Daniel Martin Hintz

Concierge of experience

SELF PORTRAIT Date and place of birth: Aug.

7, 1972, Milwaukee Occupation: Director of Downtown Bentonville, Inc.

Family: Wife Kassie Misiewicz, son Rowan, daughter Mavee The best advice I ever received was: give Northwest Arkansas a try.

The last book I read: nonÿ ction, Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; ÿ ction, Factotum by Charles Bukowski My best tip is: celebrate good food and teach your children how to cook.

My second best tip is: support your local farmers market (and art, music, etc.

scene).

Something you may be surprised to learn about me: I can actually sit still, on occasion.

I’d like to know more about: everything.

If I had an extra hour in the day: I’d spend it with my family.

My favorite smell is: opportunity.

I never: match my socks.

A word that sums me up: explorerBENTONVILLE - Daniel Hintz believes in serious play.

As a teenager, he got exactly one minute of air time at his high school for his first film, which had a heavy-metal soundtrack, before the administrators pulled the plug on it. Years later, Hintz has found a way to make a living out of serious play by using his love for travel, food, language and community to revitalize downtown areas in Northwest Arkansas.

Food is a cornerstone of Hintz’s life. Barely a step into his office, visitors encounter large volumes of Notes From a Kitchen. He cooks for his family and volunteers for the Northwest Arkansas Community College culinary program. His work for Downtown Bentonville, Inc., resulted in an enriched culinary experience in the region, through local restaurateurs and a thriving farmers market.

His sixth sense for picking chefs who could build a regional reputation can be seen in the recent recognition of local chefs by the James Beard Foundation. Case Dighero of Crystal Bridges’ restaurant Eleven, Matt McClure of 21C Museum Hotel’s The Hive restaurant and Rob Nelson of Tusk & Trotter were recently chosen to cook for the James Beard House in New York, an honor that Hintz says is on par with a musician performing in Carnegie Hall.

“To think that six years ago, we didn’t really have any restaurants - we [only] had a couple, like the Station Cafe, which has been the indelible food experience,” Hintz says. “But one restaurant a culinary scene does not make.”

So how does a city go from having a couple of restaurants to having a thriving culinary scene with nationally acclaimed chefs?

“You can’t import a new culinary scene,” Hintz says. “You have to grow it from within.”

Hintz says Downtown Bentonville, Inc. worked to recruit restaurants committed to locally sourcing their food.

“So for those [new] restaurants, locally sourcing is a part of who and what they are, it’s in their DNA. That’s how you create that local food scene, it becomes that food ecosystem,” he says.

Creating a vibrant culinary scene also takes a good leader and Hintz is exactly that guy, says Mike Harveyof the Northwest Arkansas Council.

“He knows what makes Northwest Arkansas tick,” Harvey says. “He gets that better than anyone I’ve ever met in my life … and can articulate it very well. He’s good at rallying people in terms of getting a vision for a place, articulating it and telling them where it can go. He’s done a fantastic job.”

Others say that his eclectic interests and heart for start-ups are what makeHintz such a compelling person to work with.

“He’s like an entrepreneur,” says Tim Robinson, owner of Phat Tire Bike Shops and a member of the Downtown Bentonville, Inc. board of directors. “In his role, he has to wear many different hats. He has to be a politician, has to deal with grants, invest in organizations and nonprofits, has to be a leader, he owns the budget, and has to be good out with the public.”

What makes the whole system work, Hintz says, is the coordination with local farmers and other produce growers, and piquing public interest in quality food which hopefully leads to a cultural shift in the way they consume it.

Downtown Bentonville, Inc. is trying to “activate[customers’] desire to start cooking for themselves,” Hintz says. “And bring that fresh produce home and enjoy the social benefit … the need to sit down and eat together.”

Downtown Bentonville, Inc., where Hintz has been the director for nearly six years, took over the Bentonville Farmers Market in 2008, a year that brought $90,000 in sales. In five short years, sales have increased sixfold, with last year’s sales rocketing to $540,000.

This ability to change the culinary landscape of Northwest Arkansas is a part of Hintz’ community building strategy - where shared, seated meals create a community, no matter how brief.

“In the concept of building communities, [you have] a momentary community that shares passions … like a group watching one singular thing, like food where you have people sitting around sharing something you’ve created,” he says. “From a community standpoint, I don’t necessarily see downtown work from a process standpoint being any different [from] working with a group of chefs in a kitchen to create a plate in which people can experience and nourish themselves.”

For Hintz, preparing food and the experience of eating together are directly related to perception, art, psychology and sociology. It’s also the way that he learned more about himself.

While a student at the University of Colorado, he worked for chef David Query, known for Zolo Grill.

“He’s perhaps one of the best bosses I’ve ever had,” Hintz says. “His way of cultivating talent [was] what promoted what is so good in me. He took it and cultivated that.”

Working for Query let Hintz see people transform within the food experience. When he returned home to Milwaukee he spent a great deal of time honing his culinary skills, which left him open to pursue his first community-building experience.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

Community was a pillar of Hintz’ childhood. Growing up in Milwaukee, “we were raised by a neighborhood,” he says. “Anybody could throw a shoe at me and be like ‘You need to behave, man.’”

His parents, both writers, had started a couple of charter schools for the arts. Their dinner tables were populated by priests, nuns, poets and musicians.

“Our dinner tables were very loud. I had a lot of ‘aunties and uncles’ growing up,” he says. “I just remember listening to debates on all kinds of things - artists or writers, politics. Debate is an important part of my family experience.”

These conversations challenged his way of thinking,inspiring Hintz to do things differently and to pick up Chaucer and Shakespeare as early as middle school.

By high school, he perpetuated the sense of community by bringing his ownartists around, friends from the charter schools who made horribly dubbed karate movies with him in the backyard.

The combination of experiences made a special place in his heart for community, an extended family. Now a father of two, he relies on a “village of people” while he’s putting on any one of the 120 events associated with Downtown Bentonville, Inc. in a single year.

“The circle of people that know you and allow you to be you without judgments, that’s so vitally important,” he says. “[To] have that tribe of people you can show up with one sock on, mismatched clothes, hair askew and you haven’t brushed your teeth … and they don’t care.”

The members of this “tribe” take his children to events where he’s working, bright spots in an otherwise exhausting day, when he and his team will spend upwardof 17 hours to see the event to completion.

Before making his way to Northwest Arkansas, Hintz did some traveling. Milwaukee was home for many years, but his academic journey took him to the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn.; the University of Wisconsin back in Milwaukee; and eventually to the University of Colorado in Boulder. Subsequent years found him in Russia and Venezuela, during tumultuous times for both countries.

On a road trip on the West Coast, Hintz had a chance encounter that landed him a year’s worth of experience in AmeriCorps out of Washington, an opportunity that showed him how to combine his many varied interests.

“I was transforming thecommunity,” he says. “We did a public park, community design, the whole thing. It gave me a sense of purpose, serving the community, working with kids.”

Just as important was the base of contacts and friends he made there. Not long after the experience, he had an offer to work as a director of youth development at a YMCA in Seattle, which he accepted. He took his then-girlfriend Kassie with him.

There, Hintz says, he “learned an awful lot about people and working in a downtown area.” These moments would shape his worldview, his skills and his career as a concierge of experience.HOME IN THE OZARKS

Eventually, the economic recession and the bursting of the tech bubble hit close to home, just as Hintz and his wife were thinking of beginning their family. So with a little nudge from his mother, who had moved to Arkansas, the Natural State was placed on the drawing board of options.

Skeptical at f irst, the young couple took a chance, and soon the area’s potential for a growing arts culture was apparent. They combined their mutual love for children and theater to create TheatreSquared, a local yearround professional theater, which is now an award-winning institution in its eighth season.

Soon after getting TheatreSquared off the ground, Hintz landed another director’s role, where he was in his element leading the renovation of Fayetteville’s entertainment district through Fayetteville Downtown Partners.During this time the Hintzes helped create Arkansas’ first municipal arts district, lobbied for state legislation for its continued improvement and aided in creating the Arts Council.

This caught the eye of Ed Clifford, former president and chief executive officer of the Bentonville-Bella Vista Chamber of Commerce.

“While he was running Dickson Street partnership, I told [former Mayor] Dan Coody how lucky Fayetteville was to have him,” Clifford says. “I suggested that Daniel could split his time between Bentonville and Fayetteville.”

It only took one lunch meeting for him to know it was a “for-sure thing,” and he hired Hintz soon after.

“He’s really, really talented at creating an economically developed environment downtown,” Clifford says. “And that’s exactly what we needed: Someone to coordinate development with the chamber of commerce.”

It didn’t take long for Hintz to see Northwest Arkansas as not just a place to bring to life the projects he and Kassie had always imagined, but an ideal environment for him, one with an entrepreneurial climate.

“You have to be always on the hustle to make ends meet,” he says. “You still have to make a living somehow. I think that’s one of the reasons it resonated with Northwest Arkansas. It just made senseto me, the culture here.”

He likes to point out that Bentonville has a history of rebuilding in the face of disasters, such as after the Civil War and the economic loss from an apple blight in a time when apple orchards thrivedhere.

“I feel very lucky to be doing what I’m doing in Northwest Arkansas as a whole,” Hintz says. “It’s not just about one place, about downtown Bentonville … . There’s a dynamism that stretches from Bella Vista to Fayetteville - the entrepreneurial spirit, the risk-taking, the pragmatism at the same time, the deep experience and knowledge of folks who have been through it, as well as that fascinating energy of the folks coming out of the University of Arkansas.”

It’s all part of the role that geography plays in culture and the human psyche, he says. It’s the way that circumstances and history develop a shared behavior in a regional group of people, and he seems to eat it up.

In fact, that’s exactly what Downtown Bentonville is playing off of. They’re using what Hintz calls “the DNA of place” and a full schedule of events to create “moments that allow the folks to learn about the place that they’re in … places for people to sit and be, not just to entertain themselves, to create and pursue those moments,” he says.ALL IN THE FAMILY

Hintz might be creating a change of atmosphere and building a more tightly communal spirit in Northwest Arkansas, but the responsibility of it pales in comparison to his duties at home. He describes it as a beautifully exhausting task of “learning to guide and nurture free will” for his two children, 6-yearold son Rowan and 8-year-old daughter Mavee.

Daniel met his wife, Kassie Misiewicz, while he was teaching at the First StageChildren’s Theater in Milwaukee, where she was the associate artistic director. A love for theater and similar upbringings that prioritized hospitality and family initially drew them together.

The couple began as friends, and their relationship grew over time. When Hintz’ opportunity arose in Seattle, he asked her to join him, and she said yes, but it was only the first of two yeses that he’d wait anxiously to hear.

“I married up,” he says. “I definitely married up, which is all a man can hope for.”

Hintz, an avid reader, says one Spanish poet helped him win her over.

“I love Pablo Neruda, he’s one of the reasons why I’m married, so I thank Pablo Neruda for helping me get her to say yes.”

Misiewicz agrees that the poetry helped, but says that the true lure was his cooking. On their first date, Hintz made her a meal, and they’ve never parted since.

“What struck me right away about Dan was his sense of humor, his ease with people,” Misiewicz says. “We shared so much of the same values of community, humor, play and kids.”

Their life together has been one of building each other’s confidence and supporting each other professionally, extending to some shared endeavors such as TheatreSquared.

“I love that he saw more in me than I saw in myself,” Misiewicz says. “He has helped me see that over the last 14 years, always pushed me to dream bigger and take more risks and continue to grow. He’s paved the way for both of us to do the things we’ve been wanting to do.

“He’s a phenomenal community builder, whether in our family, our extended family, neighborhood or city.”

Since having two children, Hintz says he is a different person who’s going through one of the most “humbling, frightening, amazing things ever.”

“If you’re going to be a dad, not just a biological father, you are changed,” he says. “I don’t know how you can’t be. I held my daughter for the first time and it scared the crap out of me: Am I going to break her? Am I going to drop her? ‘You’re wigglingaround! Stop moving!’”

Family life with Hintz, Misiewicz says, is always an adventure. One where she is the coordinator and he is the comedian.

“When he comes home, I always think, ‘Oh, thank goodness, he’s here,’” she says. “The [children’s] joy just comes alive when he’s in the room.”

Now that the kids are a little older, his responsibility to feed them is a unique one, since they have invariably picked up a foodie passion similar to his own.

“My daughter is a very experimental eater,” he says. “She loves beef tongue. And my son loves good food, but it can’t touch [on the plate]. He’ll eat it, but it has to be presented in a certain way.

“So I run a kitchen.”

That might be true, but it’s one where everyone’s invited

Northwest Profile, Pages 37 on 09/15/2013

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