Jordan Goodman - Good Hospitality

**Jordan Goodman** (0:00)
I thought I knew what I was doing in restaurants before that, and thank god I didn't open a restaurant, because I had no idea the back-end business side of things that it took.

**Lauren Healey** (0:08)
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Hello, welcome to The Sauce Podcast. I'm your host, Lauren, and I am here with Jordan Goodman, and he is the owner of Good Hospitality, which is quite a burgeoning little establishment over there in the Grove and downtown. So why don't you just tell us about all your businesses?

**Jordan Goodman** (0:54)
Yeah, absolutely. So my first business I started was Good Ice. I started that back in 2020, which was a fun time to start a business, March of 2020, about when I started getting my first accounts and then everything shut down. But that was good for me. I learned how to grow business slower than I probably would have had the whole world not shut down.
So that gave me a lot of opportunity to learn and to fail. And the stakes just were a little bit lower because there wasn't a lot of business out there to be had. And got that up and going with kind of the goal always to open my own restaurant. I really thought that Good Ice would be kind of a way to make relationships and get in with people that I didn't know. I was young in the industry and I just really wanted to get connected to the restaurant tours and the media and everyone with Good Ice.
And it really turned into something that I launched Good Company off of rather than kind of leveraging it to make the relationships. And so we opened up Good Company. We're in year 3 right now. It was our first hospitality outlet in the Grove. Shortly after that, right next door, we opened up Aparri, which opened up as a wine and amaro bar. But we were just having such great feedback from the food. And as we kind of, you know, started to figure out who we were, we realized we were really a small plate, kind of tapas style restaurant. So, it's gone more Spanish now, still Mediterranean inspired, but much more of a tapas style restaurant. We do some tasting menus out of there, a la carte menus. It's a really fun, small, intimate space. So, we've had those for the past couple of years, and we've been working on some new projects that are all kind of coming to fruition at the same time.

**Lauren Healey** (2:48)
Yeah.

**Jordan Goodman** (2:48)
We took on Trust late last year. So, that was a cocktail bar downtown under previous management. We took over the management of that space, added cafe programming during the day, really leaned into the events, and then kind of our common thread through all of that is, we run as an art gallery as well. So, we have opening nights about every other month. We rotate through local artists. We have an in-house curator who also works for us at Good Company.
We run that and that's been really, really fun. It's been, I'm super passionate about downtown, super passionate about St. Louis history and architecture. The building we're in at 401 Pine is one of a kind. It's a really incredible old bank that we've put that outlet into. Then from there, we have an Italian spot and a Mexican spot opening up here any minute now. As soon as we can get things through all the red tape and get our permits and our licenses, we'll probably open them both within maybe the same month of each other. Yeah, they're really stacking on top of each other, but it's been a long time in the works for both of them, about two years for the Mexican restaurant, which would be called Chico Bueno & Chico Malo, and then about a year for the Italian restaurant, which is Baia.

**Lauren Healey** (4:06)
Baia. I know, I was so excited when I heard about Baia because that's where I went scuba diving in the sunken city.

**Jordan Goodman** (4:12)
Yeah, I know. You kind of enlightened me to the history of that word on that side.
We kind of leaned into the, it's Italian Riviera-inspired design, not necessarily the menu, but the design is, and so as we were looking through words that fit, something that kind of was short and impactful, but also made sense. Baia, meaning Bay or Cove, was where we went. And then you let me know about the sunken city of Baia and started doing some research on that. Super interesting.