AUBURN — With the new The Kitchen on Beech Hill, Martindale Country Club is embracing upscale, fine dining three nights a week.

Instead of its burgers and poppers pub fare or roasted chicken for 150, buffet-style, think ribeye steak, braised pork shank, or, for its own twist with buttered garlic crumb, lobster macaTony & cheese.

“We have beautiful new mahogany tables and new industrial chairs and it’s a nice space, candlelit,” chef Tony Scherrer said. “This is more like Fuel used to be, more of a Portland-area restaurant.”

Owners Nick and Jami Glicos said they’d talked about opening something like The Kitchen for a while to round out the usually quiet winters.

For about 10 years, the club has opened Grille 19 with pub fare during the outdoor golf season.

“At the end of last season, we said, OK, we have this void to fill, especially with COVID and not having banquets,” Jami said. “We decided in addition to opening The Sims at Martindale Country Club in our banquet space, we’d also open a fine dining restaurant using our old bar space.”

The Sims, with new golf simulators and pub fare, and The Kitchen both opened last fall, on opposite ends of the second floor.

“We have 400-plus members here and in the past, we’ve sent them away in the winters,” Scherrer said. “Now we’ve got simulators in here so we have the golfers that are going to be in here all year and then we’re in this beautiful neighborhood in this beautiful community where restaurants are limited. We sat down and talked, we were doing these nice wine dinners. We thought, could we do more of those?”

Three nights a week seemed like a nice start. Scherrer, the former executive chef at Black Point Inn, has changed the menu slightly from week to week with entrees running between $12 and $28.

The Kitchen on Beech Hill seats 20 and it’s open to the public with reservations encouraged.

“We have a pork shank on there that people have loved, so I’ve left it on there,” he said. “We’re just trying to go with inspiration and what people ask us for.”

He’s often outside the kitchen, talking to diners.

“My wife’s waiting tables out here and she’s like, ‘Come out, you’ve got to talk to these people here …'” he said. “I take their feedback, their criticism and their praise alike. It’s a great thing. As a chef, you don’t always get that.”

He’s noticed a mix of both couples dining alone and friends, with up to eight at a table, eating together and catching up.

The Kitchen is open Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 4:30 to 9 p.m. with a special Sunday evening planned on Feb. 14 for Valentine’s Day.

The Sims is open Monday to Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Thursday to Saturday from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The plan is to keep The Kitchen going year-round and expand days if there’s demand, said Nick.

While the pandemic has made everything more challenging, “I’ve been here a long time and I’m confident in what we have here,” he said. “I think it was really a time to take an opportunity to grow the business and it was just the right time for us to do it. Jami says maybe I’m a little more risky; I look at it as a calculated risk.”

He first came to Martindale in 2007 as the director of golf and in the fall of 2009, purchased the course from the membership with Jim Day. In the past year, the couple purchased Day’s interest.

“It’s such a great club,” he said. “We just turned 100 years old this year at Martindale, so it’s a lot of history here. It’s an amazing group of members that we have and we’re growing. We felt like with the support of the membership and the community, it was such a beautiful place, it just made sense.”

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