What defines a golf course restaurant? If at first you think it might be a little stuffy – collared shirts, starched white attire – you’re not alone. That’s also what longtime restaurateur and caterer Johnny Carmona thought it might be when the CEO of Pajaro Valley Golf Club approached him in 2022 about taking over the club restaurant, the Cypress Grill.
“When you think of a golf course you might think, is this place stiff, are there a lot of rules?” Carmona recalls wondering. “But really, it’s a place to come and hang out in your community.”
After more than a decade, he left his longtime Watsonville space, Carmona’s BBQ, and opened up Carmona’s Grill at the golf course near Pajaro, which is celebrating 100 years in operation this year. The menu approximates classic diner fair – breakfast omelettes or steak and eggs, then burgers, tuna melts and club sandwiches. There’s a bar and live music most weekend nights, plus events like bingo and bellydance performances.
In short, the new venue was on a golf course, but that did not mean Carmona’s really had to change the vibe: “We just wanted to create the same,” Carmona says. “It’s a professional service, but with a family approach. That’s the most important thing: treat them like a customer, but treat them like a normal human being.”
There is perhaps a reputation that golf course restaurants need to overcome if they want to attract anyone and everyone who may not play golf or belong to a club or know the rules of the game. But anyone can show up, and a mix of golfers and non-golfers contributes in its own way to the ambiance.
“I don’t want to bullshit you with a ratio, but it is a high number of people who don’t golf,” Carmona says of his customer base. “It is nice – a lot of our normal customers go to the driving range and learn how to play.”
He himself used to occasionally golf years back, but says it got too expensive for him. Now that he enjoys a wide landscape view out the restaurant windows of the tree-flanked green – and occasional herds or deer or rafters of turkeys – he’s thinking about picking up a club again. “It’s beautiful scenery,” Carmona notes. “It’s so relaxing – this is a lot better than staring at a parking lot.”
Many regulars from his former location followed him to the North Monterey County golf course, partly because the chef prefers to treat people like old friends and likes to check in – after feeding hungry customers. “You give them what they need, and once they’re halfway done you ask, ‘How’s life going?’ after they have time to resettle their nerves. I stress that to staff every day. The biggest thing is the vibe, right when you walk in.”
There is a focus on ambiance and customer service, but Carmona is first and foremost a chef. He does some 300 catering events a year, and started out that way before opening a brick-and-mortar.
He loves doing big events to feed hundreds of people, such as corporate gatherings for clients like Driscoll’s and Giant, or further north in San Jose where he says he’s catered for Lockheed Martin and PG&E. But he’s always striving to create some level of intimacy; it helps that Carmona is motivated by community service and knows many regulars personally. He donates food to fundraisers for local organizations like the Pony League. And about one year after he moved to the new location, Pajaro residents were evacuated due to flooding and first responders were in the area 24/7.
“I got the call at 3am, ‘Johnny, you’ve gotta come, we’ve got all these people.’ We started making hot cocoa for everyone as fast as we could,” he recalls. From there, they began preparing as many as 600 meals a day to distribute through the American Red Cross to evacuees.
Carmona focuses on customers, but his business is also truly a family affair. All five of his children helped at some point with the former location, and now one adult son, Jonathan, is back full-time working with his dad on daily operations.
As for his own taste, Carmona says he leans basic.
“I might make paella for a big party, but when I go home I make a couple tacos, and I’m happy. Give me ground beef tacos, I’m cool.”