I approached Ponte Vedra thinking, “Meh. Not my thing.” The resort won me over, and that’s for one clear reason: It does things right.
I’ve written about this Florida resort’s destination weddings for promotional features often over the years, so I’ve spent many cumulative hours living within its marketing materials. I saw a high-quality country-club hotel with exceptional amenities. In my mind: Is it fuddy-duddy? Sleek and trendy is more my shtick, so I put the Jacksonville-area option out of my mind once those advertorial gigs ended a few years ago. I should have booked a week and settled in.
As it turns out, doing things right means a whole lot. I like this place.
Ponte Vedra – The Basics
Ponte Vedra is in fact a country-club kind of resort. It’s a community with private homes from simple to stunning, along with the AAA Five Diamond Ponte Vedra Inn & Club, where I stayed, and The Lodge & Club Ponte Vedra Beach. It also has 15 tennis courts with eight pros on staff at the Racquet Club and two challenging golf courses – one currently being dug up and revamped. Its spa is the largest in North Florida at 30,000 square feet with 100+ treatment options. You’ll also find restaurants and bars in the main house, on the beach, and near the golf and spa facilities. Stores too; I bought the perfect sun hat from a super-helpful clerk. Lodgers have full access to all these facilities.
The iconic fountain. Photo courtesy Ponte Vedra Inn & Club
This isn’t a typical resort housed in a single building. Guests check in at the original building, which has a few rooms plus luxe clubby spaces to curl up for cocktails and conversation. Most accommodations are across the street along the beach. The Surf Club is there too. That’s a string of pools, water slides, cafes, restaurants and event spaces steps from the wide tempting stretch of sand.
The family pool, one of four. Photo courtesy Ponte Vedra Inn & Club
The rooms have the look of what I’d think, say, boaters would want. There will be 262 rooms and suites in total when the Ocean House reopens, newly built from the ground up, in June 2020. Not that I know any boaters, but the decor’s tailored edges and the navy blues lead me to that conclusion. Below is a video of my room, to give you an idea. It’s a huge escape and directly on the beach. It had every single thing I’d possibly need. Take a look.
For this trip, I was the hotel’s guest as part of a media group. Free lodging plus a range of organized activities always puts a rosy twist on a getaway. Still, you can’t fake good service. You can’t falsify sincere smiles, and every employee from the janitors on up greeted me warmly. Every meal from casual to frou-frou featured top-quality food. Every in-room amenity was above-par. And so on.
Every pat of butter at Ponte Vedra Inn & Club looks like a seahorse.
It takes a whole bunch of extras to earn a AAA Five Diamond rating, and obviously Ponte Vedra Inn & Club takes care to have a slew of those. The resort isn’t as over-the-top doting at the Montage Laguna Beach, where a desk clerk walks you to your room at check-in and the housekeeping staff places your slippers by the side of your bed during the nightly turndown service. I’m OK with without being treated like like a blue-blood. Ponte Vedra is more down to earth, even with its luxuries. I’d choose it every time.
Ponte Vedra – The Nifty Extras
Ponte Vedra Inn & Club has a tendency toward abundance. You know how hotel rooms never have all the bath towels or washcloths you need? In my room, a not-super-careful count added up to five bath towels, 16 washcloths and at least seven hand towels, plus three beach towels. Every towel was thick and soft.
When room service arrived with breakfast, it wasn’t just plopped down. A friendly man set a tablecloth over the coffee table, then placed each element on that cloth. Not only my coffee and oatmeal topped with superfoods either. There was an orchid in a small vase, a glass of ice with lemon, a chilled bottle of water, and a freshly squeezed healthy juice – it differed daily – with the ingredients spelled out on a thick custom postcard.
When did oatmeal ever look this special?
A card like this described each day’s fresh juice.
In the spa, the women’s locker room nearly overflowed with extras like disposable brushes, hygiene products and razors. My facial reaped better skin, yet that’s not all. I laid on a heated table that was curved to meet my spine. I was invited to choose from six scents. And my treatment including having my hands and feets wrapped in something that started warm and stayed warm. The experience was beyond relaxing, and that’s not including time afterward by the spa pool and in its hot tub, sauna and steam room.
A sliver of the bounty in the spa’s ladies locker room.
Ponte Vedra – The Food
The spa café
One morning I took a yoga class at the gym, an amenity I forgot to mention above. Before we started, I heard regulars discussing their travels – to Morocco, to Asia, to Africa. So I guess it’s no surprise that this staid-looking club takes a global approach to food, since its members themselves bop around the planet. You can get a burger or Reuben or steak for sure, and they’ll be wonderful. If like me you enjoy trying new flavors, Ponte Vedra will keep you interested.
At The Golf Club Dining Room, we started lunch with, from top left, caramelized onion and kale risotto, pickled shrimp (Who knew that was a Southern thing? So good) and peppercorn-seared 115-day dry-aged ribeye with tomato jam.
I ate in at least four restaurants during my stay and each meal was impressive. I must have “Oh wow”ed several times during each – and this from a long-time critic who prefers her own food to anything mediocre in a restaurant. Kudos to Executive Chef Hermann Muller for pushing his culinary team to be experimental.
Datil pepper is a specialty of the area around St. Augustine, which is near Ponte Vedra. The hot pepper made this crab chowder delightfully fiery.
I’ll let the photos (sorry, my specialty is writing, not snapping) and captions below tell most of these stories. Then I’ll follow with details of two over-the-top meals. I only wish I had space to feature every meal.
Ponte Vedra – The Beach Event
Corporate and wedding groups gather at Ponte Vedra Inn & Club to bond, learn, celebrate, whatever. The culinary team decided to aim low – physically low – for a new offering that will surely become an event staple. They dug a hole in the beach and placed a table and seats in that hole. We, the media guests, sat down at just before sunset. As a soloist played guitar and sang to us from above in a lifeguard chair, we feasted family-style on a so-called oyster roast that involved all kinds of veggie and starchy sides, plus the oysters, fish (some caught nearby that morning), shrimp, even smoked brisket. What an experience, sitting below ground sipping a fruity rum runner and loading up on fresh, pickled and grilled foods. The evening ended as we sat around a fire pit toasting housemade marshmallows.
This is the beach dinner from a distance. Our table was set into a hole in the sand. It’s between those two white strips to the right. The lanterns you see are on the table.
This is what it looked like at the table in the sand, before it was loaded up with family-style platters of foods and housemade condiments, that is. The carousel below shows some of the side dishes and condiments, and the marshmallows and roasting spot we enjoyed after dinner.
Ponte Vedra – The Chef Event
Well wow again. I’ve been following chef Erik Osol his whole career because we know people in common, and once he moved to Florida from New York City I kind of hoped to try his food at Ponte Vedra’s Seahorse Grille one day. Thanks to this media event, I got not just a standard Seahorse Grille meal but the kind of wine-pairing extravaganza he usually prepares for small groups who are seated at his in-kitchen chef’s table.
Again, I’ll let my (lousy) photos tell the story. Essentially, Osol tries food tricks even I haven’t seen before. For evidence, look at my (hideous) second picture below. This was a porcini donut hole – a wonder made from dried porcini and black truffle mushrooms plus mustard mixed into a batter. No fancy food-writer words can describe what a pop of this is like. Which is why I ate three even though I had seven full courses coming up. Working with Resort Sommelier Matheson Cory, six wines jumped from around from red to white, each juice chosen because it worked with its dish. A true pleasure.
Many of the specialty foods at the meal were raised locally, such as mushrooms from Son & Skye mushrooms and microgreens from the aquaponic producer Gyo Greens.
So call me a fuddy duddy. Fine food, endless coastline, friendly faces and guestrooms overloaded with amenities – I like the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club. Click here to give yourself a tour.