Chad Hollingsworth – Flatiron Kitchen + Taphouse Davidson

Some restaurant owners come up through the kitchen. Chad Hollingsworth came up through a Zagat guide, an American Express statement, and a lot of dinners on the road.

Chad is one of the principal owners of Flatiron Kitchen + Taphouse on Main Street in Davidson. He’s also a partner in Mandolinos, the grandma-style pizza spot right across the street. On top of that, he runs seafoods.com, a wholesale seafood company that supplies fine-dining restaurants across North America and the Caribbean.

That’s three food businesses, one of which operates across a continent. What stood out to me on The Best of LKN podcast , though, was how much Chad simply loves food. He talks about it as a way to see the world, and about a restaurant as a way to bring a town together.

With Davidson College back in session and the evenings cooling off, fall is prime season for a table on Main Street. Whether you’re a longtime regular or looking for a new spot for date night, here’s the story behind one of the lake area’s most-recommended restaurants.

A Food Education, One City at a Time

Chad grew up a Midwestern kid in a meat-and-potatoes family. He was born in Cincinnati, moved to Chicago and Toledo, then went back to Cincinnati for high school before heading to DePauw University in Indiana.

His parents weren’t adventurous eaters, but every now and then a trip changed the menu at home. After one visit to New Orleans, his mom started making jambalaya “probably every week.” His dad figured out how to make beignets after a stop at Café du Monde.

Chad’s real food education started after college, when he took a job in forensic accounting in Chicago. He and his girlfriend Mary, now his wife, used the Zagat guide to explore the city’s restaurants and rarely went to the same place twice. Their year-end American Express statement showed exactly how much they’d spent on dining out. (It surprised them. It probably shouldn’t have.)

A work project later took him to Kuwait after the first Gulf War. On half-day afternoons, he explored Kuwait City’s restaurants, including a Lebanese spot and an Indian spot that he still remembers. “It really started showing me that food was a way to explore the world,” he said.

After business school at the University of Chicago and a stint with Chiquita Brands, he says food was always his “common denominator.”

From Seafood Wholesale to Main Street

Chad and Mary moved to Charlotte for her banking job. In spring 2001, he joined a seafood wholesale startup. At first it was just Chad and one partner, and sales were “just a couple thousands of dollars a week.”

They started from nothing and weathered 9/11 in their first year. Over time, they grew seafoods.com into a supplier for high-end restaurants across the country. The company’s motto is “we make chefs great,” and Chad says everyone who works there is passionate about food.

About eight years in, he got the itch to open a restaurant of his own. The opportunity came in Davidson, where a new building had gone up on Main Street on the site of the old Stowe family gas and service station. The lot gave the building a wedge shape like New York’s famous Flatiron Building, and the name followed.

Flatiron Kitchen + Taphouse opened in 2010, at the tail end of the 2008 financial crash. That’s not the easiest time to open a restaurant, but Chad says Davidson has been “a great place to be in business” ever since.

A few years later, he and his partners opened Mandolinos across the street, serving grandma-style pizza. Chad says the town has welcomed it just as warmly.

The Bar at the Center of It All

When you walk into Flatiron, you’ll notice the bar right away. That’s by design.

It’s a hexagonal bar that seats about 28 people “if you really pack in there,” and it sits right in the middle of the room. When Flatiron opened, Davidson didn’t have many restaurants, and Chad wanted a gathering place for the whole town.

At the center of the bar is a tap tower with 24 craft beers. The goal was to pair great food with great beer. Back in 2010, Chad doesn’t think they had a single local beer on tap, because the local breweries didn’t exist yet. Today, plenty of our region’s breweries are on the lineup, which is a nice reminder of how much the Charlotte and Lake Norman beer scene has grown.

The other thing Chad cares about is service. You’ll be greeted with a smile at the door, and you’ll get the same care whether you sit at the bar or at a family table. “We hope that somebody walks out of there saying, ‘I can’t wait to come back,'” he said. For many regulars, a visit to Flatiron is a weekly habit, and sometimes more than weekly.

I can vouch for the community part. On one visit, my wife and I ran into two of my former employers having drinks at the bar while we waited for our table. Both were regulars and Davidson locals.

Chef Bill’s Unlikely Path to the Kitchen

Chad isn’t the only one at Flatiron who came to food later in life.

Chef William “Bill” Schutz is originally from New York. He wasn’t a chef at all when he sat down to dinner at David Bouley’s famous restaurant in New York City. He was so impressed that he said so to his server, who asked whether he’d like to meet the chef.

That meeting turned into a long mentorship and a job in Bouley’s kitchen. After that restaurant closed, Bill went to France to stage, which means working in a kitchen for free to learn. He worked at Michelin three-star restaurants before bringing those techniques back to the U.S. and eventually to Charlotte.

He joined Flatiron after it opened and now guides the kitchens at both Flatiron and Mandolinos. Chad calls him “a guiding and calming influence.” Chef Bill is thoughtful about every dish, he often sources ingredients locally, and he takes training his team seriously. When we recorded, one longtime menu favorite was, fittingly, the flat iron steak.

Built for the Long Haul

“One thing I’ve learned in the restaurant business is very few things are permanent,” Chad said. Most restaurants don’t last ten years, and he knows that makes Flatiron’s run unusual.

We recorded this conversation during the pandemic, when North Carolina restaurants were limited to 50 percent capacity. Flatiron switched to takeout and delivery, simplified its menu, and later reopened the dining room with extra spacing and cleaning. Chad was honest about how hard that period was for table-service restaurants everywhere. He was just as clear that he and his partners were committed to getting through it. Three of those partners are Davidson College alums.

Chad also shared the books that stay on his nightstand:

• Getting Things Done by David Allen, for keeping track of everything when you have multiple businesses
• Good to Great by Jim Collins, which argues that “good is the enemy of great”
• Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up by Verne Harnish, for turning long-term strategy into daily habits

And of course he gave a few local shout-outs:

• Kindred on Main Street, where chef Joe Kindred’s cooking has helped turn Davidson into “a dining destination”
• Wade Associates, the insurance agency across the street. Jay Wade is a Davidson alum and one of Flatiron’s earliest supporters.
• TSG Real Estate, where Flatiron partner Michael Orlando works in residential real estate. Chad calls him the restaurant’s “face in the community.”

Pull Up a Seat on Main Street

Chad likes to say Flatiron wasn’t the first restaurant with that name, “but I like to think we’re the best.” After a few dinners at that hexagonal bar, I’m inclined to agree.

What makes Flatiron and Mandolinos special is the same thing that makes Davidson special. They’re places where you run into people you know, the staff remembers you, and the food keeps you coming back. Grab a seat at the bar or bring the whole family across the street for pizza. Either way, you’re supporting people who have been betting on this town for a long time.

Location:
215 South Main Street
Davidson, NC 28036

Phone: 704-237-3246

Website: flatirononmain.com

Jeff Hamm is a North Carolina real estate broker with Ivester Jackson | Christie’s International Real Estate, serving Lake Norman, North Carolina. He specializes in luxury and waterfront property, golf and lakefront communities, condominiums, active adult and family-friendly neighborhoods, and short-term rental and investment purchases – with a particular focus on buyer representation, where his relationships with the region’s top listing brokers, builders, and designers give his clients a measurable edge.

Jeff is also the founder and host of The Best of LKN, a podcast, newsletter, and media platform that has spotlighted the Lake Norman area’s most admired small businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs since 2020. He publishes the annual Lake Norman Visitors Guide, regular market reports, and hosts The Best of Lake Norman Business Network.

Equal Housing Opportunity