplace in the Nicklaus guesthouse. One of the books neatly lining the shelves is a leather- bound copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Its opening lines are among the most famous about family in world literature.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Jack is patriarch of what he assures is a most happy extended family — one that still often gathers in Barbara’s kitchen, where meals and memories are made.
“We’re all about family,” Jack says. “We always have been. The biggest legacy you can leave is family.”