Chef Janine Booth Shares What To Eat After a Round of Pickleball

At some point during a long day watching pickleball at Life Time Harbour Island in Tampa, I began studying the athletes between games. I was there to report on a feature for the upcoming issue of Flamingo about how Florida has become one of the epicenters of pro pickleball. But because I’ve become obsessed with playing pickleball in the past year, I was also watching to see how often they took swigs from water bottles, how they spent downtime between matches and what snacks they ate to keep their energy up.

The answer was: not much. Protein bars. Energy packets. Lots of bananas. Electrolytes in flavors advertised as blueberry but probably taste like bubblegum. They were spending hours in the hot Florida sun, dinking and lunging and rushing the kitchen line, rewarding themselves with little that wasn’t ultra-processed.

It made me realize that’s the case with every sport I’ve taken up. Hot dog carts in golf. Energy gels in biking. There has to be something better.

So I reached out to Chef Janine Booth.

Booth co-created the menu at Florida Room, the restaurant at The Fort, a sprawling pickleball facility and the world’s first pickleball stadium in Fort Lauderdale. It’s one of several major facilities around Florida these days that are combining courts with restaurants— places with legit good food and not just brats and beer.

“The starting point was creating food that felt fresh, vibrant and distinctly Florida,” Booth told me. The Fort sits beside a lake, and that setting helped push the menu toward “coastal flavors, seasonal ingredients, seafood, bright salads and dishes that feel approachable and social.”

That last part feels important. Pickleball is exercise, but the thing I enjoy most about the sport is that I typically play with three strangers, and since I picked it up last summer, I’ve learned perhaps a couple hundred new names, shared beers with new people and occasionally a meal, too. Booth had that in mind as well.

“We wanted the menu to feel energetic and shareable without being overly heavy,” she said. That means grilled proteins, seafood, vegetables and bright flavors, but also fried chicken, sourdough flatbreads and house-made tater tots with sturgeon caviar. Because, yeah, pickleball is the kind of sport where people are going to celebrate with a bump of caviar.

Booth’s lighter favorites: grilled mango and sesame salad, tuna tartare with watermelon citrus dressing and wood plank salmon. Then she mentions dessert with the enthusiasm of someone who knows life is short. “My recommendation would be to definitely order dessert,” she said. The showpiece is a baked Florida, the restaurant’s take on baked Alaska, with Buddha’s hand, citrus cake, lemon sorbet and vanilla bean ice cream under toasted meringue.

This, to me, is the correct evolution of pickleball dining. Not wellness as deprivation. Not indulgence as defeat. Something in between, where a person can spend the day sweating through a Selkirk ballcap and still sit down afterward to a meal that feels like the Sunshine State.

By the end of my day in Tampa, I understood that. I’d gone to watch the women’s doubles and figured it’d end by noon. It lasted until dinnertime. Just as a spectator, I felt like I needed protein, salt, water and definitely a chair.

But what I really wanted? Booth’s baked Florida, for sure.

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