PopStroke Hamlin: Putting, Scratch Kitchen and Three Bars
Tiger Woods-backed PopStroke opened in Hamlin in August 2025 with two 18-hole putting courses, a restaurant, an ice cream parlor and a playground. It changed what a Hamlin evening can be.
3 minute read
Hamlin’s newest major attraction does not serve dinner and a movie. It serves dinner and 36 holes of putting. PopStroke opened at 5487 Hamlin Groves Trail on August 6, 2025, in Hamlin Town Center — the golf-entertainment brand’s 18th location nationally, its ninth in Florida and its second in the greater Orlando area after Waterford Lakes, according to the company’s opening announcement.
The ownership tells you the ambition. PopStroke is co-owned by Greg Bartoli, Tiger Woods and TaylorMade Golf Company, and its courses are designed with Woods’s TGR Design involvement — putting courses, not novelty mini golf, with real contours, bunkering logic and two distinct 18-hole layouts on a 1.75-acre site. There are no windmills. The challenge is reading a putt, which is why the format works for golfers and non-golfers in the same group: a beginner can finish every hole, and a good putter still has to work.
More than the courses
The Hamlin venue wraps the putting in a full evening’s infrastructure. The company’s announcement lists a full-service scratch-kitchen restaurant — BarTenders, built around its chicken tenders — an ice cream parlor, three bars with expansive televisions and jumbotrons, an outdoor gaming patio with games such as ping pong, cornhole and foosball, a beer garden, and a fully enclosed children’s playground with a soft rubber surface. Read that list as a group strategy: the people who want to compete putt, the people who want to watch sports watch, the kids get a playground, and everyone eats from the same kitchen.
That breadth is why PopStroke changed Hamlin’s gravity. Before it opened, a Hamlin evening meant dinner plus the cinema, or dinner plus the brewery. PopStroke added the active option — the place a group chat picks when nobody wants to sit still for two hours. It anchors our Hamlin family day out and earns a place in the date-night itinerary for couples who would rather compete than watch.
How a round works
The model is pay, putt and order as you go. PopStroke venues are known for app-based ordering that delivers drinks to you on the course, and for keeping score digitally rather than on a paper card — confirm the current Hamlin specifics on the venue’s own page before a first visit, as formats and pricing change and this magazine does not print prices it cannot keep current. What does not change is the pacing advice: go early evening for the best light and the shortest waits, expect peak crowds on Friday and Saturday nights, and treat a full 36 holes as an evening, not a pre-dinner sprint.
Weather deserves a sentence of its own. The Hamlin courses are outdoors, which is their charm in the cooler months and their constraint in a summer thunderstorm. Florida’s afternoon rain pattern makes the late-afternoon start a gamble in the wet season; the restaurant, bars and gaming patio are the built-in shelter while a cell passes, and the ice cream parlor is the consolation prize that reliably works on children.
Where it fits in Hamlin
PopStroke sits on Hamlin Groves Trail in the same southern stretch of the town center as Agave Bandido and Ford’s Garage, which makes the combined evening easy: putt first, then walk to dinner, or reverse it and putt under the lights. Development coverage has also reported a planned waterfront boardwalk along Lake Hancock south of PopStroke, with seating and a pocket park — reported as planned, with no confirmed groundbreaking date, so enjoy it as a prospect rather than a promise.
For visitors, PopStroke is also the simplest answer to a common west-Orlando problem: what to do with a mixed group, near Disney, that is not a theme park. It is plainly an attraction rather than a local secret, and it does not pretend otherwise. For Horizon West residents, its value is different — it is the birthday, team outing and out-of-town-guest venue that used to require a drive across town.
Find PopStroke through the Hamlin hub and on the Orlando Top Spots Map. In a district this young, every opening is a claim about what Hamlin wants to be. A Tiger Woods-backed putting venue with a scratch kitchen and three bars is a confident claim — and on a busy Friday night, watching the courses fill up under the lights, it looks like a claim the neighborhood was ready to back.
Orlando Citizen by email
The weekly edition, in your inbox
One email, every Saturday: the week’s edition of Orlando Citizen — the week’s stories, rankings and winners, gathered in one place. Free, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Related Stories
Editor’s Picks
Spotted an error? Tell us — corrections · How we rank