Drive past the clubhouse at 6501 Summit Drive this month and you will notice something that was missing for most of the past year: cars in the lot on a Tuesday night. The Owensboro Times reported in early August that the Pearl Club, the golf course and restaurant that sits at the center of The Summit, spent close to a year rebuilding after a fire sprinkler pipe broke and flooded the clubhouse. The restaurant reopened on May 22 with a new chef, a renovated dining room, and an expanded menu. Owner Terry Delk told the Times that the reaction has been consistent: people walk in, see the space, and say some version of the same thing.
What is easy to miss, if you only clocked the construction fencing and figured the place was simply closed for a while, is that this is not the first time the Pearl Club has had to rebuild itself into something better after nearly losing everything. That pattern, not the fresh paint, is the part worth understanding if you live within walking distance of the ninth green.
What actually broke
The damage started with a broken fire sprinkler pipe, not a slow decline. It forced extensive repairs to flooring, paint, lighting, fixtures, sinks, and faucets, and what began as a repair job turned into a full clubhouse renovation. Delk has run the Pearl Club since 2014, and by his own account the past year ranked among the hardest stretches the business has faced. The restaurant stayed closed through the rebuild and reopened on May 22, 2026, with a dining room that Delk says better reflects what the club is trying to be.
The bigger point for anyone who lives in The Summit is that the golf course itself never stopped operating during any of this. The clubhouse was the casualty. That distinction matters because it explains why you may have seen golfers on the course all year while the restaurant sat dark.
The kitchen behind the comeback
The new chef is Danyon Calloway, who came to the Pearl Club after working at a fine Italian restaurant in Texas. He kept many of the restaurant's longtime favorites and added a page of Italian dishes to the menu, along with a rotating weekly special built around whatever is fresh that week. The restaurant now runs full-service dinner from 4 to 8 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, with a limited menu geared toward golfers available from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.
Delk has spent twelve years trying to correct a specific misconception, and it has not fully gone away. "We've been here 12 years, and we still struggle with people thinking we're private," he told the Times. The restaurant and the golf course are both open to the public. Membership is available for individuals, families, juniors, corporations, and social members, but nobody needs one to book a tee time or sit down for dinner.
This isn't the first time the course had to rebuild from nothing
If you want to understand why Delk talks about this year in terms of resilience rather than misfortune, you have to go back to 2014. When he and his wife Melody bought the course, they discovered after closing that the fairways were dead from winter kill. Delk's first meeting with the membership was telling them the course had no fairways left to play on. Rather than replace what was lost with the same Bermuda grass that had just died, Delk rebuilt with zoysia, a decision that makes the Pearl Club the only course in Daviess County with zoysia fairways today. That grass produces a thick, plush playing surface through the golf season and has become part of what regular players mention when they talk about the course's condition.
The flooded clubhouse is a smaller version of the same story. Something broke that was outside anyone's control, and the response was not a patch job but a full rebuild that left the space better than before. Delk has now watched this course come back from near-total loss twice in twelve years. That track record is why the course is drawing more than 20,000 rounds of golf annually, with Delk reporting that play has been up significantly this season, including a noticeable rise in golfers driving over from Southern Indiana who say they can make the trip, play a well-kept course, and get home in about the time it would take to finish a round somewhere closer.
What's actually on the fall calendar
A clubhouse that spent a year under construction does not usually reemerge in time to host a full slate of community events in the same season, but that is exactly what happened this year. The Owensboro Health Foundation held its 25th Annual Golf Classic at the Pearl Club on June 4, followed the next day by Divots & Divas, the Foundation's all-women's golf outing that paired nine holes of golf with an afternoon of food and games.
The fall lineup is where things get busy again. The Mulzer Family of Companies is hosting the Helping Habitat Charity Golf Outing at the Pearl Club on September 23, raising funds for the local Habitat for Humanity chapter. Nine days later, Grace Christian Academy holds its own golf scramble at the course on October 2, complete with a ball toss contest, a shotgun start, and prizes for longest drive and closest to the pin.
None of these events require a membership to attend as a sponsor, player, or spectator, and together they say something the renovation alone does not: local organizations are once again treating the Pearl Club as their default venue, the way they did before the flood. That is a faster form of proof than any press release.
Beyond the dining room
The clubhouse renovation gets the headlines, but the property offers more than a rebuilt dining room and a golf course. Amenities available to the public and members include:
- A pool and six pickleball courts
- A driving range, short-game area, and large putting green
- A full-service golf shop stocked with balls, tees, apparel, and clubs
- Club fitting services through head golf professional Dylan Hardesty
- Locker rooms inside the renovated clubhouse
For a neighborhood built around the course, that combination means the Pearl Club functions less like an amenity you visit occasionally and more like a second gathering point for the people who live around it. A round of golf, a Wednesday dinner, or a Saturday afternoon at the pool all run through the same building that spent the better part of a year being rebuilt from a burst pipe.
Why this matters if you already live here
The easy read on a shuttered restaurant and a year of scaffolding is that something is struggling. The Pearl Club's actual history says the opposite. Twice now, in a little over a decade, this course has lost something it could not have predicted, whether that was every fairway to winter kill or a functioning clubhouse to a burst sprinkler line, and twice it has come back with something better than what existed before. The zoysia fairways and the renovated dining room are not separate stories. They are the same instinct showing up twelve years apart.
If you live in The Summit, that is worth knowing the next time you walk past the clubhouse on a Tuesday and see the lot fuller than it was last year. It is not a coincidence. It is the same rebuild that has defined this course since 2014, happening again in front of you.
EPIC Realty and Jennifer Staser call The Summit home too, and we are always glad to swap notes on what is happening around the neighborhood. If a friend or family member ever mentions they are thinking about a move to this part of Owensboro, we would welcome the chance to schedule a free consultation and show them why residents here rarely want to leave.
