San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
3 COMPANIES
“For our group,
it creates opportunities to
fly.”
Bill Shown, CEO of Pearl
Build, which now sees opportunities outside the physical boundaries
of Pearl
Each of the three companies that used to be one is headed by a Pearl veteran, each with its own focus and an enlarged staff. The idea, originating from Silver Ventures CEO Bryant Ambelang, enables the companies to be “more nimble, more independent and more focused,” Shown said.
Pearl Real Estate Co., headed by former Pearl Chief Operating Officer Mesha Millsap, oversees
Pearl’s 23-acre campus — including its parking lots, retail spaces, holiday decorations and environmental impact. Potluck Hospitality, with former Chief Marketing Officer Elizabeth Fauerso as CEO, has a mission to develop restaurant and hospitality concepts.
All three companies are scaling up their ambitions. Potluck is overseeing the sweeping renovation of the former Liberty Bar building, with its Victorian-era wraparound balcony, into Carriqui, a 400-seat restaurant serving South Texas cuisine,
and is transforming the Pearl Stable into an intimate concert venue that Fauerso likened to the famous Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tenn.
Pearl Build and Potluck Hospitality are starting to look beyond Pearl’s footprint, even thinking about doing work outside San Antonio someday, though each company has a long list of projects to wrap up at Pearl first.
“Despite the fact that we’ve all been part of Pearl for 11 years, this is a new endeavor,” Fauerso said of her Potluck
team. “In the next couple of years, we have work to do to establish ourselves.”
A similar sentiment led Pearl Build to pass on Lone Star. The idea of redeveloping the former brewery was “enticing,” Shown said, but after a few days of discussion, Pearl Build’s leaders decided “we just don’t have the bandwidth to take it on.”
“You know, we’re a fledgling company right now. With what we have on our plates, it felt like more than we can take on,” he said.
Once the company sets a
pace for itself, he expects it to tackle ambitious projects elsewhere.
“At some point, we’ll break outside of town,” he said. “With good sponsorship — in other words, people that we know and trust and respect — and as we understand what our capacity is, we’ll take other opportunities. My guess is we’re three or four years down the road before that happens.”
Out of one, many
The three companies work in different offices with separate finance and marketing teams: Potluck in the Can Recycle building on East Grayson Street, the one with a giant can on top; Pearl Real Estate in the Full Goods building; and Pearl Build in temporary quarters in a warehouse while it renovates space in the Oxbow on Broadway.
Though independent, the companies still work together, including on a project to renovate the Samuels Glass building into a market with restaurants, which is expected to open late next year.
Pearl Build is doing the construction work for Carriqui and the Stable Hall for Potluck, as well as for Ladino, a Mediterranean restaurant set to open in August, Fauerso said. All three concepts will be tenants of Pearl Real Estate.
Since splitting from Silver Ventures, Pearl Build has expanded its staff to 15, up from the six who worked on development for Pearl. Recent hires include Omar Gonzalez, a longtime executive at Hemisfair, who is Pearl Build’s director of development. Potluck has hired about 20 people since becoming independent, including Page Pressley, as culinary director, who had worked at the popular Emmer & Rye restaurant in Austin.
Having the companies as separate entities offers the advantage of setting firm boundaries between Silver Ventures’ interests, Shown said.
“It gets real squishy … when it’s time to negotiate a lease and you’re one company,” he said. “How do you set lease rents? How do you set lease
terms?”
It’s a major shift from Pearl’s early years, when the vision for the neighborhood was in flux and the employees “wore many hats,” as Fauerso put it.
Millsap is an example of that. She joined Pearl as an accountant in 2007, not long after it welcomed its first tenant, the Aveda Institute beauty school. She soon began taking on work in operations and eventually came to manage the group that ran event venues such as the Pearl Stable.
“The beauty of being in a company that is very dynamic is that sometimes you get to do a lot of things you wouldn’t have expected,” she said. “As we grew and there were needs, I was able to explore new things.”
Pearl bloomed in the late 2000s and through the 2010s with the help of generous development incentives from the city of San Antonio and Bexar County. It earned its gastronomic bona fides with the opening of Andrew Weissman’s Il Sogno Osteria in 2009