Chef Andy Little
Less than two months after his beloved 12South restaurant Josephine served its last meal, chef Andy Little has landed in an important new position as director of culinary operations for the restaurants of Strategic Hospitality. In his new role, Little will primarily be involved with Strategic Hospitality’s restaurants that are more experience-driven as opposed to the group’s chef-driven properties. So this means he will be instrumental in developing and streamlining systems at the new restaurants at the Nashville International Airport — Kitty Hawk Eat + Drink, Voodoo Doughnut and The Titans Press Box — as well as The Band Box at First Horizon Park, Merchants, the multi-story Friends in Low Places Bar & Honky Tonk collaboration with Garth Books and Trisha Yearwood on Lower Broad and another upcoming project. (Stay tuned to this space for more details!)
Little is a huge baseball fan, and you could think of this new position as sort of a veteran “bench coach” who helps up-and-coming ballplayers be all that they can be by sharing his years of experience in the game. In fact, Little first became directly involved with Benjamin and Max Goldberg and the Strategic Hospitality team when he came up with the idea for a collaboration at The Band Box to create a pop-up to serve upscale ballpark food. The one-off event quickly evolved into an anticipated annual series that attracts some of Nashville’s favorite chefs to share their take on ballpark fare.
The collaborators discovered that they shared many of the same attitudes toward hospitality and the importance of taking care of staff.
“I’ve enjoyed getting to know [Max and Ben] throughout the years, and I’ve admired them for so long,” Little tells the Scene. “We all agree that the food is very important. But the life you breathe into the space is the important part, and that always comes from the people!”
Closing Josephine after a decade was difficult for Little and his wife Karen, but it came down to the unfortunately common Nashville restaurant bugaboo of an expiring lease. “When the renewal came up, we spent a lot of time running through how we could do it,” he recalls. “But we knew we wouldn’t do it unless we could maintain the quality of life for our staff and pay an equitable rate. I really believe that restaurants have lifespans, and we had reached ours.”
Little says telling the staff was "one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.” Andy and Karen gave the staff nine weeks of notice before closing.
“I’ve experienced being locked out of a restaurant that I was working at, so we wanted to be upfront with them,” he says. “I told them that it’s rare to have the chance to write your own story, and we could write a great story in these last nine weeks. We had such an amazing group, we didn’t lose a single person!”
The Littles also met with the entire staff individually to discuss future opportunities. “It was important to me to be able to say that everyone had an opportunity to get a job, and we helped place everybody who wanted to stay in the industry.” This included one employee who told Little he wanted to take a left turn in his career and follow his bliss to learn all about making pizza, so the chef helped make connections with a couple of Nashville’s best pizza restaurants. Additionally, former Josephine sous chef Matt Stanzel will join Little and Strategic as the new executive chef at Friends in Low Places.
Still, Little already misses the kitchen. “I didn’t anticipate how difficult it would be to step aside from commercial cooking,” he says. “My hands were on the last plates at Josephine, and that’s what’s thrown me for the biggest loop. I love professional cooking, but I honestly feel like we went out on top at Josephine.”
With his new position at Strategic Hospitality, Little has found comfort through focusing on another aspect that has always been a crucial part of his experience in the kitchen: educating the next generation of chefs. Even while specializing in a delightful melange of Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine prepared using classic French techniques and down-home Southern ingredients, Little always made sure that his kitchen staff remained grounded in fundamentally sound culinary philosophies such as employing the brigade system in his kitchens. But Little also encouraged employees to stretch their wings and express their own cooking personalities through epic staff meals which were based around cookbooks assigned by the chef or picked by the cook-of-the-day, encouraging them to “cook from your cookbook that you’d like to write someday.”
Now, Little will be able to help shape the future crop of Nashville chefs, working with a culinary team of 150 to 200 people rather than his tight staff of eight at Josephine. “It’s such a gift to do that at any number of locations, to have the chance to influence people. It’s a really exciting opportunity.”
If you get a few Nashville chefs or restaurateurs together in a room, it won’t take long before the conversation turns to the issue of staffin…
Candidly, Little admits there are also more practical reasons for his change in career direction. “My body can’t carry 50-pound bags of flour anymore. I knew a couple of years ago that another 10-year lease would be difficult on me. There’s a point in every chef’s life where you have to think about it. Either you’ve become an empire builder like Thomas Keller or Daniel Boulud, or you have to figure out how to deal with the stress of still being in the kitchen night after night.”
He’s looking forward to contributing to a range of Strategic Hospitality properties with a multiplicity of styles. He explained, “It’s exciting after ten years of going to the same address. I hope to bring a fresh perspective, and my ultimate goal is that if you go into the back of any of the restaurants the kitchens will have the same feel and flow.”
While Little won’t be working as directly with the talented current and former Beard-nominee chefs that helm Strategic Hospitality projects like Bastion (chef/partner Josh Habiger), Locust (chef Trevor Moran), The Catbird Seat (chef Brian Baxter), Henrietta Red (chef Julia Sullivan) or Kisser (chefs Leina Horii and Brian Lea), he will certainly make himself available as a resource.
There was never any thought of leaving Nashville after the end of the Josephine era. “Nashville’s home at this point. It caught us by surprise that so many of our friends and regular guests wanted to know if we were staying. The city has been so good to us being part of the restaurant evolution in Nashville, and I can’t imagine any place I’d rather be, unless it was somewhere I could play golf 12 months out of the year.
“There is still the opportunity to redefine what Nashville dining is going forward, and we’re all-in on Nashville. I’ve admired Strategic Hospitality for so long and what they’ve meant to the city’s restaurant scene, being part of the team feels like being drafted No. 1.”
