"It's a restaurant with rooms attached." That's how Tony Greenberg describes SingleThread — and Ariela thinks it might be the future of hospitality. In this episode, Tony, co-founder of SingleThread and CEO of Vertice Hospitality, joins Ariela to trace his unlikely path from working under Mayor Bloomberg on the Hudson Yards development to surviving the 2008 financial crisis to co-founding SingleThread with chef Kyle Connaughton. They dig into what makes SingleThread's restaurant-inn-farm model work, how retail and hospitality are converging across every industry, and why Tony insists that integrity — not opportunity — should decide which projects a hospitality brand takes on.

Episode Time Stamps:

• 0:00 – Introduction to Tony Greenberg and SingleThread
• 0:40 – From NYU finance grad to working on Hudson Yards under Mayor Bloomberg
• 3:32 – Striking out on his own to found Up Ventures
• 4:16 – The pivot to food and hospitality, and building Food Union with top chefs
• 6:22 – Losing it all in the 2008 financial crisis, and meeting future co-founder Kyle Connaughton
• 7:11 – Building SingleThread as a side project that quickly took off
• 9:47 – What SingleThread actually is: a restaurant, inn, and farm woven into one experience
• 11:20 – Hospitality's spread into retail and other industries
• 14:22 – Opening Selvedge: extending SingleThread into a standalone inn
• 16:02 – Retail at SingleThread: starting small and staying true to the core business
• 20:37 – Why integrity, not opportunity, should decide which projects to take on
• 20:59 – Bringing SingleThread to Kyoto through a partnership with Capella Hotel Group
• 24:09 – Closing: what's next for SingleThread, including Entremet and future locations

Episode Highlights:

• Tony's origin story: working for Mayor Bloomberg's Economic Development Corp on Hudson Yards in his 20s, negotiating opposite real estate titans like Steve Roth and Douglas Durst
• Striking out on his own to found Up Ventures after discovering he was barred from working with anyone who'd bid on Hudson Yards
• Building Food Union with chefs Thomas Keller, David Chang, and Albert Adrià as anchor tenants — and watching it collapse in the 2008 financial crisis
• Meeting future SingleThread co-founder Kyle Connaughton through that experience, and starting SingleThread as a side project
• What SingleThread actually is: a restaurant, inn, and farm designed as one continuous guest experience
• Why hospitality is bleeding into retail and other industries, and his take on which brands are doing it well versus poorly
• Opening Selvedge, a 10–11 room extension of SingleThread with no restaurant of its own
• His approach to retail: starting small (farm store, CPG products, artisan collaborations) and never letting it distract from the core business
• Why he insists on integrity as a filter for every business decision — "if you can't execute at a very high level, just don't do it"
• Bringing SingleThread to Kyoto through a partnership with Capella Hotel Group, after a pre-COVID Japan project fell through
• What's next: opening SingleThread Entremet and plans to expand the concept to a few more international locations over time

Tony and Ariela close on a theme that's run through the whole conversation: growth, for Tony, only makes sense when it makes everything — the guest experience, the team, and the brand — better, not just bigger. From Hudson Yards to Food Union's collapse to building SingleThread almost by accident, his throughline is patience and integrity over opportunism. As hospitality continues to spill into retail, real estate, and beyond, his approach offers a clear filter: only take on what you can execute at the highest level, and let everything else wait.

Stay tuned for the next episode of The Unfamiliar Shift with Ariela for more insightful discussions on the boutique lifestyle lodging industry.

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