For most of its history, if you wanted to describe what the Cloister's dining scene meant, you pointed to one room. The Georgian Room held Georgia's only Forbes five-star rating for years, ran a rotating tasting menu under twinkling chandeliers, and offered an eight-course chef's table experience that a decade ago started at $165 a person before wine. It was the kind of place where a Sea Island evening got planned around a single reservation.
That restaurant does not exist anymore. Not the format, not the room as it was. The Georgian Room sat closed for years before reopening, and when it came back it did not return as one restaurant. It came back as four.
If you have owned on Sea Island long enough to remember the old room but haven't dined there since before the closure, the practical details below matter more than they might seem to. If you moved in more recently, you may not know there was ever a version of this space that looked completely different.
What the reopening actually built
The current Georgian Rooms, plural now by design, split into distinct spaces inside The Cloister: a Library for cocktails, a Lounge built around Japanese cuisine, and a Dining Room anchored by a glass-enclosed Orangery. Each functions differently, and none of them is a straight continuation of what was there before.
The Lounge is the most obvious departure. Where the old Georgian Room ran French-inflected tasting menus, the new Lounge serves maki, nigiri, sashimi, and Japanese A5 Wagyu, with a sake, shochu, and Japanese whisky list built around a Ginza-style cocktail program. It is also the most casual of the four spaces. You can walk in without a reservation and take a seat at the sushi bar.
The Dining Room took the opposite turn. The formerly stark-white, chandelier-lit room has been rebuilt as an upscale American grill, with leather banquettes, brass fixtures, and deep forest-green walls that read closer to a hunting lodge than a formal dining hall. White tablecloths remain, but the mood shifted from classical French service to something closer to a steakhouse with better lighting. The menu leans into vintage cocktails and a whiskey list running past fifty bottles, including a bottle of The Macallan Fine & Rare 1950 for anyone building an occasion around it.
The Orangery sits just off the Dining Room, sharing its menu in a lighter, glass-walled space for guests who want the same food without the jacket-required formality next door.
Here is the useful part if you're deciding where to book: the four spaces don't have interchangeable rules.
| Space | Style | Reservation | Dress code |
|---|---|---|---|
| Library | Cocktails | Walk-in | Elegant casual |
| Lounge | Japanese, sushi bar | Walk-in | Elegant casual |
| Dining Room | American grill | Required | Jacket and collared shirt for gentlemen and boys, cocktail attire recommended for ladies |
| Orangery | Same menu, casual room | Required | Same as Dining Room |
The Dining Room and Orangery also carry a stricter policy than most restaurants on the island: no electronic devices at the table for entertainment, and all diners must be 10 or older. If you're planning a family dinner that includes younger children, the Lounge is the room built for that, not the Orangery.
The Lodge made a quieter but real change
While The Cloister rebuilt its flagship room from the studs up, The Lodge took a more targeted approach with Colt & Alison, its longstanding steakhouse. The restaurant expanded into a new fully enclosed space with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the 18th hole of the Plantation Course, added a semi-private dining room next to the restaurant's original stone fireplace, and built out a fully private room with views of both the golf course and the ocean.
Nothing about Colt & Alison's core identity changed. It's still the steakhouse next to the bagpiper's evening walk on the Plantation Course, still a bank of windows looking out at the 18th hole. What changed is capacity for the kind of small, semi-private gatherings that used to have nowhere obvious to go. If you've hosted a family dinner or a small group celebration at Colt & Alison in the past and been seated in the main room by necessity, there are now two additional formats built specifically for that.
The pattern shows up outside the dining room too
Two other changes on Sea Island point to the same underlying shift, toward more structured, purpose-built experiences replacing looser, single-format ones.
The first is Dapper Dogs, a pet amenity program Sea Island launched with Barbour on National Dog Day, August 26, 2024. Guests staying at The Cloister or The Lodge with a dog under 35 pounds now get matching Tartan-print Barbour gear, an in-room pet dining menu with items like a roasted beef "Paw-t Roast," and a curated walking guide to the property. It's a small thing next to a restaurant overhaul, but it reflects the same instinct: rather than let pet-friendly stays happen informally, the resort built a defined program around it, complete with its own $175 non-refundable dog fee at The Cloister and The Lodge.
The second is the Golf Performance Center's Women's Golf Getaway Weekend, a three-day program built around instruction from two of the center's senior teaching professionals, Gale Peterson and Chrissy Felton, inside the center's 17,000 square foot facility. The 2026 calendar runs six separate weekends between April and November, and both April sessions, April 9-12 and April 30-May 3, had already sold out well ahead of the season. That's not a claim about the golf market generally. It's a specific, dated fact about demand for one structured program on this island, and it tracks with the same logic behind the dining overhaul: build a defined, well-staffed format around an experience, and people will book further ahead for it.
What this means if you haven't been back in a while
None of this changes anything about owning here. It changes what you should expect the next time you make a dinner plan or host guests at the club.
If you're still picturing the Georgian Room as the single formal restaurant it was before the closure, you'll want to know it now refers to four connected but distinct spaces, and that walking in without checking which one you're booking can mean showing up underdressed for the Dining Room or overdressed for the Lounge. If you've hosted a group at Colt & Alison and been stuck in the main room, ask about the semi-private space by the fireplace or the private room with the ocean view. And if fall golf plans are on your calendar, sold-out dates on the Women's Golf Getaway Weekend suggest booking further ahead than you might have a few years back.
The bigger point is less about any single restaurant and more about how Sea Island's clubhouses have been rebuilt around specificity. A single flagship room gave way to four rooms with four different personalities. A steakhouse added private space instead of just more tables. A pet policy became a named program with its own menu. None of it is a dramatic reinvention of daily life on the island, but taken together, it's a real shift in how the two clubhouses that anchor that daily life actually work.
If you're weighing what it means to own property tied to a club that keeps restructuring its own experience layer, or you're trying to figure out how these changes affect what a Sea Island property is really worth to you day to day, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground detail Coastal Georgia Real Estate tracks for clients living here year-round. Schedule a free consultation with Linda Williams and her team to talk through what's changed and what it means for your specific corner of the island.
