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Nelly Korda unveils Chevron champion’s dinner menu with an ode to her Czech roots
Katelyn Mulcahy
TARZANA, Calif. — There are dozens of perks that come with winning a major, but one of the coolest for Nelly Korda in defending her Chevron Championship is working with a star-studded chef for her champions dinner menu.
Korda is embracing her Czechoslovakian roots to kick off the LPGA’s first major of the year next week at the Club at Carlton Woods in Texas.
Dessert is her favorite part, of course.
But first, the rest.
The World No. 1 worked with chef Thomas A. Keller—the renowned chef and proprietor of the famed French Laundry in Northern California.
To start, former champions like Lilia Vu and Hall of Famer Amy Alcott, will dine on caviar, then a cream of mushroom soup. The entree is an herb roasted filet of Snake River Farms American wagyu beef with a Goulash sauce, accompanied by a Greek deli salad, along with asparagus, garnet yam gratin and glazed mushrooms.
The dessert is the exclamation mark and a childhood favorite of Korda’s—spring berry dumplings with toasted poppy seed covered in Tahitian vanilla anglaise.
“I love mushroom soup, that’s one of my favorite things for the starter,” Korda told Golf Digest Thursday at the JM Eagle LA Championship after shooting a first-round 67. “No one can go wrong with a good old wagyu steak. I put a lot of trust—and I never doubted—into Chef Keller. It’s going to be amazing, I know it. My personal touch was the dessert. That’s something that as a kid, that was my favorite meal. It’s fruit-filled dumplings. It’s kind of bringing in my Czech roots as well.”
Korda won an incredible seven times on tour last year and when she finally got to her offseason, she had time to cook. That included making Goulash, and Keller included a Goulash sauce on the beef.
Since the Chevron Championship was moved from Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage in California to the Club at Carlton Woods, Chevron has tried to implement things to make the tournament special for players, past champions and fans. The champions’ dinner is a nice touch and something that’s long been revered at the Masters. In fact, the same woman who designs the menu at Augusta, is the one who did this one for Korda, too.
“Chef Thomas Keller does the dinner for us and the past champions gets to consult with him on the meal. Nelly had a big heavy influence on that,” said Glenn Weckerlin, Chevron’s global director of brand and partner line management. “I keep teasing [Keller] about it because she had several pieces of the dinner that have a Czechoslovakian influence, but the dessert is a Czechoslovakian dessert. It’s basically a strawberry dumpling with powdered sugar on it. My mouth waters when I think about it.”
He teased the chef because Korda’s dad, Petr, a former professional tennis player, joked to Weckerlin that he’ll reserve judgment about the chef until after he’s tried his Czechoslovakian cooking, especially those dumplings.
After all, that’s Nelly’s favorite part of the meal.