THE GOAL:Tie golf or other sports into menus that offer culinary variety.THE PLAN: At the Fort Wayne Country Club, an indoor miniature golf course featured an “Around the World” assortment of cocktails and foods from various countries and regions. At Desert Highlands, a cocktail party offered specialty foods from major league baseball stadiums around the country. THE PAYOFF: Aces and home runs all around, as members and guests responded positively to the diverse food offerings and inventive casual settings.

There’s no disputing that golf, food and beverages go well together. But just as golf can feature a lot of variety over the course of 18 holes, golf-related F&B offers shouldn’t have to be confined to the boredom of burgers and dogs. And just as some clubs have turned the golf side of an outing into a themed event, others have seen the opportunity to offer a new culinary delight at every stop of a round—even if that round is just being played indoors with a putter.

The Fort Wayne (Ind.) Country Club, for example, turned its spring cocktail party into a “Golf Around the World” event. A nine-hole “golf course” was laid out throughout the upper level of the clubhouse, using foam piping bumpers (the last hole actually required a putt off the balcony through a pipe and onto the 9th green). Members were given a hole number at which to start upon arriving. Each hole offered hors d’ouevres and/or cocktails from various parts of the world—Hole 2, for example, was a margarita station with fresh corn tortilla chips, salsa and guacamole, while Hole 8 offered Scotch tasting, and Hole 9 featured assorted French pastries.

Another club, Desert Highlands in Scottsdale, Ariz., decided it didn’t even need to have a golf tie-in to offer members some sports-related culinary “travel.” For its last High Desert Wine Club dinner of the season, the club arranged a Great American Ball Parks Culinary Tour. For an outdoor patio event, wines were paired with the best specialty foods from 13 major league stadiums. Members got into the swing of things by coming dressed in their favorite team’s gear for the casual evening.

“We hit it out of the park with this event!” reports Desert Highlands’ Terra Waldron. “Our staff ‘ran the bases’ to track down and recreate all the specialty recipes [from the various ballparks], and the members loved the diverse food offerings, the causal environment, and of course the wine.”