Not that many years ago, the ponds along the back nine at what's now Trilogy Golf Club at La Quinta were thick enough with stagnant water that Riverside County had to stock them with fish just to keep the mosquito population down. The fairways had gone brown under weeds taller than a golf shoe. The clubhouse sat dark. If you lived on a lot that backed up to any part of that course, you were looking at a slow-motion eyesore every morning with your coffee.
Today that same building holds a restaurant that just won a national industry award for its remodel, and its name is a direct reference to the people who paid for the turnaround: you, or your neighbor three doors down, or whoever cast one of the 1,011 yes votes that made it happen.
What Was Actually Sitting Behind the Fence
The course closed in late 2022 after its previous owner landed in bankruptcy proceedings, but the neglect started earlier than that. Irrigation had effectively stopped by 2021. The HOA mowed the property exactly once during the shutdown, and only after residents pushed hard enough that maintenance became unavoidable. Six irrigation ponds turned stagnant enough to breed mosquitoes at a scale the county felt compelled to address directly.
That is not the version of this story that shows up in a real estate listing description. It is the version that explains why, by January 2024, the Trilogy at La Quinta Maintenance Association had already held 20 separate meetings trying to figure out what to do about 229 acres of dead turf sitting in the middle of a 1,238-home community.
The Math Behind the Name
On January 22, 2024, homeowners voted, and the result is where the restaurant's name comes from. A total of 1,011 homes voted yes on acquiring the course and restaurant for roughly $6.17 million, plus an additional undisclosed amount for equipment and irrigation upgrades. Out of 1,238 homes in the entire community, that works out to more than four in every five households voting to tax themselves for a golf course and restaurant most of them may never set foot on for a round of golf.
That ratio matters more than the raw vote count. A community can pass an assessment with a bare majority and still leave a lot of resentment on the table. Trilogy cleared 80 percent of its total home count, not just 80 percent of ballots cast. Whatever number the HOA had been bracing for going into those 20 meetings, this was not a squeaker.
The People Who Rebuilt It
The board didn't bring in an unfamiliar management company to execute the turnaround. BlueStar Resort & Golf, the same operator that ran the course when Shea Homes originally built it in 2002, got the job back. One of the first hires was Ernesto Alvarez, who had worked as assistant superintendent before the course went dark and returned to lead the restoration. New pumps went in. Irrigation-control equipment was replaced. Thousands of individual sprinkler heads were repaired one at a time, the unglamorous part of bringing 229 acres of dead turf back from years of neglect.
The course reopened under its original name in November 2024, the same name it carried when it hosted the PGA Skins Game from 2003 through 2006, with Tiger Woods, Fred Couples, and Annika Sorenstam among the players who once teed off on the Gary Panks design. Residents now play the same 7,200-yard layout at a 20 percent discount off the public rate, with a 32-day priority booking window ahead of outside guests.
What You Actually Get at the Table Now
The restaurant took longer. Kitchen Ten Eleven opened in May 2025, built into the same footprint as the club's previous dining room but reworked around a relocated entrance that flows into a dynamic bar setup, a high-top community table meant for exactly the kind of casual mingling a clubhouse restaurant should encourage, hardwood millwork, vintage breeze-block accents, and a three-sided fireplace anchoring the dining room. The expanded patio adds fabric shade sails and yard games, with views back across the course toward the Santa Rosa Mountains.
The menu leans into comfort over pretense. Recent listings put gourmet burgers, hand-tossed pizzas, and prime rib as the standing options, with weekly specials that have included pickle-brined fried chicken and a seafood bouillabaisse. It's closed Monday and Tuesday, open the rest of the week from midday into the evening, which matters if you're used to the old Bistro 60 schedule and haven't adjusted your routine yet.
In March 2026, Golf Inc. named Kitchen Ten Eleven the winner of its Golden Fork Award for Best Remodeled Public/Resort Facility, a category judged on design, menu creativity, and overall impact on the guest experience. Mark Reider, board president of the Trilogy at La Quinta Maintenance Association, put the intent behind the redesign this way when the restaurant first opened:
"Our goal was to capture the essence of La Quinta's distinctive sense of place, but we don't intend for it to seem vintage. Rather, we want it to feel timeless, approachable, and welcoming."
The Part Worth Sitting With
Most golf-adjacent communities in the valley answer to an outside ownership group when it comes to the course and the clubhouse restaurant. A management company sets the pricing, decides what gets renovated and when, and moves on to the next property if the numbers stop working. Trilogy doesn't have that arrangement anymore. The people setting the menu prices and deciding whether the patio gets new shade sails are the same people who voted on it in January 2024 and are still living three streets over from the ninth green.
That changes what it means to walk into Kitchen Ten Eleven on a Wednesday night. It's not a corporate hospitality outpost that happens to sit inside a gated community. It's a restaurant a supermajority of your neighbors decided was worth $6.17 million to save, named after the vote that saved it, now carrying a national award less than a year after opening. Next time you're at the bar, you're sitting in something the community built back from mosquito ponds and dead turf, one repaired sprinkler head at a time.
Whether you're already at the bar most Wednesday nights or you've got a friend asking what Trilogy is actually like these days, Kathleen Galigher keeps this kind of detail on hand for every gated community in La Quinta and the Coachella Valley. Let's Connect.
