San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
3 COMPANIES
and the Culinary Institute of America campus in 2010. Hotel Emma finished construction in 2015, becoming one of San Antonio’s toniest hotels. Apartment complexes were built, including the luxury Cellars at Pearl tower in 2017.
The neighborhood powered through the COVID-19 pandemic, with two restaurants — Brasserie Mon Chou Chou and Best Quality Daughter — opening in late 2020. In April of last year, Pearl Cowork, a communal office space, opened, and it has since filled up, Millsap said.
Today, the Pearl neighborhood encompasses 654 residential units, 463,000 square feet of office space, 24 food and beverage outlets, and 16 retail shops, she said.
Goldsbury’s role
Pearl never could have happened without Goldsbury.
Many developers expect quick returns, as their business models often hinge on selling
what they build, such an apartment complex or office tower, within a few years of completing it. With Goldsbury as its owner, Silver Ventures didn’t have to worry about that, empowering Pearl’s builders to be patient and experiment.
“There are some things that worked and things that didn’t,” Fauerso said. “I think one of the greatest luxuries that we’ve had is time — to be able to develop this neighborhood with enough room to let things evolve and let certain things work and things not work, and get a lot of organic input from the community.”
Goldsbury made his fortune from selling the salsa maker Pace Foods to Campbell Soup in 1994 for $1.1 billion, according to Forbes. Along with Pearl, Silver Ventures’ portfolio includes the produce company NatureSweet Tomatoes, where Ambelang used to be CEO, and the La Babia Cattle Co., Shown said. Hotel Emma is another subsidiary.
Goldsbury remains closely involved with aspects of Pearl, Shown and Fauerso said. Carriqui is “one of his passion proj
ects,” Shown said.
The restaurant is one of Pearl’s most ambitious retail concepts. To create a suitable setting for the restaurant, Pearl Build moved it from Josephine Street to Grayson Street and threaded its balcony with steel. The restaurant, to be owned by Potluck, will serve staples from the Rio Grande Valley and the South Texas Gulf Coast.
“This is not just work to him. This is his lifeblood. He loves the historic buildings,” Shown said of Goldsbury. “That is going to be one of the most iconic restaurants in the state of Texas. I walk the project with him monthly, and we are literally choosing paint colors together.”
Beyond the brewery
Is Pearl — the original complex that Silver Ventures bought in 2001 after Pabst Brewing Co. ceased operations there — close to being built out?
“That’s a loaded question,” Shown said. “There are a couple of sites that are great development sites. At some point, it’ll make sense for that parking
lot in front of La Gloria to be something other than a parking lot. So it’s sort of finished, but not completely finished. It’s materially done.”
There’s still room for the Pearl neighborhood to grow. Silver Ventures owns about 9 acres along the river that has yet to be developed — nearly everything on either side between Josephine Street and Interstate 35, according to the Bexar Appraisal District.
Yet vacant lots are getting scarcer as other developers jump in to capitalize on a surge in demand. Three large-scale apartment complexes are in the works on the west side of the river just outside Pearl’s boundaries.
Shown sees opportunity for Pearl Build to do work elsewhere.
“For our group, it creates opportunities to fly,” he said of the restructuring. “Now, we can consider those opportunities basically unencumbered by any obligations that we might have otherwise had to our sister companies.”
Silver Ventures has looked
beyond Pearl’s footprint before. Along Broadway — technically outside Pearl’s boundaries, tied to the original brewery complex — it built Credit Human’s 10story headquarters and the eight-story Oxbow next door. In 2018, the company bought 4.74 acres near Hemisfair, where Shown sees the potential for a mixed-use development.
Pearl Build has been approached by developers to partner on projects outside San Antonio, including a “really cool urban deal” in Houston, Shown said, but he wants to wait until the company gets a sense of its own capacity to venture out.
The company has a firm rule to only undertake projects in urban settings, he said. And there will always be a focus on the Alamo City.
Silver Ventures has a “stated purpose to transform San Antonio,” he said. “With us being a subsidiary of Silver Ventures, I would suggest that as long as we have a full plate of work that we can do in San Antonio that we believe is transformative, that’s where we’ll be.”