Most people think of Florida and picture oranges, palm trees, and sunshine. What they might not envision is a thriving patchwork of small family farms tucked into the landscape surrounding Vero Beach, growing heirloom tomatoes with a 40 percent yield, raising Berkshire hogs on open pasture, and harvesting exotic mushrooms grown in shipping containers in their backyards. But Chef Brian Jones and Bent Pine’s Social Committee know they are there and have built something around that knowledge that is worth celebrating.
That something is the farm-to-table dinner series, and it would not exist without the vision and hands-on effort of Bent Pine's Social Committee, the member-driven group that oversees the club's social events and programming. It was committee members who identified the opportunity, cultivated relationships with local farmers, and continue to do the essential work of sourcing and collecting ingredients that make each dinner possible. Chef Brian Jones, Bent Pine's Executive Chef and Food and Beverage Director and a member of the committee, brings those ingredients to life in the kitchen. Together, the Social Committee and Chef Brian have created something genuinely rare in Vero Beach.
Florida is one of the nation's top agricultural producers, yet much of what is grown never actually stays in the state. Chef Brian, who has worked in Vero Beach's culinary community for more than 32 years, understands that reality firsthand.
"A lot of what's grown here gets shipped overseas because the market is more demanding and the price point is higher for commercial farmers," he says. "So when you're ordering oranges through a standard distributor, you're often getting California oranges, even in Florida. That's another reason using local farmers matters so much. You're guaranteed Florida-grown product."
The farms surrounding Bent Pine are part of a tight-knit agricultural community, many of them multi-generational, some tracing their roots back to the early 1900s. They grow heirloom tomatoes under challenging conditions, raise pastured Brangus cattle suited to Florida's climate, and operate with methods passed down through generations. These are not hobbyist operations. They are the backbone of a regional food culture that most club members have never had the chance to experience up close. Until now.
The farm-to-table dinner series runs on the first Wednesday of each month throughout Bent Pine's season, from November through May. What makes it genuinely different from a restaurant marketing a farm-fresh menu is the process behind it. Here, the ingredients come first. The menu follows.
"With locally sourced product, you don't make the menu first and then go get the ingredients," Chef Brian explains. "It's actually the other way around. You figure out what the farmers have, and then you decide how to bring that to life."
Every Sunday, participating farmers send Chef Brian an email detailing what they have available. He builds from there, planning roughly a month in advance. But the real creative work often happens the moment the product arrives at the kitchen door.
"It's happened two months in a row now where I've seen the product come in and said, I have to redo the menu, because I don't want to ruin this, it's so beautiful," he says. "A month ago, we had a golden cauliflower arrive, and I was going to do a cauliflower puree. But it was such a brilliant, bright color that if I cooked and pureed it, it would have turned gray-brown. So I reversed the whole dish and made a roasted cauliflower instead. It just popped on the plate. The farmer loved it."
It is a kind of creative constraint that Chef Brian finds energizing rather than limiting. Working with commercial distributors tends to produce sameness – the same reliable products, prepared in routine and familiar ways. Local sourcing upends that entirely.
"With a commercialized product, you keep doing the same thing," he says. "With local farmers, they bring you different products, and then you're able to create. It makes you think more outside the box. Cooking is fun, and this is where you really get to have fun with it."
The results have been memorable. A whole 250-pound Berkshire hog, broken down and incorporated into a single dish four or five different ways, slow-cooked for days. Short rib, stew meat, and osso buco braised and pressed together into a riff on beef wellington, an inventive solution to the reality that a small farm simply cannot provide enough tenderloins for a full house. Fresh spinach so leafy and full-bodied that Chef Brian scrapped his original plan for a spinach flan entirely, sauteing it with garlic, shallots, and goat cheese to let the quality of the ingredient speak for itself.
The product tells Chef Brian what it wants to be, and he listens.
“When you write a menu on paper, it's different than when you actually get the product," Chef Brian says. "Your mind changes. When you start working with the product, it changes your whole mindset.
The evening takes shape weeks before anyone sits down to eat. Committee members work directly with local farmers to source ingredients, arrange logistics, and collect the product that Chef Brian will transform into the night's menu. An hour before dinner, those same farmers set up tables where members can taste, buy, and talk directly with the people growing their food.
When dinner is served, the farmers dine alongside the members, spread across tables so every conversation can continue. Before each course, Chef Brian comes out of the kitchen to describe what he made, how he made it, and often why he changed his mind at the last minute when the product arrived.
"They always say, we never realized what it takes," he says. "It's not like it just comes in the back door and lands on the plate. It's a production, from the time you receive it to the time it's served. A lot of members don't realize what goes into braising a piece of meat for volume. At home, you're searing two short ribs and throwing them in the oven. When you're doing it for two hundred people, that's a completely different thing."
The member response has been enthusiastic and, in many cases, genuinely transformative. Members who had never thought much about where their food came from find themselves connecting with farmers who live minutes away. Some have begun purchasing directly from those same farms – a half side of beef, a flat of heirloom tomatoes, a mushroom-growing kit to take home. Many had simply no idea these farms existed.
"It builds relationships," Chef Brian says. "It gets members to want to go to the farms and buy directly instead of just going to the grocery store. We're bringing the farmers to the members, and a lot of them are five or ten minutes from the club."
The season's grand finale is planned for May, an outdoor event bringing back all participating farmers for a mingle-friendly food-station format, with live music, designed to celebrate the season and the community that made it happen. After that, the plan is to continue through the summer for Bent Pine's reciprocal members, guests from other clubs who come to play golf and dine. The Social Committee and Chef Brian see it as an opportunity to share what Bent Pine has built together.
"If we do it for reciprocals who don't have this at their own clubs, they'll get the experience," he says. "You're giving members from other clubs a chance to see what Bent Pine can offer, and you're supporting the local farmers in the process."
Further down the road, Chef Brian envisions taking the dinner off-property entirely, bringing members out to one of the participating farms for an immersive cooking experience under the open sky. He did it once before, at Osceola Farms in 2019, and describes it as one of the most memorable events of his career at Bent Pine.
What drives all of it is something more personal than culinary ambition. Chef Brian grew up in Vero Beach, went to high school here, and has spent his career in this community, with early stints at acclaimed clubs across the country sharpening his craft along the way. Some of the farmers he sources from today are the children of farmers he knew years ago.
"I love giving back to the community," he says. "A lot of these guys, I've dealt with their parents, and now they're taking over the farm. To continue building those relationships, it's just a great feeling. We create it together."
For Bent Pine members, the farm-to-table dinner series delivers on every level: extraordinary food, genuine connection, and a deeper understanding of the community they call home. For prospective members, it signals something meaningful about the kind of club Bent Pine is, one that looks outward as much as inward, and invests in the land and people that surround it.
The first Wednesday of the month has never tasted so good.