As Downtown Bentonville Inc. celebrates its 20th anniversary, some local business leaders talk about Bentonville’s rapid growth.
The Walton brothers called the downtown environment in local cities “the beating heart of Northwest Arkansas.”
Inside the downtown Bentonville event venue Record on Wednesday night (May 11), famed singer/songwriter and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams perhaps summed it best.“This is a very powerful room,” Williams said. “There’s a lot of energy in here tonight.”Williams made the comments before a high-level crowd of approximately 300 policymakers, investors, business and thought leaders and entrepreneurs from across the country who are in Bentonville this week for the Heartland Summit.
Certain cities always lead the conversation when discussing the best restaurant markets in America. New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago are mainstays, and Portland, Ore., Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New Orleans and Houston are also ubiquitous. But in recent years, smaller cities have begun to open and operate some of the most exciting concepts in the country, so it has become increasingly difficult to ignore places like Greenville, S.C. and Birmingham, Ala. With three recent James Beard nominations, we can add Bentonville, Ark. to the list.
Rather than describing us as “the next Austin,” the Walton brothers painted a picture of a place that’s to middle America what Colorado is to the American West–a less crowded state that offers abundant outdoor recreational opportunities, an emphasis on the arts and fine, reasonably priced cuisine. Such a lifestyle not only attracts visitors, it also attracts smart, talented new residents.
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