A growing St. Louis restaurant empire is taking root in the Grove

0:00This is St. Louis on the Air from St. Louis Public Radio. I'm Elaine Cha. In the last three months, three new restaurants in the grove are bringing diners' taste of Mexico, at Chico Bueno and Molo, and flavors of the Italian Riviera with Bia. Those restaurants are all backed by the same man, Jordan Goodman, and they join a budding restaurant empire that started with Good Company. The burgeoning business caught the interest of our digital editor Jessica Rogan, who joins on this show alongside Avila Rico every month for our look at new restaurants in the region. Jessica recently sat down with Jordan Goodman. So I'm going to start with a little bit of a shaggy dog. A bunch of years ago, I was at the Vandy, and I got my drink, and it came in a Collins glass, which is this long tall glass, and it had a piece of ice in it.

1:03It was a really thin rectangle, and it was the whole length of the glass. I don't remember the drink, but I do remember that ice. That was your ice. So how did you come to make really beautiful ice? Yeah, I started it while I was opening the narwhals crafted on Midtown, their first location, and we had a small cocktail program where we would hand cut all of our own clear ice. It's a process that you can do at small scale to get some clear ice, but you have to cut it. And so I was doing that, and I really loved it. When I went to the Olive and Oak group, I started doing the same thing. It was the bar manager at Clover and the B when I first went there. Our dinner service that I was running wasn't very busy. It was still building into what Owen O'Pizza is today. Part of that growth came. I started cutting them by hand right at the beginning of service, and people started showing up, watching me cut the ice. Next thing you knew, the bar would fill up first, and we'd have a full bar right at open to watch me hand cut the ice.

2:09So I was going to first look at inside into the appeal, the commercial appeal of ice, that people were amazed by it. They didn't understand it. People loved things. They don't fully understand, and I've always been entrepreneurial. So from there, I started thinking, well, this could be a business. I think this is cool. Olive and Oak, which was our big brother, started coming over and the bartender started asking me for ice, and customers were asking them for ice, that they'd get next door at Clover and the B. So I started digging into other businesses out there at the time in the country there was only a handful in big markets as you'd expect. So I started doing some research, started digging, and gotten contacted with a company out in San Francisco that has been acquired since. They gave me the blueprint to do everything. He was a world champion ice carver that found a market in the Bay Area, told me how to do everything, and I implemented it. We started with $5,000, and I started my mom's basement,

3:11and started cutting ice and grew it, bootstrapped it, and grew it into what it is today with a lot of help from a lot of people. So what is it about ice? Is it like this showmanship of it? I think that it's something you see all the time. I think it's something you interact with all the time, but the way that we present ice looks different. You can't make it like that by just freezing it or boiling it or doing whatever. It's a special process called directional freezing, and at scale it takes either especially equipment that we have, or you would literally harvest it from a lake. It would freeze from the top down. It creates this perfect crystal structure, which gives it the clear appearance. And so in the old days when people would, that's how they got their ice, was carving rivers and lakes and sending them down, and holding them in big, cold warehouses. They would be perfectly clear, but I think that people see it every day, but they don't understand how we get it so clear, and I think the other beautiful thing about ice and our cubes,

4:19and things that they are kind of little works of art, but they disappear. And so as we've grown that, and we've started doing ice sculptures, and they truly are works of art, I think something that people love is that it's just there for that moment, and it goes away. And I think in today's society with access to everything, anytime you want it, something that is beautiful that you can't have forever, I think is really special. I think that's one of the reasons that people are really attracted to the ice. That's really interesting. I didn't realize this was like this old school and kind of modern thing happening. Yeah, absolutely. We take all of our techniques that we use for our ice cubes, and it comes from ice carvers that have done it this way for a long, long time, and some of the best tools we have are those very mechanical pieces that have existed for a long time. So that would I think was 2019 when you launched that. And in the last three years, you've done a lot. You've opened up six restaurants or bars that feature tapas.

5:28We've got a Mexican tasting menu, a taqueria, upscale pub fare, and now just last month at a talent restaurant with Baya. So how did you move from ice to restaurants? Yeah, well, I never moved out of restaurants. So I started the ice business while I was working in restaurants. And really, when I started Good Ice, it was a... But I thought would be a vehicle to build relationships that I could then leverage into opening restaurants. And kind of always thought Good Ice would be this little side thing. And that's what I tried to do for a long time was I built my restaurant career after the Olive and Oak group. I got an opportunity to join the Salt and Smoke group as a corporate beverage director, which they'd never had before. So kind of to build my own position within this huge restaurant group that had all this buying power and was really great education for me.

6:31But that whole time I was still building Good Ice and I was building it, building it, building my family as well. So it just got to this point where I couldn't quite give everything I needed to my job, my restaurant career, and give everything I wanted to to my own businesses. But I love restaurants and I can't not do restaurants so then the choice was pretty easy for me was, well, let's see if we can leverage Good Ice itself. Not the relationships that we've built necessarily, but the team that we've built and the business that we've built and leveraged that into a restaurant. So I can leave working for other people and start my own thing and give all my attention to my own growing restaurant group. And so when we started, I was very clear with my business partners. I've got the same business partners that every business we have. That we were building for growth that I had taken my time learning the restaurant industry. I had taken my time learning Business through Good Ice.

7:34So although we've had rapid growth in the restaurant business, we've actually had one business for five years and then hit this period of rapid growth in the last three years with our restaurant group. And so from the very second we opened Good Company, we put into play systems, back end operations that were built for a restaurant group that you would never build for just one restaurant. And so it was kind of just me kind of realizing the full vision of what Good Ice was going to grow into, which was something that serves the restaurant community, but also serves our businesses as a supplier to ourselves. So why so many restaurants though? I mean one thing that I've wondered is like, you know, not being a restaurant or like owning a restaurant seems like an opening a new one seems like a big financial deal. So why like go so full born to it right away? Yeah, I think there's some insights I can give you to why and some that I just I don't know myself. I think that one thing I'm very passionate about and have always had a lot of success in my career with has been growing teams.

8:57Identifying good people, developing good people, creating a sense of passion and energy behind what we're building. And if I'm not passionate about it, it can come out into the teams. And I think that's kind of something I've always been really, really passionate about and I think good at doing. And so as we started bringing people into our restaurant group as we were able to build a name for ourselves. And a track talent that I think is super, super special. We kind of needed places for them to go and things for them to do. So we'd always had Chico Bueno as an idea. We had good company. Aparie came about from a conversation, a conversation, you know, many conversations over over months around this really unique room that we had in good company that was big enough to sit. A full small size restaurant, but big enough to sit a restaurant, but didn't have its own energy. It was just kind of a room off to the side. And that became Aparie where we took a concept that we had in our heads for a different location in the future and said, well, let's put it into here. And that's our Spanish top of restaurant with the focus on DJ Steve O with the focus on Vermouth and Sherry and all these fun things.

10:22And then Chico Bueno was always in our head as something we were doing. That's been actually my number one concept. I've always wanted to open. I'm Mexican. Really. My whole family grew up in El Paso, Texas when they moved to St. Louis. I was the only one of my family born here. And so I always kind of was able to connect with my culture through food and beverage. And then that was able to kind of get in with my family. I could relate to them about Mexican culture through the food and the beverage that we were eating because that's why I knew although I didn't spend time in Texas. And so as we gained these talented people, they had ideas. They had fresh things they wanted to do. We had opportunities to build on the real estate side of things. So we've started to acquire properties now, which I think is not necessarily vital to the restaurant industry these days, but I think it is an important aspect that you can leverage to being able to build these things as only the properties you're on.

11:26And so we just had all these great people with great ideas, a lot of passion behind what we're doing. And we needed places for them to go and express themselves. And that's why we've been able to open several concepts. And I think do it at a very high level is because we've had the people on the team that are asking to do those things. And we need to give them the space to create. Okay, that makes sense. You've got to create the opportunities for your for your people. One of the things you said about now you're owning the buildings, a lot of your concepts are in the grove. Is it that you love the grove? It wasn't easy to acquire that property. Can you tell me more about that? Yeah, I think I think a little bit of both. I think there's a lot of things about the grove that make it really special and made it a place that we wanted to base our businesses out of. I'm very passionate about the development of St. Louis City itself and seeing the city become a great, a great place to live and work and play.

12:34And there's many aspects to why the city is struggling that are far bigger than anything I can solve, but I can try to do my little part to help. And so when we started looking, I knew I wanted to be in the city. I did not want to be in the county. And so we started looking at a couple different districts. I love walkable districts. My older brother and sister spent, I think, 12 consecutive years in New York. Someone was in the city. So I would travel up there to see them. I would I would spend time in New York, I'd spend time in Chicago. And I just love these walkable places. And St. Louis, it's really hard to find that. And so I kind of had identified a few places that I thought could be something like that. That could be a walkable district that you could not just go out in, but you could live there. You could work there. You could you could go out and play there too. And we looked at South Grand, we looked at the central stand, we looked at the grove and the grove presented an opportunity with the old laylist space that I thought was really great.

13:44And I had spent the most of my time personally going out in the grove as well. That's where I would spend a lot of my post shift nights with the three M bars, the old atomic and places that we could go out after we got off shift. And so I was really passionate about it. I think there's a ton of cultural diversity in the grove, which I love. I think that if St. Louis is going to be great, we need to embrace the cultural diversity that we have. So it just, I was in love with the grove. And as I got involved, I just fell more and more in love with the grove. The business operators that are there are fantastic. The people that have made that neighborhood what it is, have done a lot of really hard work to get there. And I think as we usher in kind of this next era of what the grove can be as people aren't going out and spending all their money on bombs and shots and they want experiences now, you know, there's still places for those sorts of establishments and I hope that they continue for a long time because we need that as well.

14:51But I also think that people are craving full kind of immersive experiences. And that's where I think we can step in as we can create these places that you can go to that make you feel like it doesn't matter if you're in the grove or the central west down or wherever we're transporting you to a completely different place when you step into our restaurants. And that's our goal there. Yeah, I was just having a conversation with someone and they were like, oh, you know, I forgot about how many great restaurants there are on the grove. I think of it as a nightlife spot. So I hear you saying that, you know, you are part of the person, you know, the people making that change. You mentioned earlier that food was a way to connect with your family and your culture. Did you grow up in a family that was interested in the restaurant and bar business? No, no, very much detached from the restaurant business. I loved it from a distance and really wanted to be a part of it. And, you know, grew up, I'm lucky in some ways to have much older siblings in me. So my next closest sister is nine years older than me.

16:03And so I grew up in the county. She moved to the city and then started taking me to places like Fulgrand and Jalada Ria and these places in the city that I hadn't been exposed to. And so then I started, you know, when I would go out on a date as a 16 year old high schooler, I would go find a restaurant in the city that I loved and, you know, just kind of explored restaurants. It wasn't until after college where I really got into restaurants. I took a gap year before graduate school knowing that I was never going back to school. But I had to appease my parents. And so it was a gap year before I went to law school and I got in and just immediately was like, this is everything I thought it would be and more. And I love this so much. So the second I got a taste of it, it was that was it for me. I knew that this was what I wanted to do. What do you think makes the restaurant scene in St. Louis special?

17:06I think so many things. I think that there is a... I love St. Louis so much. So I say this with all the love. There's just not that much to do in St. Louis sometimes. And so, you know, people love to go out and eat and you love to go out and drink because we're not on a coast. So, you know, I think that because of that, there's a ton of demand for restaurants and people, people kind of... I don't even know the right word. It's a bigger kind of picture movement where people are becoming, you know, these celebrity chefs and all this sort of things by thinking St. Louis too. Because there isn't a ton going on. We've lost the football team and all these things. These kind of become your teams of sorts. Like, I love going to Matt McGuire's restaurant. And I love rights and Louis.

18:07And this is almost my team that I support. And I think there's a weird, almost competition in guests from what I hear of my restaurants. I love them almost better than your restaurants that you love. So, there's just a passion from the St. Louis community. I think it's so special around our food and beverage scene. I think that because of where we're at in the cost of living and cost of doing business that we're starting to get some really great people coming in that are bringing new and fresh ideas into St. Louis when we started good company, our beverage director, Diego Gonzalez joined us from New York City. He had just moved in town. He worked at some of the best bars and restaurants in New York City and came and just brought a bunch of fresh ideas to the group that were really welcome. I think there's a lot of that happening right now where you get, you get restaurants coming from restaurant tours that have St. Louis ties, but haven't just come up in the St. Louis restaurants and they're coming back because it's more affordable to open a restaurant here.

19:13So, I think it's just a great kind of melting pot of all these different ideas. People coming from all these different areas and bringing those ideas and then the people of St. Louis being super passionate about restaurants. That's Jordan Goodman, the restaurant tour behind Molo, Chico Bueno and Baya, all of which opened in the last three months in the Grove. He recently talked with STLPR's Jessica Rogan. This episode was produced by Jessica Rogan with editing and engineering by Alex Hoyer, podcast design by Aaron Dorr. St. Louis on the air is a production of St. Louis Public Radio. Understanding starts here.

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