By Shaun Tolson
An ominous-looking front of thunderstorms looms on the horizon several miles away from the Fields Ranch West course at Omni PGA Frisco, but Kwame Onwuachi is only focused on the flagstick – one that’s tucked devilishly near the right edge of the first green about 200 yards away.
With a Marlboro Light loosely hanging from his lips, the 35-year-old takes his time getting properly lined up, sets the head of his 5-wood behind the ball, then slowly initiates the backswing. There’s a deliberateness in his actions, a methodical approach to the golf swing that appears a natural extension of his training as a chef. But there’s power, speed, and conviction in the downswing that follows; and on this occasion, that symphony of motions produces a pure strike.
Onwuachi’s not attempting to channel his inner Ben Hogan, per se, but the sight of him striping a fairway wood with a cigarette pursed between his lips conjures up sepia-toned images of The Hawk, or perhaps Arnie, sauntering down the fairway or visualizing their forthcoming shots from the tee. As for this shot, the chef’s ball is tracking the pin but lands beyond the hole and trundles off the back of the green.
“I’ve got a youthful energy, but on the golf course, I’m an old soul,” he tells me as we walk off the putting surface a few minutes later.
The celebrity chef is still relatively new to the game, and though he’s well-traveled and has already played a slew of bucket-list courses (more on this later), golf is not the main driver that brings him to the two-year-old Omni resort. That honor belongs to the property’s inaugural food and wine event, Savor, which celebrates the craft of fine cooking and expert mixology – both locally and on a national scale. But make no mistake, committing to the event was a much easier decision for Onwuachi knowing he’d be able to play a couple rounds of golf, including participation in the event’s celebrity golf tournament.
Less than a year after Onwuachi opened his celebrated Afro-Caribbean restaurant Tatiana at Lincoln Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in late 2022, his world was forever changed when good friend, actor Adrian Holmes, put a golf club in his hands. At the time, Onwuachi was splitting time between New York and Los Angeles, and it was during a weekend in L.A. that Holmes suggested that they go to the driving range. Onwuachi had never played golf before – he had never even picked up a club – so the thought of going to a golf course made no sense to him.
“I didn’t really understand,” he recalls. “I guessed this is just what people do in L.A.”
Although skeptical, Onwuachi agreed to the idea, and the two headed to Rancho Park Golf Course.
At first, the chef only observed, but soon Holmes showed him the basics, instructing him to take an athletic stance with some bend in his knees. The actor handed him an 8-iron, showed him how to properly grip the club, then explained the importance of keeping the lead arm straight and to turn the body during the backswing.
“Obviously, I did none of that,” the chef recalls with a chuckle. “I was probably just like this,” he adds, miming a swing with a takeaway that hinges hard at the elbows and has little body rotation, followed by a downswing in which the arms are doing all of the work.
Onwuachi’s first attempt at a golf swing may not have been much to look at, but the resulting shot was a sight to behold. “I flushed it,” he says, still beaming with pride as he thinks about that introduction to the game. “It was the best feeling ever.”
Understandably, the chef was immediately hooked. The rest of the balls in his bucket, Onwuachi remembers, “went nowhere,” but it didn’t matter. That one pure shot was all it took. Instantly, he had a slew of questions. He was captivated by the bag full of clubs, each with a different number. He didn’t understand why you needed so many. He was also intrigued by the accessories and the gadgets – golf gloves, laser-guided rangefinders, divot repair tools. But it was Holmes’ explanation of the game itself that completed the spell.
“He was telling me how it’s a correlation with life, how you have to play the ball as it lies,” Onwuachi says. “That some days you’re gonna shoot a good score, and some days it’s gonna feel like it’s your first time playing. But that’s life – it has its ebbs and flows. I went home and all I could think about was golf.”
The very next day, Onwuachi was out buying what he describes as “a dope golf bag” and a set of pre-owned TaylorMade clubs. He went to the range every day after that for at least a month, and before long he had set up regular lessons with James Leadbetter, whose father, David, is one of the foremost instructors in the game.
The feeling of a pure shot may have sparked the chef’s interest in golf, but the game’s siren song, at least for Onwuachi, had less to do with the physical act of hitting a golf ball.
When Onwuachi moved back to New York City full time, he knew he needed to join a club. After an exhaustive search, he chose Montclair Golf Club in New Jersey, which appealed to him for several number of reasons. First, the club offered two 18-hole courses and didn’t require tee times. Second, he didn’t know any of the members.
“I liked the fact that I could just go and play and work on my game,” he says. “I know a lot of people will say, ‘Oh, the deals are made on the golf course.’ But I just want to enjoy the game. I don’t want the course to also be work.”
During Onwuachi’s first golf season in New York, he squeezed in practice sessions at the driving range at Chelsea Piers, then went right to Tatiana for dinner service, oftentimes bringing his driver along with him. He even sustained a stress fracture in his ribs from overuse, that’s how many balls he was hitting every day.
In the beginning, the contents of Chef Onwuachi’s golf bag could’ve been misconstrued as the product lineup for an infomercial marathon. Training aids for his grip, devices designed to keep his left arm straight, laser pointers that attached to his putter head … he owned them all.
“I had so many gadgets!” he says with a laugh. “I dove in. I was in it. I was in deep. But I slowly came back. Now, I just have a rangefinder.”
With almost two years of experience under his belt, Onwuachi also has an appreciation for the sport that parallels his love of cooking. In fact, the chef acknowledges that cooking is the only other thing that he fell in love with as immediately as he did with golf.
He’s also enamored by the never-ending quest that defines both pursuits. “You strive for perfection knowing that it’s not attainable,” he begins. “In the kitchen, there’s always something, whether you’re wishing an herb was shaped a certain way or you’re unhappy with how the onions were cut. But you can’t get lost in the sauce. We’re not at the operating table. At some point you’ve got to step back and let it go.”
With a golf club in his hand, Onwuachi also understands that he can spend ample time refining his swing, working on his fundamentals, and improving various aspects of his game. But there comes a time when he has to go out on the course to play, at which point he needs to do the best with where his game is at and how his swing is performing that day.
In spite of the chef’s relative inexperience, his travels and newfound love of the sport have allowed him to play more than a dozen celebrated courses, including Liberty National, Torrey Pines, and Pebble Beach. In fact, only four months into his golfing journey, Onwuachi had the opportunity to tee it up at Pebble, where he parred the iconic par-3 seventh. The rest of the round, however, had few highlights.
“It was not good,” he says of his score, which he thinks might’ve been as high as 120.
Earlier this year, however, Onwuachi had a chance to play Pebble again with Holmes, and this time, he broke 100. Not only that, but he shot almost two dozen strokes better while putting everything out.
“I would’ve had a 92, probably, if we had gimmes,” he says, “but we were playing by all the Rules, which is the only way to really get better.”
As for the chef’s personal best round, it occurred at Half Moon resort in Jamaica, where he broke 90 for the first time. By all accounts, the chef’s best round is actually five strokes better, but he carded that 84 at what he describes as “a really bad muni” – a course that he says was so easy that his final score should’ve been even lower. For that reason, he doesn’t even like to think about it. In Chef Onwuachi’s mind, that round – more specifically, that score – never happened.
An old soul, indeed.