Every Masters Champions Dinner From The Last 15 Years Ranked From Worst To Best

Every April, a select group of men sit down to one of the most exclusive meals in all of sports. No reservations, no Michelin stars required, no dress code beyond a green jacket. The Masters Champions Dinner has been a Tuesday-night tradition at Augusta National since Ben Hogan organized the first gathering in 1952, and its central ritual hasn’t changed since: the defending champion picks the menu, foots the bill, and attempts to feed the greatest collection of golf talent on the planet without embarrassing themselves in front of Jack Nicklaus.

Some champions have risen magnificently to the occasion. Others served what amounted to a school cafeteria daily special. Here’s how every Champions Dinner from the past 15 years stacks up, ranked from the one you’d politely push around your plate to the one you’d fly to Augusta just to eat.

15. Bubba Watson — 2013 & 2015 (Tie for Last, Partly Because He Made Them Eat It Twice)

Let’s get this out of the way: Bubba Watson holds the unique distinction of being the only champion in Champions Dinner history to serve the exact same menu twice. After winning in 2012 and again in 2014, he went to the considerable effort of not updating a single item between his two turns as host. The meal: Caesar salad, grilled chicken breast with green beans, mashed potatoes, corn, macaroni and cheese, and cornbread, followed by confetti cake and vanilla ice cream.

To be fair, it’s a perfectly decent meal. It’s the kind of dinner that would earn enthusiastic reviews at a church potluck or a casual backyard cookout. At Augusta National, served to Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, and a room full of major champions, it reads like a gentle trolling of one of golf’s most sacred traditions. The confetti cake, in particular, is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a context that usually calls for something more refined.

The fact that Bubba looked at all of this in 2015 and decided it was still the right move is either deeply endearing or mildly baffling, depending on your relationship with comfort food. Either way, it lands at the bottom of this list and takes both spots while it’s down there.

14. Dustin Johnson — 2021

Dustin Johnson’s 2021 menu wasn’t bad so much as it was aggressively unremarkable for the occasion. The spread leaned hard into crowd-pleasing territory: a straightforward salad course, a main of beef tenderloin and chicken, and sides that could have come from any high-end wedding catering package in the southeastern United States. The one legitimately fun touch was the pigs in a blanket on the appetizer menu — genuinely a bold choice to hand wrapped pastry bites to Gary Player and Fred Couples before the main event.

Johnson’s menu wasn’t without charm, but it lacked the storytelling that the best Champions Dinners have. There was no thread connecting the courses to his life, his roots, or even a particularly strong culinary vision. It felt like a very good meal assembled by someone who wanted to make sure nobody left hungry, which is a fine goal (just not a memorable one in a tradition built on memorable meals).

13. Danny Willett — 2017

Danny Willett’s decision to go full traditional English for his 2017 dinner was sincere, patriotic, and an absolute nightmare of a brief to hand the chefs at Augusta National. The menu leaned into British cuisine at a moment when British cuisine was not widely regarded as the world’s most exciting culinary tradition. Willett is a proud Yorkshireman and that pride comes through clearly in the menu he assembled — it just so happens that Yorkshire pudding and mushy peas are a harder sell to a room of international golf legends than a Texas BBQ spread or a Japanese kaiseki.

The Augusta kitchen almost certainly executed the dishes as well as they could be executed. The fundamental issue is that traditional English food, however lovingly prepared, was competing against some extraordinary menus in the same era. Willett gets credit for authenticity and loses points for degree of difficulty. A champion serving haggis in 1989 was Sandy Lyle swinging for the fences in his home tradition. Willett serving a more restrained British menu in 2017 was a choice that required courage more than inspiration.

12. Sergio Garcia — 2018

Sergio Garcia’s dinner was an interesting case of a Spanish champion who had the perfect cultural heritage to put together a transcendent menu — and who chose instead to go fairly spare. His 2018 spread featured an International Salad as the opener, described as incorporating flavors representing the various nationalities of Masters champions past. The main was traditional Spanish lobster rice, which sounds genuinely excellent. Dessert was tres leches cake, a recipe contributed by his wife Angela.

What dragged Garcia’s menu to the lower rungs wasn’t quality but scope. This is easily one of the most abbreviated menus in the past fifteen years: three courses, minimal selection, no appetizers, and a comparatively thin overall spread for an occasion that rewards generosity of vision. The lobster rice is a legitimately wonderful concept, and the personal touch of Angela’s tres leches cake is lovely. But Garcia left significant creative real estate on the table — and it makes you wonder what he could have done with a fully loaded menu, especially in light of what a fellow Spaniard would put together six years later.

11. Tiger Woods — 2020

Tiger Woods has now hosted the Champions Dinner five times — more than anyone else in the modern era — and his 2020 effort represented a reasonable but slightly disjointed collection of his personal favorites rather than a fully cohesive menu. The spread paid homage to his 2006 dinner and drew from the rotation of meals he ate growing up: Augusta Rolls (tempura shrimp, spicy tuna, avocado, eel sauce), steak and chicken fajitas with all the fixings, and a dessert trio of flan, churros, and sopapillas.

There’s a lot to like here. Churros and sopapillas at Augusta National is genuinely inspired. The Augusta Rolls are a clever nod to the setting. But the menu reads as a collection of personal favorites rather than a considered culinary statement, and the mix of Asian-influenced sushi and Mexican-American mains doesn’t quite hang together as a unified experience. Tiger gets endless points for the memories attached to these dishes. As a pure menu, it sits comfortably in the middle rather than the upper tier.

10. Scottie Scheffler — 2023

Scottie Scheffler’s first turn hosting the Champions Dinner was exactly what you’d expect from a down-to-earth Texan who had just won his first major: approachable, crowd-pleasing, and genuinely fun, even if it lacked the sophistication of some of its neighbors in the rankings. The menu included firecracker shrimp, cheeseburger sliders, Texas ribeye, and blackened redfish, with a warm chocolate chip skillet cookie and milk-and-cookies ice cream for dessert.

It’s hard to argue with any individual item on that list. Firecracker shrimp? Yes. Texas ribeye? Obviously. A skillet cookie the size of a small vehicle with milk-and-cookies ice cream? Someone deserves a green jacket just for that dessert. The issue is cohesion: the menu feels like Scheffler ordered from his three favorite restaurants simultaneously rather than composing a meal. Still, it’s genuinely delicious, and Danny Willett reportedly warned everyone about the tortilla soup’s heat level, which is the kind of detail that makes Champions Dinner lore great.

9. Phil Mickelson — 2011

Phil Mickelson’s 2011 menu holds a distinction that elevates it beyond its ingredients: it was assembled as a tribute to Seve Ballesteros, who was too ill with brain cancer to attend and would pass away the following month. Mickelson chose a Spanish menu in Seve’s honor — paella, Manchego-topped filet mignon, tortillas, asparagus, and apple empanada ice cream — as a way of bringing the spirit of the game’s most charismatic champion to the table even in his absence.

The gesture was one of the most moving in Champions Dinner history. The menu itself is solid if not spectacular: the paella is an inspired centerpiece and the Manchego-topped filet shows real culinary ambition, but the overall spread is less comprehensive than what Rahm would later accomplish with similar cultural material. What it lacks in breadth it more than makes up for in heart. If you’re ranking purely on the emotional weight of the evening, this sits considerably higher.

8. Charl Schwartzel — 2012

Charl Schwartzel’s braai-inspired spread deserves more credit than it typically gets. The South African brought his country’s most beloved culinary tradition (the open-fire barbecue that is essentially the national pastime of the rainbow nation) to the Augusta National dining room, and the execution was genuinely impressive. The opener was a chilled seafood bar with jumbo shrimp, lobster cocktail, crab meat, crab legs, and oysters. From there, the braai: marinated and grilled filet mignon, lamb chops, chicken, and boerewors sausage with monkey gland sauce, served with dauphinois potatoes. Vanilla ice cream sundae for dessert.

That iced seafood spread alone would rank among the better appetizer courses in Champions Dinner history. The combination of the raw bar and the fire-cooked meats is a genuinely inspired pairing — cold and clean followed by charred and rich — and the cultural authenticity is total. Schwartzel deserves to be remembered as one of the more underrated Champions Dinner hosts of the modern era.

7. Adam Scott — 2014

Adam Scott brought a bit of everything Australia had to offer, and the result was one of the more elegant and cohesive menus of the decade. The opening course was an artichoke and arugula salad with calamari. Then came the main event: a surf and turf pairing of Australian Wagyu beef New York strip steak alongside Moreton Bay Bugs — a native Australian crustacean that, despite the extremely unappealing name, is essentially a sweet, tender flathead lobster. Sides of sauteed spinach and onion cream mashed potatoes. Dessert: strawberry and passion fruit pavlova, an Anzac biscuit, and a vanilla sundae.

The pavlova alone is a masterclass in knowing your culinary heritage. The Moreton Bay Bugs generated significant conversation among champions unfamiliar with Australian seafood, which is exactly the kind of curiosity a great Champions Dinner menu should generate. Scott’s meal was refined, distinctly Australian, and thoroughly considered from opener to dessert. It remains one of the more complete menus in recent Champions Dinner history.

6. Patrick Reed — 2019

Patrick Reed went full Texas steakhouse for his 2019 dinner, and he committed to the bit with admirable conviction. The menu was anchored by a cowboy ribeye listed so prominently that the alternative — mountain trout — was practically a footnote. Appetizers included jumbo shrimp cocktail, soup, and Caesar salad. But the item that genuinely elevated Reed’s dinner into the upper half of this ranking was the corn crème brülée.

Corn crème brülée is not a dish that shows up on most menus. It is an unusual, genuinely interesting fusion of a classic technique with an unexpected ingredient, and the fact that Reed put it at a Masters Champions Dinner earns him real points for culinary imagination in an era when a lot of his contemporaries were serving the golf equivalent of the drive-through menu. The cowboy ribeye was clearly the star, but the corn crème brülée is the reason people still talk about Reed’s dinner.

5. Scottie Scheffler — 2025

Scheffler’s second turn behind the menu was a significant improvement on his first. Not because it abandoned the Texas comfort-food playbook, but because it refined it and added a genuinely inspired personal touch. The appetizers featured “Scottie-Style” cheeseburger sliders, firecracker shrimp, Texas-style chili, and — in one of the all-time Champions Dinner items — “Papa Scheff’s Meatball and Ravioli Bites.” The main course offered a wood-fired cowboy ribeye or blackened redfish. Dessert was a warm chocolate chip skillet cookie.

The Papa Scheff’s Ravioli Bites are a stroke of genius that also happened to reference Scheffler’s own recent history: he suffered a hand laceration from a ravioli tin earlier in the 2025 season, an injury so absurd it became a full news cycle. Acknowledging it on the menu with his father’s recipe is charming, self-aware, and the kind of personal detail that elevates a Champions Dinner from a meal into a story. Scheffler proved he could learn from his first attempt, and the result is a significantly better showing.

4. Jordan Spieth — 2016

Jordan Spieth went Texas BBQ, went big, and went with complete commitment. His 2016 dinner was a sprawling feast anchored by beef brisket, smoked half chicken, and pork ribs with all the classic accompaniments: baked beans, bacon and chive potato salad, green beans, zucchini, squash, and cornbread. Dessert was a warm chocolate chip cookie with vanilla ice cream — the kind of ending to a BBQ meal that feels both inevitable and completely right.

What separates Spieth’s menu from other crowd-pleasing Texas-style spreads is the generosity and confidence of the vision. This wasn’t a cautious first-timer’s interpretation of BBQ — it was a fully realized spread that understood exactly what it was and delivered it at maximum quality. The smoked half chicken, alongside brisket and pork ribs, is not timid. It’s three great things at once, and the sides to match. As Texas BBQ representations at the Champions Dinner go, this is the gold standard.

3. Hideki Matsuyama — 2022

When Hideki Matsuyama won the 2021 Masters, he became the first Japanese player to win a men’s major. The weight of that moment was felt across an entire country. And when it came time for his Champions Dinner, Matsuyama rose to the occasion with a menu that honored that history with complete culinary confidence.

The appetizers set the tone immediately: assorted sushi, sashimi, and nigiri alongside yakitori chicken skewers. For the main course, champions chose between miso-glazed black cod served with dashi broth — one of the most elegant preparations of any protein served at any Champions Dinner in recent memory — or A5 Miyazaki Wagyu ribeye with mixed mushrooms, vegetables, and sansho daikon ponzu. That Wagyu is not regular Wagyu: Miyazaki Wagyu has won Japan’s national beef competition multiple times and has been served at Oscar dinners by Wolfgang Puck. Dessert was Japanese strawberry shortcake with whipped cream and prized Amaou strawberries, grown in the Fukuoka prefecture and celebrated for their size, sweetness, and flavor.

Every course was executed at the highest possible level of its tradition. Fred Couples called Matsuyama’s post-dinner speech — delivered entirely in English, a language Matsuyama does not consider his strong suit — “the coolest thing” he had ever witnessed at the dinner. The food matched the moment. That’s the definition of a great Champions Dinner.

2. Rory McIlroy — 2026

Rory McIlroy spent years dreaming about what he would serve if he ever won the Masters, and the menu he put together for 2026 reflects that level of advance consideration. The result is the most eclectic and thoughtfully personal spread of any Champions Dinner in the last fifteen years: not anchored to a single national cuisine, but assembled from the specific constellation of dishes and experiences that define McIlroy’s life.

Appetizers included bacon-wrapped dates (a tribute to his mother Rosie’s recipe), grilled elk sliders (a good-luck charm from his pre-Masters preparation in 2025), rock shrimp tempura, and a peach and ricotta flatbread nodding to his Georgia host state. The first course was a yellowfin tuna carpaccio with foie gras on a toasted baguette — a dish lifted directly from Le Bernardin, McIlroy’s favorite New York City restaurant. The main was wagyu filet mignon or seared salmon, served with traditional Irish Champ (“when I was a kid, I used to eat champ by the bowlful”), sautéed Brussels sprouts, glazed carrots, and crispy Vidalia onion rings. Dessert was sticky toffee pudding, his Northern Irish signature.

But the element that truly set McIlroy’s dinner apart was the wine list. Working with Augusta National’s legendary cellar, he curated a lineup that opened with a 2015 Salon Brut Champagne, moved through a 2022 Domaine Leflaive Batard Montrachet, featured a 1990 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, and closed with a 1989 Chateau d’Yquem for dessert. That is not a wine list. That is a love letter to the cellar. McIlroy’s dinner is the most globally assembled, personally meaningful, and lavishly considered menu in the fifteen-year window of this ranking.

1. Jon Rahm — 2024

Jon Rahm’s 2024 Champions Dinner is the benchmark by which all future Masters meals will be measured, and it isn’t particularly close. Everything about it — the scope of the concept, the depth of cultural pride, the caliber of the collaborator, and the personal details woven through every course — was operating at a level the Champions Dinner had never quite seen before.

The cocktail reception opened with gernika peppers from the Basque region of Spain and gildas — anchovy skewers with peppers and olives, a classic pintxo that Rahm admitted “a lot of things are not people’s favorites, but it’s very common in Basque country.” He started the meal as he meant to continue it: by serving what he actually loves, not what he thought the room would find least challenging.

The tapas course was a six-item showcase of Basque identity: Iberian ham, Idiazabal cheese with black truffle, tortilla de patatas, chistorra con patata (spicy Basque chorizo with potato), croqueta de pollo (creamy chicken fritters), and Lentejas Estofadas — his grandmother’s classic lentil stew, a recipe that Rahm’s collaborator, James Beard Award-winning chef José Andrés, obtained by calling her directly. The first course was a Basque crab salad with potato. The main offered a Chuletón a la Parrilla — a Basque ribeye, seared and served already cut with a hot plate for guests to finish to their preferred temperature (“if you go past medium rare, you’re going to get a weird look”) — or Rodaballo al Pil-Pil, turbot with Navarra white asparagus. Dessert was milhojas de crema y nata, a puff pastry cake with custard and Chantilly cream that Rahm had served at his own wedding.

The wines were aged Riojas carefully selected to complement each course. One bottle had particular meaning: CVNE Imperial, a wine his grandfather had treasured since a special edition released in 1994 — the year of Rahm’s birth — in collaboration with his grandfather’s beloved Athletic Bilbao football club.

Rahm described his speech nerves in terms that made clear how much the evening meant to him: “When I tell you this has definitely been rent free in my head.” He later admitted he “blacked out” during the speech itself. Whatever he said landed, by all accounts. The atmosphere turned from formal to genuinely warm.

The Champions Dinner is supposed to be the intersection of a champion’s identity and the most storied dinner table in golf. Jon Rahm brought his grandmother’s recipe, his grandfather’s wine, his region’s most prized ingredients, and one of the world’s great Spanish chefs. No one has come closer to the Platonic ideal of what the evening is supposed to be.

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Fifteen years of Champions Dinners. Fifteen different visions of what it means to feed the most exclusive club in golf. From Bubba’s cheerfully repeated chicken and confetti cake to Rahm’s grandmother’s lentil stew and a bottle of wine his grandfather loved, the range of what these menus reveal about their hosts is genuinely remarkable.

The best of them are not just meals. They are self-portraits, assembled in courses: who I am, where I came from, what I love enough to put in front of the greatest players who ever lived and say — this is worth your time at this table.

Some champions clear that bar more convincingly than others. All of them at least tried. And given the room, the occasion, and the expectation, that alone deserves a round of applause before the first course arrives.