It’s 5:30 p.m. on a Thursday in the Financial District, and a DJ playing house music is the soundtrack to a room of (mostly) men concentrating on their golf swing. At nine Astroturfed little stations, someone is hitting a real ball into a projector screen displaying the image of some famous golf course, like Valderrama or Muirfield Village. The Five Iron Golf on Stone Street has opened back up after a brief closure for renovations, and people at the relaunch party seem to be having fun while getting hard data. “You can go over and see your shot shape and your spin rate,” one guy tells me about why he comes here. Another Five Iron regular, Yuki, admits that while the place is ostensibly about socializing — there’s a bar and tiny burger canapés floating around, and it’s a popular destination for bachelor parties — it’s sometimes challenging to attend group gatherings. People can get hardcore pretty quickly. “In the end, some people are more serious,” Yuki says. This is not like ax-throwing, which is classic bar eatertainment. Golf simulators are a more genuine sporting endeavor, which explains the people milling around holding beers with golf gloves on. “The fact you got all those numbers is pretty important for someone who plays a lot of golf,” one of them says.

Important enough that somehow these booths of fake grass and screens seem to be everywhere right now. People in the industry tell me it’s just a natural progression from the post-COVID golf boom (all that open turf was perfect for social distancing) with 2 million more people playing golf in 2023 compared to 2019. Off-course golf — simulators, driving ranges — saw especially strong growth as people chased what the CEO of the National Golf Foundation unironically called “shot euphoria.” For Fidi-based golf bros, because it takes some effort to get to the nearest course in Van Cortlandt or Pelham Bay, golf simulators are an efficient way to get their fix. “It’s tough to take your clubs on a train and navigate the world, so we offer a turnkey solution for a lot of golfers in an urban environment,” says JP Geoghegan, director of sales and marketing for Golfzon Social, a golf-simulator–slash–café lounge that Tishman Speyer brought over to 11 Hoyt.

Commercial golf simulators can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 depending on the add-ons and features. They also require certain specs: No columns and ceiling heights of at least ten feet. (I was instructed to imagine a six-foot-tall NBA player swinging a three-foot-long golf club, so they can’t just be installed anywhere.) But not all of the golf simulators opening around the city are created equal. Some are for the purists, like Golf v.2, which offers membership-based golf-simulator access for $275 per month and lessons with professional golfers. These spots lack frills — no chicken-finger platters or dart boards — and are pure function. Since 2022, the company has opened locations in Tribeca, Midtown West, and Brooklyn Heights. Perhaps even more antisocial, and coming soon to the East Village, is a 24/7 self-service, autonomous golf simulator called Ready Golf Club, which offers simulator bays that you can access with an app to “make yourself at home” for $55 per hour (and which I can only imagine is for the kind of golf man who is also divorced).

On the other side of the business is the more casual golf-simulator restaurant or bar, like the Five Iron I’m standing in, which still attracts golf nerds but ones who are maybe on a date or at a corporate outing. The company charges $349 per month for membership or $100 per hour to rent a simulator. (Five Iron is doing well — it just recently opened its sixth location in the city, at 1290 Sixth Avenue, an office tower owned by Vornado, and this year Danny Meyer invested $20 million into the company.) Similarly, last fall Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods opened T-Squared Social, a “golf-infused” sports bar on 42nd and Madison that costs $95 an hour and claims to have the “largest flat-screen 200-inch television” in New York City.

And then there’s the golf simulator as amenity, a kind of one-off that is tucked away in luxury office and residential buildings alongside an empty “game room” and dusty “library.” It can be found in luxury high-rises from midtown and Murray Hill to Greenpoint — tiny pieces of turf in gray carpeted rooms. This version of fake golf, I learned, is almost universally looked down upon by the more serious-minded entrepreneurs in the golf-simulator world. It lacks heart, at least according to its retail rivals. “They kind of get left deserted,” Nora Dunnan, co-founder of Five Iron Golf, says of these amenities. “They don’t get maintained properly — nobody knows how to keep them calibrated. And the vibe isn’t there.”