I have rather mixed feelings about halfway houses. The first is why should anybody need to eat where a round only takes 3 1/2 hours. Yet my second thought is I can remember a six hour round at a resort course and numerous five hour plus rounds where are the only thing to break the monotony of waiting for the group ahead to hit was a sandwich or two from the halfway house.
Full disclosure, I love a halfway house. Primarily because they are a major feature that can be used to give a "sense of places" or "vibe" to a golf course. Tools to set a places tone are few and can be challenging to create. I think of the "halfway house" (even though they have returning nines) at Lawsonia as a good example of this.
Anyway, so, I think another very good trick a golf course can do (if they are operated very well), is to control pace
via the halfway house. In the golf-course-as-a-factory model of pace-of-play, there is little a course can practically do to speed up play, but they
can do a lot to improve
perceived pace-of-play. You see, suppose you have 12 minute intervals, but after the first 9 holes, groups are squeezed together. Unless the whole course is slow, a halfway house is a great way get pace back to their intervals. You order a sausage with a group right in front of you, and it magically takes about 8 minutes to cook, but if there is a big gap in front, it could have been cooked ahead of time... if that happens, and the halfway house knows there's a gap--surprise--lucky for you they already cooked theirs, and the slow pokes are back on the course immediately. In this way, an informed halfway house can correct pace problems in the middle of the round.
The idea may be diabolical, but again, most folks are much more concerned about perceived pace-of-play, and adding a halfway house at known bottlenecks can improved wait times, and strategically placed halfway houses can actually reset pace if they know how much time needs to be added-or-subtracted to different groups to get them back on the correct interval.