Today we’d like to introduce you to Benjy Mason
Hi Benjy, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I ended up an owning a bar in a fairly roundabout way. After college I moved to Houston to start a non-profit with friends. We started an organization called Workshop Houston that provided afterschool arts programs to kids in Third Ward including music production, fashion design, and metal working. I spent my first decade in Houston building that organization, acquiring a permanent home, renovating the campus and learning about running non-profits. Eventually, I felt like it was time for me to do something new and I started thinking about graduate school. I downloaded all the applications and was staring at them and trying to figure out how to avoid doing them.
I loved cooking and had worked in kitchens in college and I decided to see if any restaurants would let me stage on weekends while I was still doing full time non-profit work. I ended up at a rustic European restaurant in Montrose called Feast that specialized in nose to tail cooking. It was a wild place and they immediately started giving me butchering projects, something I knew nothing about. My second weekend I had to take the skin of a dozen pigs heads! I fell in love with working there and knew I would never fill out my grad school applications. After a month of unpaid staging, the sous chef quit and they asked me if I wanted a full time job. I worked there for about a year, before they ran into financial troubles and gently encouraged me to start looking for another job.
I was looking for a job at a restaurant that I could really get excited about, when my boss told me he had found the perfect job, a brand new neighborhood farm to table restaurant in the Heights called Down House that had just lost their opening chef. I was wildly under qualified for a head chef job, but I was ambitious and they were pretty desperate. I started there in the summer of 2011 and it was crazy! We were so busy all the time and the kitchen had no systems. My first day there I watched line cooks trying to make mayonnaise to put on sandwiches to order while the whole line backed up. I spent the next two years in the kitchen there, figuring out how to deal with the rapidly increasing business, building relationships with local farmers and ranchers, and learning about kitchen management on the fly.
After two years the owners started to expand into other projects and I stepped out of the day to day kitchen stuff into a more managerial operations role. Over the next 4 years I was part of opening 3 more restaurants, 3 more bars, a seafood distribution company, and a local food magazine called Sugar and Rice. It was a wild time, but then the parent company ran into some pretty serious financial issues and it all kind of fell apart. The group was picked apart, sold off, pushed into bankruptcy and eventually there were only two of the7 businesses left. I realized it was time to part ways and ended up reforming Johnny’s Gold Brick as a new company in 2018 and have been running it since then.
Over the years, I realized that what I really cared about, and what I had always really cared about, was building community spaces, third places as it were, for people to come together in real life. That has been a common thread through all the work I’ve done and is what continues to drive me.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Hahah, it has never been a smooth road. Eventually I had to learn that you aren’t in control of anything other than your own reactions. After the restaurant group I was with closed and I stepped out on my own, I felt like I was starting over from scratch and it was a very depressing feeling. Things at Johnny’s Gold Brick were going really well, and I was pouring myself into it when March 2020 arrived and COVID landed on the hospitality industry like a ton of bricks. Everyone was panicking and I realized I felt oddly calm. I already knew what it felt like to have everything fall apart, I already knew what worst case scenario looked like, and at least this time I wasn’t in it alone. That was a real turning point for me as a business owner. I realized that all I could do was do the best with the information I had, take care of the people who worked for me, and roll with the punches.
Since then I have opened another bar with a good friend, Winnie’s in mid town, and there have been the normal amount of ups and down in business, but I try not to let them get to me and to take things as they come.
As you know, we’re big fans of Johnny’s Gold Brick/Winnie’s. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Johnny’s is a neighborhood bar that just happens to make great cocktails. When we opened Johnny’s 10 years ago there were two kinds of bars that I liked: craft cocktail bars like Anvil or Julep and classic neighborhood bars like Poison Girl or West Alabama Ice House. At the time, you were either one or the other, no one was trying to do both. I took a trip to New Orleans and visited a place called Bar Tonique where they were making amazing craft cocktails in a low key neighborhood bar and fell in love. Johnny’s opened in the Heights with a vision of being a place that you could come in and get a great craft cocktail or just have a cold beer and a shot. We have evolved significantly since then, but that is still the core of our business.
Over the years Johnny’s has received a number of accolades, winning Bar Fight Club, being nominated for several Tales of the Cocktail Awards, and being represented on a variety of “Best of Houston” lists, but what really stands out to me is all the friends and regular we’ve made along the way. Last night we hosted a pre and post party for long time regulars wedding and celebrated the anniversary of another couple who got married in the bar during COVID when their venue shut down.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.johnnysgoldbrick.com and www.winnieshouston.com
- Instagram: @johnnysgb, @winnieshouston
Image Credits
Philip Ethridge, Emily Jaschke, Benjamin Mason
