Brian McCord
Benjamin and Max Goldberg
A few days after Benjamin and Max Goldberg announced they would be closing Paradise Park, their dive-y trailer park-themed bar on Broadway, in mid 2018, a group of passionate, heartbroken locals started a Facebook page called Keep Paradise Park Alive! A NewsChannel 5 segment announced that locals were distraught. A petition was circulated to “help save the bar,” with its $6 pitchers of Natty Light, stage fashioned out of an El Camino, and beer-soaked Astroturf.
“These guys are morons,” one Facebook post ranted in response to the news that the space would become a four-story cocktail bar.
“We did a terrible job telling the real story,” Benjamin says. “They viewed it as we were buying the building and shutting down this beloved institution that we didn’t give a shit about. None of which was true,” he says. “People would come to us and say, ‘You came in and bought Paradise Park and ruined it.’ Well, we’re the same guys who created it.”
To eat in Nashville is to know Strategic’s core lineup: The Catbird Seat, their high-end, high-priced tasting menu spot; Bastion, the Wedgewood-Houston nacho den, bar, and hidden dining room; and Henrietta Red, the city’s best oyster bar. Maybe you’ve bowled at Pinewood Social, or been ushered behind the speakeasy-like curtains into The Patterson House for a thoughtful cocktail. Putt-putt and a frozen whiskey and Coke at a Sounds game? They created those concepts, too.
What ties it all together is the creative engine of the brothers themselves. Strategic Hospitality was founded by Benjamin in 2006. He could see that the city was on the brink of something big—he just needed a partner to help harness the company’s potential. With a pact to remain brothers and friends first and business partners second, he recruited his brother Max to join the business in 2007, and the two went on to build an empire of unique concepts.
The past year, though, has been a turning point for Strategic. The brothers closed Le Sel, a French-inspired brasserie that never quite found its footing. Then came the saga of Paradise Park’s closure and the opening of the three-story Downtown Sporting Club, their first foray into the hotel business, complete with axe-throwing—which may have brought forth their most dubious critics yet.
After years of wildly successful openings, were these setbacks the signal of a less gilded future for Strategic, or an opportunity to work harder, fix what needs mending, and continue to push Nashville further?
Building a Business on Guac
After graduating from the University of Miami, Benjamin returned home to find Nashville on the brink of change. He wanted to open a bar that was different than the rest of Nashville’s scene. Something cooler, more stylish, with a focus on design. He partnered with Austin Ray, now of M.L. Rose and Sinema, whom he’d known peripherally during high school. Lured to the Gulch by the revitalization of the once-neglected neighborhood, they found a two-story brick building, now home to boot retailer Lucchese. They went out in search of investors, hoping to raise $350,000 to get the bar open—an amount laughably low by today’s standards.
“The first person said yes, and we thought, ‘OK, this is going to be easy.’ And then, we got a lot of no’s,” Benjamin says.
But with each, they asked for the names of six people who might potentially set up a meeting. The 23-year-old first-time business owners started bringing guacamole to their meetings. They’d leave the bowl of guacamole behind, and then call a few
days after the meeting to get it back.
“We eventually raised the money, so I’d say it might have been the guac,” Benjamin laughs.
Benjamin and Ray went on to open a music venue, City Hall, and stayed rooted in the Gulch for five years until their lease came up. In that time, Benjamin’s brother Max, who had graduated from the University of Denver and moved to New York to work in financial management consulting, came home to visit.
“The first time I went [to Bar Twenty3] I saw him standing in the rain with an umbrella, guiding people with a flashlight because there weren’t any streetlights at the time,” Max recalls. “Ben is too humble to say it, but it was a big moment for the city. It pushed boundaries,” he says.
Conde Nast Traveler would name Bar Twenty3 one of the Top 30 nightlife spots in the world, giving Nashville an important moment in the global spotlight.
After five years, Benjamin and Ray closed Bar Twenty3. By then, Benjamin had already launched his next project, Paradise Park, which opened in 2007. He’d also recruited Max to come home and partner up after a six-month discussion.
“I told him, ‘Look, there’s this really weird thing happening to the city now. How people are spending their money, where they’re choosing to go. And there’s not a possibility of me doing this alone. If you moved back, we could do something cool and fun and special together,’” Benjamin recalls.
It was a big ask, but Max eventually jumped.
“It was too fun not to try,” he says.
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Andrew Thomas Lee
Pinewood Social
2 of 4
Ansley Cohen
The Catbird Seat
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Andrea Behrends
Henrietta Red
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Andrea Behrends
Bastion
Talent Attracts Talent
The Goldbergs have convinced some of the best chefs to move to Nashville. Their technique?
“We take them to Arnold’s. No one says no once they’ve been to Arnold’s,” Benjamin says.
Clearly, that iconic steam-table meat-and-three has done its part. But so too has the brothers’ vision. The first chef they partnered with was Josh Habiger, who came to Nashville from Chicago to help open The Patterson House.
Benjamin and Max had no idea that he was a talented chef; he was just helping out on the bar program. Then Habiger cooked brunch for the brothers and their friends at their mother’s house. What he served blew the brothers away, including the brioche doughnuts that are still on Patterson’s menu today. Habiger took over the food menu and eventually, the guys started talking about what he might want to do next. The space above Patterson, which once housed a salon, was coming available. Habiger talked about creating a restaurant where chefs could have a one-on-one interaction with their guests, where the cooking happened right there behind a counter, like bartenders mixing drinks.
When that restaurant, The Catbird Seat, opened in 2011, it was called “wildly ambitious” by the Nashville Scene, with a “bold” and “artful” menu. It was also the most expensive restaurant in the city.
The risk paid off—the accolades poured in for the tasting menu concept, including from Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, the James Beard Foundation, and many more. Catbird, and by extension, Nashville’s food scene, was suddenly part of a national conversation.
Eventually Habiger went on to help the Goldbergs open Pinewood Social. The team then recruited Trevor Moran to take over Catbird. Ryan Poli from Chicago came next, through a connection made by Moran. Now, the restaurant sits under the helm of new chefs Will Aghajanian and Liz Johnson, whom Max and Julia Sullivan of Henrietta Red met during the Aspen Food & Wine Festival in 2018. Sullivan and Johnson were both there to be honored as Best New Chefs by Food & Wine.
Sullivan, a Nashville native who cooked at Michelin-starred New York restaurants like Per Se and Blue Hill at Stone Barns before returning home, knew the brothers during high school and once back in Nashville, worked as a sous chef to open Pinewood Social.
She wanted to open her own concept with business partner Allie Poindexter. After searching somewhat successfully for investors, Sullivan went to Benjamin for advice. The conversation turned into an offer to go into a space the Goldbergs were looking to lease in Germantown, as well as an investment in the business. The group opened Henrietta Red in 2017, striking a partnership that put Sullivan and Poindexter in control of all of the operations.
“To allow Allie and me to be here and run it the way we want it to be run is crucial to the success of the relationship,” Sullivan says.
The Goldbergs developed a similar relationship with Habiger when he decided to open Bastion. And they’ll do it again this fall when Moran opens his forthcoming dumpling and shaved ice restaurant, Locust, in 12 South.
Brian McCord
Max and Benjamin Goldberg
Deeply Personal
Today, Strategic Hospitality has nine concepts, including their latest, Sullivan’s catering business The Party Line, and employs more than 600 people. But that hasn’t changed the amount of time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears the brothers put into their projects.
Max, arguably the more sentimental of the two, says that Paradise’s last night might have been his most memorable.
“We had so many couples come back saying they met at the bar, or under the beer sign,” Max says. (Benjamin actually took the beer sign off the wall and handed it to one of the couples.)
On closing night, Max wore a white tuxedo and performed marriage vow renewals.
“It was really special to look back and see how we’d impacted people, that we’d been a part of something bigger,” he adds.
“I don’t think people recognize that it’s not just an arbitrary business,” Benjamin stresses. “We’re not doing market research on these things, we’re just creating where we want to go and we pour our heart and soul into them. When people love them it feels better than it probably should, and when people don’t like the smallest thing, it stings way more than it should,” Benjamin admits.
As for their partnership, the work is split evenly. Max oversees some of the concepts completely, while also more generally looking at growth potential—he’s deeply involved in the planning of the concept they’ll open inside Nashville’s airport in 2023. Benjamin oversees other concepts completely while also drilling down into operations, budgets, and management. On their collaborative, non-chef-driven concepts, like Pinewood and DSC, both keep their hands on everything. And though they’re not always in the same place at once, the two are in touch constantly.
“We probably talk or text about 200 times a day,” Max says.
Buying Local
On Halloween night in 2017, Benjamin got a call from the owner of the building that housed Paradise Park. An Atlanta-based company was offering to buy it. The Paradise lease might be good for another year but beyond that, it would be unmanageable to keep the bar open.
“We realized if someone else wanted to buy it, there was good value down there,” Max says. “As Nashville kids, we really wanted to keep local ownership downtown.”
They made phone calls to a few key investors and quickly had a group of like-minded partners. The building owner chose not to take the Atlanta deal “to give us an opportunity as a local group,” Benjamin says. “[They] chose to sell a building and go down a very painful road, just in order to preserve it.”
Since Paradise Park, the one-floor, cheap beer-and-tots bar, wasn’t going to be able to sustain the entire building, they set their sights on a new vision. They’d been working on a plan to open a hotel for several years, and when they realized the four-story building would be theirs, they made the move to open it there. In true Goldberg fashion, they aimed to create something that didn’t already exist—hence, a gaming theme, stylish but affordable hotel rooms and, yes, axe-throwing.
What they didn’t do was make any of this backstory clear to the public. If the Facebook ranters had known that there was no scenario in which Paradise could survive, and that it was a group of locals preserving a piece of Lower Broadway, maybe the outcry would have been less cruel.
Like many of their missteps, that one will help them make better decisions going forward—and onward they do go. Within DSC, they’ve already started to tweak the concepts. This fall will see Moran’s restaurant opening. There’s the airport deal coming up, and several other undisclosed ideas in the works.
“We’re always asking: How can we make sure this is the best quality experience it can be and how can we do this for a long period of time?” Max says. “Because we want to be here for the long haul.”