The newest tenant to sign a lease at the Foundry building Downtown combines golf and gastronomy in an urban oasis for golfers and partygoers alike.
Picture a bar surrounded by golf simulators and big-screen TVs with your favorite bar food and drinks on tap.
New York-based Five Iron Golf plans to bring that concept later this year to the 13,000-square-foot space it’s leasing inside the Foundry building.
“The goal of Five Iron is to be the best place for serious golfers as well as entertainment customers,’’ Jared Solomon, co-founder and CEO, said. “You can come here to train to be on the PGA Tour or on a Tinder date.”
For golfers, Five Iron offers professional club fittings, lessons from PGA-certified teaching professionals, and access to the latest indoor practice facilities, including golf simulators with Trackman radar systems that read club and ball data.
The new Downtown location will feature 13 custom-built golf simulators with multiple high-speed cameras to capture every angle of the golf swing.
You don’t even need your own clubs to practice or play a virtual round of golf on the simulators.
“Don’t have clubs, don’t worry,” Solomon said, noting each Five Iron location has 30-60 sets of complimentary, top brand golf clubs on hand for customers to use. “You can come in and practice with a $2,000 set of golf clubs, and it’s all free.’’
In addition, Five Iron, which has a dozen locations in eight cities nationwide, offers complimentary storage for your clubs if you do bring your own equipment.
Of course, not everything is free.
Visitors to the Cincinnati location can expect to pay between $40 and $60 per hour to use Five Iron’s simulators, depending on the day and time.
Frequent visitors can buy a membership for $250 a month, which includes unlimited simulator rentals during off-peak times and discounts during peak hours, as well as lessons, club fittings, food at the bar, and merchandise.
Five Iron will also offer league play, private lessons, and clinics for various prices.
For nongolfers, Five Iron offers pool, ping pong, shuffleboard, and other leisure games as well as a full-service restaurant serving what Solomon described as “high-end American cuisine.”
Five Iron also serves food and drinks.
“Our customers say our food is laughably good for a golf place,’’ Solomon said, adding that most of the food is made from scratch by Five Iron’s in-house chefs.
Menu items include Korean short-rib quesadillas, mushroom and pesto flatbread, shrimp tacos, and guacamole and chips.
The focus on food is reflected in the business name, which some may assume refers to one of the long irons in a set of golf clubs.
In fact, the company name refers to Fifth Avenue in New York’s famous Flatiron District, where Five Iron opened its first location.
Five Iron will join previously announced street-level retail tenants at the Foundry, including Royce – a French-leaning brasserie – and Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse, which is moving from its current location.
Upper floor tenants at the Foundry include Deloitte, Turner Construction, and Divisions Maintenance Group.
“We’ve been actively seeking out new and creative entertainment options to fill our downtown commercial spaces, and we think Five Iron Golf is the perfect concept for The Foundry,” said Lindzie Gunnels, senior commercial leasing officer for Cincinnati Center City Development Corp., which developed the Foundry.