If you live in Island Club and someone from off the island ever tries to meet you at Davis Love Grill for lunch, expect a text message about twenty minutes later asking where the building actually is. The restaurant sits at 100 Kings Way, inside the gated approach to Island Club at Retreat, and its own reviewers routinely admit their GPS gave up before they did. That confusion is the whole point of this post. The restaurant everyone assumes is a private clubhouse tucked behind a residential gate is, in fact, open to the public. And it happens to be the one dining room on this end of St. Simons that gets calmer, not busier, during the single loudest week of the island's calendar.
That's the part worth sitting with if you already live here. Most of what gets written about Island Club treats it as a real estate product: 400 homes, a Davis Love III redesign, a gate. What actually matters day to day is that your neighborhood clubhouse doubles as a legitimate restaurant with its own rhythm, and that rhythm runs opposite the rest of the island in November.
A Public Restaurant With a Private Address
Island Club at Retreat is a gated community of roughly 400 homes built around the Retreat Golf Course, one of Sea Island's three championship courses. The clubhouse at the center of it includes a pool, pickleball courts, tennis courts, and Davis Love Grill, named for the touring pro who redesigned Retreat with his brother Mark in 2001. What doesn't show up in most descriptions of the neighborhood is that the grill isn't gated off from the general public the way a members-only dining room would be. It's open to anyone who can find the door, which, based on how often visitors mention circling the neighborhood first, is not a given.
The dress code shifts by the clock, which is a small detail that tells you a lot about how the room is actually used:
| Time | What's Expected |
|---|---|
| Before 5 p.m. | Casual, fitness, or swim attire is fine. Shirts and footwear required. |
| After 5 p.m. | Collared shirt for men. Well-kept denim and Bermuda shorts are acceptable. Casual attire for women, but no tank tops, sweatshirts, or swim gear. |
That split exists because the same room serves two different crowds on the same day. Afternoon regulars come straight off the course or the pool deck for a DLG burger or a turkey melt at the bar. Evening diners are there for a slower meal, a date night, or a Sunday brunch, and the room adjusts its expectations accordingly. It's the kind of detail a resident learns once and a visitor learns the hard way.
The grill has also become something more than a place to eat after a round. The Brunswick Golden Isles Chamber of Commerce held one of its Business After Hours networking events there in May 2026, drawing local business owners for an evening that had nothing to do with golf scores. That's a small signal, but it matters. A restaurant that a chamber of commerce picks for a networking mixer is a neighborhood fixture, not a golf-course afterthought.
Why Retreat Goes Quiet When Everyone Else Gets Loud
Here's the part that actually changes how you plan November if you live inside these gates.
The RSM Classic, the PGA Tour's annual stop hosted by Davis Love III, runs November 16 through November 22 this year at Sea Island Golf Club. It is the last event on the Tour's regular-season calendar, which means the players competing are often fighting to keep their card for 2027. That stakes-driven finish pulls a real crowd. Spectator parking sits over at St. Simons Island Airport, with shuttles running continuous loops from early morning through evening all week.
But tournament play never touches Retreat. The Seaside and Plantation courses host every round. Sea Island's own description of Retreat calls it geographically set apart from those two courses, which on a normal week just means it's a short drive rather than a shared fairway. During tournament week, that separation becomes the whole story. While Seaside and Plantation fill with grandstands, hospitality tents, and security checkpoints, Retreat keeps running its normal tee sheet in a part of the island the tournament crowd has no reason to visit.
The tournament's biggest public gatherings that same week happen well away from Island Club. The Wiffle Ball Classic, where PGA Tour pros face their wives in a charity match, is played at Frederica Academy's baseball field. The Rotary Club's Meet the RSM Pros fundraiser sets up at the Golden Isles Green on the tournament grounds themselves. Community Day, with free admission for the Yamaha Pro-Am, draws its own crowd to Seaside and Plantation.
None of those events happen anywhere near Kings Way. If you live in Island Club, RSM week is something you can watch from a distance, or ignore entirely, without giving up a seat at your own grill.
What That Actually Means If You Live Here
The practical upside is simple. Every other restaurant within a short drive of the tournament, from the well-known spots downtown to the casual places near the pier, gets busier during RSM week because visitors who came for the golf still need to eat somewhere between rounds. Reservations get harder. Wait times stretch. Davis Love Grill doesn't share that problem, because it isn't on the route anyone driving in for the tournament would think to take. You still get the DLG burger, the Retreat course view from your table, and a seat at the bar without fighting a crowd that formed for a completely different course two miles away.
This is also a decent test of whether Island Club fits how you actually want to live. A neighborhood built around a private course only pays off if you use what's inside the gate. If your instinct during a big local event is to want less traffic and a shorter walk rather than more energy and a bigger crowd, the fact that your own clubhouse quietly opts out of the island's busiest week is a real point in the neighborhood's favor. If you're the type who wants to be in the middle of the RSM Classic buzz, Island Club will always feel one step removed from it, and that's worth knowing before you assume every golf community on St. Simons experiences tournament week the same way.
We've written before about why Retreat's tee sheet has been tighter than usual this year, which is a related but separate story about play shifting onto the course rather than away from it. This is the flip side: a restaurant that empties out precisely when the rest of the island fills up.
If you're comparing what a home in Island Club actually buys beyond the median price, from HOA structure to golf access to the value of that gate, we've broken that down in detail on our Island Club neighborhood page.
For everyone else, the short version is this: the next time you want a table with a golf-course view during the third week of November, you already have one, and it's the one place on this end of the island that isn't going to be crowded.
If you're weighing a move into Island Club, or already live here and want a read on how the neighborhood's value has shifted this year, Christal Kuchar knows this gate, this clubhouse, and this course better than most. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
