08/19/2026
We’ve posted a lot lately about the employees who have moved on from Jake’s… but today, I want to brag about two people who are still right here beside us. ❤️
Steph & Eric.
If you know these two, you know they are BUSY. (I don’t know if they even sleep) They have their own jobs, their own lives, their own things going on and somehow, whenever Jake’s needs them, they’re here.
Steph, my aunt and Tanya’s sister-in-law, has quite literally been here since day one. And I mean DAY ONE. As soon as we signed the papers, she was there painting right alongside us. She was in the original group chat when Jake’s was nothing more than a million ideas and us trying to figure out what the heck we wanted this place to become. Three years later, she’s still my go-to. She’s creative, she listens to all of my crazy ideas, helps me make the good ones even better… and, maybe most importantly, tells me when I need to cool it. She’s my voice of reason, and Jake’s wouldn’t be Jake’s without her. (She makes the prettiest pizzas!)
And then there’s Eric.
I don’t think there’s been a single time we’ve called Eric with a “Heyyyy… so we have a problem…” that he hasn’t shown up. Something breaks in the middle of the day? Eric. We don’t know how to fix it because, well… we’re a building full of women and sometimes our mechanical expertise ends at unplugging it and plugging it back in? We call Eric. And now, somehow, we’ve even talked him into becoming our newest kitchen guy. He’s back there whipping up pizzas, jumping in wherever we need him, AND possibly his most important qualification is he’s always willing to slice cheese and meats for me. (He also wears the coolest pants. IFYKYK)
BUT, what means the most to us isn’t just what they do while they’re here. It’s the long nights they’ve spent beside us. The weekends they could’ve been doing a hundred other things but instead spent helping us with catering orders. The times they’ve dropped what they were doing because we needed an extra set of hands. The problems they’ve helped us solve, the crazy ideas they’ve gone along with, and all the behind-the-scenes things nobody else ever sees, like making our new tables, sanding our pizza peels or even making us new ones.
They don’t have to do any of it. They do it because they love us, they believe in Jake’s, and they’ve been in our corner from the very beginning.
There truly aren’t two people like Steph & Eric, and saying “thank you” doesn’t even come close to covering how grateful Tanya and I are for everything they do for us and for Jake’s. ❤️
