A Sharper Look at Gables’ Aussie Restaurateur
Who Exactly is Nick Sharp?
Ten years into his career as a restaurateur, Nick Sharp dresses for work every morning by picking up whatever t-shirt and jeans combo is at the top of his drawers. He’ll usually finish by pulling on a wellworn cap and his Redback work boots, made in Australia.
Nick himself was made in Australia, which is obvious as soon as he opens his mouth — and by the details present at each of his restaurants. Bay 13 Brewery + Kitchen on Alhambra Circle is named after the rowdy section of seating at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, where Nick once dreamed of playing professional cricket. When the brewery first opened, there was a framed photo of the Hemsworth brothers — the famous Australian actors — in the women’s restroom. (It was soon stolen.)
At Threefold Café on Giralda Plaza, the Sharps’ first endeavor into the food and beverage industry, Australian flags sit in vases on every table. And, every Australia Day, the Sharps celebrate by hosting a huge beer festival called Woop Woop — Australian slang for any place far out in the bush.
Nick is likely the most well-known Aussie in the Gables, referred to occasionally as “the mayor of Giralda Plaza” by colleagues. He and his wife, Teresa, have been brewing coffee and serving up platters of avocado toast (yes, we can thank the Aussies for bringing that one to the Gables) for a decade as of this month, which marks the 10-year anniversary of Threefold.
“We were just deprived of good coffee,” explains Teresa about their first taste of the City Beautiful. “We lived for 10 years in Melbourne, which is like the coffee capital of the world. They’re so far ahead when it comes to specialty coffee. We knew what good coffee was and we knew we weren’t getting it. So, we thought, ‘How hard could it be?’”
And so Threefold Café was conceived, specializing in coffee and a chef-driven allday Australian breakfast, another commonality in Melbourne. “We opened with almost all of the capital we’d put into it gone,” Nick says. “I was still working full-time in my finance job. Teresa was the barista.” He made the tables himself out of wood from pallets and sourced bread locally from Zak the Baker in Wynwood. Then the Yelp reviews poured in, and they were soon doing a steady business.
From there, the Sharps opened additional Threefold locations and more restaurants. A second Threefold opened in South Miami in 2015 (closed in 2021 because the space was too small). Someone’s Son opened in Douglas Entrance in 2016 and enjoyed a nearly eight-year stint there. A third Threefold location opened in Brickell in 2019, which is still operating. This was followed by the ambitious, sprawling (and popular) Bay 13 in October 2021, replete with huge steel tanks for brewing beer.
Now, the Sharps are launching La Cucina di Threefold this month, next to Douglas Station just outside the Gables, featuring a new Italian menu — as well as the specialty coffee patrons have come to know and love. Along the way, there have been endeavors into groceries, coffee roasting, and burgers. With a background in finance — the career that first brought him to the U.S. and eventually Coral Gables — Nick has always known how to run a business. But the inventiveness of his culinary endeavors is a testament to his willingness to adapt and persevere.
Nick Sharp, The Man
A first impression of Nick Sharp isn’t one of overt friendliness. He seems more serious than easygoing, solemn rather than comical, more sharp (forgive me) than soft. But his wife swears he has a wicked sense of humor, which sometimes comes out in short flashes the more comfortable he gets. “That’s the thing with him,” Teresa says. “People don’t know how to take him because he’s very direct. [But] he’s a joker, for sure.”
At work, many of the employees seem slightly afraid of Nick, at least at first, says Johnny Alvarez, Threefold’s longest-running employee. He’s known the Sharps since Threefold first opened, when he met them at church.
“Nick is a really good person,” he says. “Very humble, very intelligent. He can walk into the cooler and walk out a few seconds later and tell you exactly what’s on every shelf… and [he’s] involved. He’ll go back there and get his hands dirty.”
Back when the South Miami Threefold location was still open and the grease trap needed fixing, Nick was the one who jumped in “up to his hip” in grime to pull out the blockage. Alvarez says he can count on him and his family to help wash dishes too, or to cover for a chef that’s taking off a few days for vacation.
Bay 13’s Head Brewer Greg Berbusse, meanwhile, takes a more lighthearted view of his employer.
“[Nick] hates it when I say he’s a robot. But it’s not uncommon to get either really early or really late emails from him, depending on what side of midnight you’re on. So, I joke that robots don’t need to sleep. They just have to plug in.”
Berbusse admits he was a bit intimidated by Nick upon their first meeting, but now, four years later, they’re fast friends who attend Metallica concerts together and joke about Nick’s apparent love for Radiohead. “He probably needs that [to calm down],” says Berbusse.
One of the things long-standing employees appreciate about Nick is his willingness to give opportunities to those who work hard. Berbusse, who moved from Arkansas to take the job at Bay 13, says, “He had no idea who I was when they first hired me. But I guess Nick saw something in me that was worth taking the risk, so he gave me the opportunity. He doesn’t micromanage. He gives you enough freedom to make decisions that need to be made.”
RELATED Brewer’s Brouhaha: The Battle of Local Breweries
For his part, Nick says he doesn’t know why he comes across as so daunting, while acknowledging that he has “a very low tolerance for avoidable mistakes.” He admits that he’s not the most empathetic person in the world, though able to recognize his shortcomings.
“I don’t communicate as well as I should,” he says. “I presume that everybody thinks about everything the same way I do.” One of his biggest revelations in the move from Australia was the realization that many Americans — and especially Miamians — don’t have the same work culture or work ethic that Aussies do, a cultural difference that often frustrates him.
“It’s not rocket science,” he says bluntly of his staff ’s responsibilities. “You’ve read the menu, so memorize it. That’s it; that’s all you need to do.” He also doesn’t understand the step-by-step graphics displayed in his kitchens that show cooks how to construct a hamburger. “I always thought that was such a waste of time,” he says exasperatedly. “Let me just show you how to do it and then you know how to do it. But people don’t,” he says, baffled. “That’s definitely a challenge.”
At work, Teresa is Nick’s opposite: the front-of-house manager with a warm smile, a quick wit, and a degree in marketing. Nick is the back-room machinery, the engineer of the cogs and gears behind the curtain. And it’s always been that way, Teresa says. The couple have been together some 20 years now, since they first met and began dating as high schoolers in a small town in rural Australia. Nick was the jock, a good-looking kid with dreams of playing professional cricket. They married young and soon had two daughters, Allegra, now a freshman at FIU, and Chloe, still in high school.
“He’s always been very driven, very dedicated,” says Teresa. Even back when they first met, she says, “he was always organized with his time” and sharp (again, apologies). “He gets from A to B very quickly, [whereas] I sort of zig-zag from A to B. But he can make that leap and those connections. He’s one of those people that just read a text and understand it, [including] all the subtext, instantly.”
Pandemic Pivot
Sharp is also highly inventive and opportunistic. During the pandemic, it was his idea to start selling groceries from Threefold, rather than just take-out. “You can imagine the amount of food that’s in the supply chain going to South Florida for cruise ships, hotels, restaurants…just a tidal wave of food,” Nick says. “And within like 48 hours, 100 percent of that stuff had shut down. Most restaurants packed up and quit.”
At grocery stores, people were panic-buying toilet paper and other goods, while the food service industry actually had a surplus. “[It] was overflowing with stuff they didn’t know what to do with or how to get rid of,” says Nick. “So, that was the start of our grocery endeavor.”
With a bare bones staff, the Sharps set to work packing up boxes of produce, dry goods, and other grocery items for sale at Threefold and for delivery. They used a connection with a friend in the flower industry to store items at a refrigerated warehouseand moved “10 or 12 tractor trailer loads of produce” to the 40,000-foot cooler.
“We were taking truckloads of this stuff,” Nick says. “In the space of a couple of weeks, we went from a little grocery store at Threefold to doing 150 deliveries a day across Miami-Dade County. And all of that just got pulled together on the fly.” Sharp also gave back, working with the Coral Gables Community Foundation to supply hot meals for people unemployed during the pandemic.
“We partnered with Nick to feed out-of-work individuals two hot meals a day for eight weeks,” says Foundation President and CEO Mary Snow. “His staff worked in the kitchen making the meals and helped dish them out at Douglas Entrance, at their Someone Son’s location… He had the vision to do those meals, and he made his restaurant a grocery store during COVID, selling everything from toilet paper to soup, spaghetti sauce, and eggs – all types of things. He pivoted and kept everyone employed.”
Gaby Bustamante, who’s been a regular at Threefold since it first opened, was a regular of the makeshift grocery store as well. “The more difficult things got, the harder it was to see when and how it would get any better, the more Nick and Teresa rose up to meet the challenges,” she says. “It never got to be ‘too difficult’ or ‘too much’ for them to keep carrying on, doing what they believed was the right thing for them to make a positive difference…. I found that whole experience to be very revealing of [an] admirable character, including uncommon selflessness.”
Indeed, with such a surplus of available food, Nick started calling churches and food banks to set up food drives. And the Sharps’ suppliers got a hand too, as Nick became possibly the only man in South Florida in need of pallets’ worth of eggs and produce.
“Our egg farmer that we’ve worked with for years, all of his business pretty much dried up. So, we started taking pallets of eggs. Then, he introduced us to his neighbor, who was a blueberry farmer. Same deal. So, that kept everybody employed until PPP came in. And that’s sort of how we got through COVID.”
Nick’s tone implies a shrug, almost nonchalant, as if he wasn’t responsible for saving these people’s livelihoods. Maybe he simply doesn’t realize it. That spirit of grocery and gratitude survives to this day in seasonal promotions at Threefold and Bay 13. Every year during mango season, for instance, Bay 13 offers free beer in exchange for mangoes, which are used to make everything from more beer to desserts to cocktails at all the Sharps’ restaurants.
Today, there is a seemingly ceaseless list of events across those restaurants, from beer-paired dinners to Inter Miami watch parties to evening artisan markets. There’s weekly live music at Bay 13 and private events nearly every day, from baptisms and weddings to networking events and private parties. The ideas come pouring out and the bookings come pouring in; for a while, they even tried running a comedy club at Bay 13, but were put off when many of the comics were “a little too blue.”
Behind the scenes of all this is Nick Sharp, building tables and fixing grease traps, engineering the moving parts in a machine now a decade in the making.
“He wasn’t known as the Mayor of Giralda for nothing,” says Venny Torre, who chaired the downtown Business Improvement District when Sharp launched Threefold on that iconic restaurant row. “He is a soft-spoken sort of guy, but really determined when it comes to solving problems and helping out the other merchants. He’s a very strong voice for the downtown business community. We’re lucky he landed here from Australia.”