Pebble Beach Traded a Golf Course for Three New Dining Rooms This Year

Ask anyone in the Forest what fall in Pebble Beach usually feels like and you'll hear some version of the same answer: the fog burns off earlier, Car Week's dust finally settles, and the golf calendar goes quiet enough that residents can actually get on a course without fighting resort guests for a tee time. This fall is not that fall. Two structural things happened at once this year, and most people driving 17-Mile Drive right now have only clocked one of them.

The Links at Spanish Bay has been closed since March 18, and it isn't coming back until next spring. At the same time, three dining rooms at The Lodge quietly finished flipping over, one by one, across 2025, which means the restaurant side of Pebble Beach changed while everyone's attention was fixed on the golf side. If you haven't connected those two facts, you're missing the actual shape of this season.

One Course Down, for Thirteen Months

Spanish Bay played its final round on March 17, and construction crews moved in the next day. Pebble Beach Company brought in architect Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, the team behind Ladera and the Los Angeles Country Club's North Course, to rebuild the 1980s-era Scottish-inspired links into what the company is calling a modern California coastal course, all within the existing footprint along the dunes. The timeline isn't vague. Spanish Bay is set to reopen to the public on April 17, 2027, roughly two months before Pebble Beach Golf Links hosts the 127th U.S. Open from June 17 to 20 of that year.

The storm-damaged boardwalk that runs along Spanish Bay, the one that gives the public coastal access between the course and the beach, is part of the same project. That's easy to miss if you only think of Spanish Bay as a golf course and not also as a walking route a lot of Pebble Beach households use without ever picking up a club.

What this actually means for anyone who plays regularly is a rotation problem. Del Monte Forest normally spreads local and member play across five courses: Pebble Beach Golf Links, Spyglass Hill, Spanish Bay, Del Monte, and the short course at The Hay. Pull one of the five out of that rotation for thirteen months and the other four absorb the difference, particularly Del Monte and The Hay, which see the most walk-up and local play to begin with. If your usual move has been to book Spanish Bay on a weekday morning because it was the easiest tee time to land, that option is gone until spring 2027, and everyone else who used to think the same thing is now competing for the same four courses you are.

The Restaurants Already Came Back, and Most People Missed It

While the golf story has been about closure, the dining story has quietly been about reopening, and it happened on a staggered schedule that started right after last year's AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. The Bench, the wood-fired restaurant overlooking the 18th hole, reopened in June 2025 with updated interiors but the same fire pits people go there for. The Tap Room, Pebble Beach's clubhouse bar and the closest thing the resort has to a living room, reopened in October with better acoustics and a new addition called the Champions Room, a private space built around a collection of U.S. Open memorabilia that includes the wedge Tom Watson used to chip in on the 17th hole in 1982.

Stillwater, the Lodge's main dining room, was the last domino, reopening in November 2025 with a full redesign: floor to ceiling windows, a central bar looking out at the cove, and a glass-enclosed wine room. Executive chef Benjamin Brown and chef de cuisine Alex Ramirez rebuilt the menu around Monterey Peninsula farms and fisheries, and dishes like the charred hamachi tostada and whole roasted branzino have been on the table since that reopening, not as some future plan but as the current menu, sitting there right now.

The practical point for a resident is timing. If the last time you sat down at Stillwater or grabbed a stool at the Tap Room was before spring 2025, you haven't seen any of this. The renovation ran nine months from start to finish, which means by the time Spanish Bay's rebuild wraps up in April 2027, the dining side of the Lodge will have been operating in its new form for the better part of two years. The golf closure is the visible disruption. The dining reopening is the quiet upgrade that's already done.

PURE Championship Weekend Is the One Without the Circus

This is also the week to notice the other event on the calendar, because it won't stay this manageable for long. The PURE Insurance Championship Impacting First Tee runs September 18 through 20 this year at Pebble Beach Golf Links and Poppy Hills, its 23rd year and PURE Insurance's tenth as title sponsor. It pairs PGA TOUR Champions players with First Tee juniors from around the country, which gives it a completely different texture than the AT&T Pro-Am's celebrity-and-crowd energy in February or the eventual scale of the U.S. Open. It's the one week a year the golf here is about mentorship as much as it is about spectacle, and it's small enough that you can still park, walk the course, and actually watch.

That won't be true again for a while. Between now and June 2027, Pebble Beach is going to spend increasing energy on U.S. Open logistics, hospitality builds, and the kind of infrastructure planning that turns a quiet fall into a staging ground. This September is close to the last normal one before that ramp-up fully takes hold.

The rest of the fall calendar is smaller and worth knowing about even if you have no interest in golf at all. Roy's at Pebble Beach runs its annual Hawaiian Luau on September 27. Hay's Place, the resort's newest dining addition, hosts a ticketed walk-around tasting event on October 17. And Whiskey & Fire, a golden hour open-air tasting built around rare pours, lands on October 30 at the fire pits.

• September 18-20: PURE Insurance Championship Impacting First Tee at Pebble Beach Golf Links
• September 27: Hawaiian Luau at Roy's at Pebble Beach
• October 17: Hay's Place walk-around culinary event
• October 30: Whiskey & Fire at the fire pits

None of this requires a tee time or a dinner reservation months out. It just requires knowing the calendar has shifted, which is easy to miss when the biggest headline in Del Monte Forest right now is a golf course that's closed rather than the three rooms that quietly reopened around it.

Next fall, Spanish Bay will still be under construction and U.S. Open planning will be in full swing. The one after that, everything flips again. This particular September, with one course down and three dining rooms freshly finished, is its own moment, and it's worth actually being in it rather than waiting for the next headline to tell you what changed.

If you've got questions about what any of this means for a specific property in the Forest, or you're simply trying to figure out which gate gets you to dinner fastest these days, Scherling Properties is a call away. Stacey lives here too, and she's always glad to talk shop about the neighborhood, tee times included. Let's Connect.