Nate Berg’s career trajectory is not exactly typical for a 25-year-old former hockey player from Armstrong High School. From a very young age, he had a passion for cooking and an entrepreneurial spirit that eventually drove him all the way to New York to attend The Culinary Institute of America. For a class project, he was tasked with creating a plan for a restaurant business. He chose a barbecue theme and used the blueprint to form a competition team called City Slickers BBQ, which eventually turned into a catering company and finally a line of sauces and seasonings now available in all Lunds & Byerly’s stores.
“I started enjoying cooking when I was about 4 or 5 years old,” Berg says. “My uncle was a chef, and he kind of got me into it. I’ve always been a fan of barbecue, so I decided to just run with it.”
Berg participated in his first big barbecue competition in 2010, at the unseasoned age of 20—the youngest participant at the event by about two decades. His team’s third place win stoked a fire in Berg that continues to grow with each success.
“I was pretty much hooked from the first competition, almost like an addiction,” he says. “I fell in love with it. The competitions turned into people asking me to cater, and the catering turned into people asking me to bottle my sauce, and that turned into all the retail sales. It’s like a hobby that turned into a career, I guess.”
Creative Catering
Though based in Plymouth, Berg rents a kitchen in Minneapolis for a small but growing catering business that takes him across the Twin Cities. What kinds of groups feature finger-licking food at their events?
“I do a lot of corporate lunches and grad parties, but I’ve also done weddings, hockey banquets, even a funeral,” Berg says.
The budding entrepreneur thinks the Twin Cities is a great market for a barbecue business. “Pretty much everyone loves barbecue, and the interest keeps growing,” he says. “It’s not a saturated market at all, not like down south where there’s a barbecue restaurant on every corner.”
In addition to his passion for cooking, Berg’s business sense seemed to have taken shape early. The name City Slickers evolved from a childhood dream of opening a restaurant.
“When I was little, I would come up with names for restaurants,” he says. “For the longest time I wanted to open a restaurant called Cityside Bar & Grill. Cityside turned into City Slickers.”
The name also reflects Berg’s determination to change the preconception that authentic barbecue doesn’t come from urban areas. “When people think of barbecue, they think of the South or out in the country,” he says. “We’re trying to change the idea that people from the city can’t do barbecue. We’re trying to prove them wrong.”
Earning his Stripes
Berg certainly proved people wrong in his short career, especially when it comes to age. Now 25, he is still by far the youngest competitor.
“It’s definitely an older man’s sport,” he says, referring to the fact that it is also a male-dominated activity. “A lot of the people are retired. I used to be considered the baby, but I’ve kind of earned some respect. They don’t look down on me; they see I’m serious.”
Berg’s childhood friend, Eric Gunderson, was part of the original competition team and remembers vividly that first event in Mason City, Iowa, where it all started.
“We didn’t know it at the time, but that particular competition had some very fierce and veteran competitors,” Gunderson says. “Our equipment didn’t help us much, either. After we set up our Charbroil grill with an optional smoker attachment and a graduation tent we borrowed from my parents, we toured the grounds. Teams near us had these enormous and highly advanced smokers we had only seen on the Internet. It seemed like we didn’t have a chance.”
The team’s disadvantage only grew when a bout of torrential rains and winds took all the heat from their humble smoker. But Gunderson proudly recalls how they pulled an underdog victory in one of the toughest categories. Berg has never looked back.
Gunderson has since moved on from the team and taken a full-time job, but he continues to support and admire his friend. “There are plenty of times when he makes the hard decision to turn his attention to the business rather than go on vacation or take personal time,” Gunderson says. “He’s a very determined individual, and until he achieves his ultimate goal, he will not relent.”
On Berg’s current competition team—which includes Berg, his brother, Josh, and friend Parker Berg (no relation)—Berg is the pit master and does most of the cooking. He considers his brother his right hand man, who helps get the smokers out and does a lot of the heavy lifting. The trio recently tried their hand at bigger competitions, such as The American Royal World Series of Barbecue in Kansas City, where in 2013, City Slickers took first place in the open division’s beans category, beating out more than 500 other teams. In 2014, they took 19th place in the chicken category in the same event.
His secret? “For the beans, I use more traditional cooking techniques, such as caramelizing the onions, adding fresh thyme, crisping the bacon, using only high-quality bacon.” His award-winning chicken thighs are cooked in a smoker, using apple and cherry woods along with charcoal.
Spicing it Up
After Berg launched his catering business a few years ago, he was getting requests to bottle his special sauce and seasonings. Though he faced the same challenges anyone does when trying to bring a new product to market, he somehow makes the whole process sound easy. After winning over a rep for Lunds & Byerly’s, his full line of sauces and seasonings is now available in all of the chain’s stores. “I only had to present to two people,” he says. “I told them how I got started; they liked the product, and that was it. I was only there for 15 minutes.”
Berg credits his parents with supporting his dreams from the get-go.
“Doing the competitions, I would experiment a lot,” he says. “They encouraged me, told me I needed to bottle the sauce and the seasonings. So far there have been no banks, no investors. I owe my dad a lot of money.”
Berg has more plans up his sleeve, but he won’t give specifics so as not to jinx anything. Who knows, maybe the public will have the opportunity to taste Berg’s smoked sensations smothered in City Slickers sauces and seasonings.
Gunderson is confident his friend’s dreams will come true: “I think he can put Minneapolis in the spotlight when it comes to barbecue, [especially] now that he’s getting noticed in some of the United States’ barbecue meccas.”
Catering info:
City Slickers BBQ
Upcoming Events
Nate Berg’s City Slickers team will be participating in the following regional events this summer.
July 31–August 1:
The Great Northern BBQ (Brainerd, Minn.)
August 7–8:
Med City BBQ (Rochester, Minn.)
August 21–22:
SMSU Smoke Fest (Marshall, Minn.)
