A Full Day at Sycuan: Golf, Spa, Dinner, and a Show

Sycuan Casino Resort stopped being only a casino floor in March 2019, when a $260 million expansion added a twelve-story hotel tower, a spa, a pool complex and ten restaurants. That turned a place people dropped into for three hours into somewhere you can spend from morning until midnight. It is out in the Dehesa Valley, about half an hour east of downtown San Diego. One rule governs everything below: the property is 21 and over, gaming floor, pool and concerts alike, so this is not an outing with anyone younger. What follows is how the day actually runs, in the order you would do it.

Morning: Golf at Singing Hills

Start with the thing most people get wrong, which is that the golf is not on the property. Singing Hills sits about three miles further down Dehesa Road, so build the drive into your morning. Once you arrive, you find three courses, not one, and choosing between them is really a decision about how much of the day you are prepared to spend.

• Willow Glen is a four-hour round, so it needs an early tee time if the rest of the day is going to happen. It is also the course carrying the history, having hosted the U.S. Junior Amateur twice, in 1973 and again in 1989, when David Duval won the final. Par 72, 6,687 yards from the back tees.
• Oak Glen takes the same four hours and is the friendlier of the two full-length courses. Its fourth hole is the one people still talk about afterwards, a short one played to a peninsula green, with water short and left and a eucalyptus on the right that has knocked a lot of good shots into it. Par 72, 6,682 yards.
• Pine Glen is the short course, where every hole is a par 3, and it plays in a fraction of the time. That makes it the sensible pick when golf is one item on a long list and not the point of the trip. It is also what gives Singing Hills the only 54-hole golf facility in the San Diego area.

Midday: The Rules Nobody Mentions

By the time you get back, the middle of the day belongs to the spa and the pool, and both come with rules worth knowing in advance.

Spa Ritual is the easier of the two, because it is open to the public and not just to hotel guests. It closes on Tuesdays, which is the detail most likely to catch you out, and it opens at 9:30am and stays open into the early evening for the rest of the week, so check the hours for the day you are going. Massage, skin care, salon and waxing, with a sauna, a steam room and a fitness center attached.

The pool is where a day trip gets complicated, because getting in depends on who you are. Hotel guests walk in free and wear a wristband. Everybody else needs a day pass, which Retreat sells in limited numbers through the box office and only when there is space. There is a second way in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, where a spa treatment of 45 minutes or longer can get you in, if availability allows. It opens at 9am and closes at 5pm, so it never becomes an evening activity.

The season matters as much as the day. In winter the main pool and the lazy river close completely. Only the upper one stays open, and only to registered hotel guests. So the lazy river and the swim-up bar everyone mentions are a summer proposition, not a year-round one, and in the colder months a day visitor will not see them at all.

Evening: Ten Restaurants, and How to Pick One

By evening the question becomes where to eat, and with ten restaurants and bars on site the most useful way to sort them is by how much time you have.

• Bull & Bourbon is the long dinner, and the one to take if the meal is the event. It keeps an in-house butcher program, an on-site aging room and custom wood-fired grills, and the bourbon list explains the rest of the name. Steaks start at an 8oz petite filet and climb to a tomahawk ribeye.
• The unCommons is the fast option, a market that imported San Diego names instead of inventing new ones. Phil’s BBQ, Hodad’s, Lucha Libre Gourmet Taco Shop, Luna Grill and The Hangry Slice, between them, settle the argument in about four minutes.
• Pink Buddha, Rank & File, Elicit Bar & Lounge and Viewpoint Neighborhood Kitchen fill the middle ground, running from Pan-Asian to a tap house. The Viewpoint bar keeps going until 10pm most days, and until 11pm from Thursday through Saturday.

Night: Check Which Room Your Ticket Is For

Then there is the show, and here Sycuan has two venues even though people regularly turn up assuming there is only one. Live & Up Close seats a little over 450, which is small enough that the back row is still a good seat. The Heritage Event Center is the other room, and it holds more than 1,200. That gap matters when you are deciding whether to buy early, since a 450-seat room sells out in a way a 1,200-seat room simply does not.

Whichever room you land in, the programming leans in a clear direction. Read through a season and you will find tribute acts sitting alongside the touring names, with Journey, Queen, Prince and Marvin Gaye all getting their night, and stand-up and magic filling in the rest. It is a room for music you already know the words to.

The Casino Itself

After the show, most of the evening funnels back to the casino, which covers 200,000 square feet and holds roughly 2,300 slot machines and 52 table games, with about 750 of those machines sitting in the non-smoking section. It stays open 24 hours.

Those 24 hours are the trap. It is easy to leave far later than you meant to, which is why groups expecting a late finish usually settle the return from the casino in advance.

Stay Over, or Drive Back

The hotel tower holds more than 300 rooms, including 57 suites, and taking one solves several things at once: the pool stops needing a day pass, the clubs stop living in the car, the drinks stop being a calculation, and Dehesa Road stops being your problem until the morning.

If you are going home the same night, Sycuan is at 5469 Casino Way, roughly 21 miles from the airport. The last stretch is a two-lane country road, and it is properly dark once a show lets out.

Golf at nine, a massage, a long dinner, a show and a few hours in the casino makes for a genuinely long day either way. Staying changes where it ends. It does not change who has to skip the bar.