Jillian's is FUN! Community Blog

Greeting your guests for the holidays…

ecsanfrancisco — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 03:24:00 +0000

It’s always this time of year when we all get so busy and the month of December seems to fly by. It’s also times like this when our clients come to Jillian’s to have fun and relax. SF makes it a point to personally greet our hosts and thank them for hosting their parties with us… Make it a point to shake as many hands as possible this season - guests remember good hospitality!!

Disney Star Kyle Massey’s 18th Birthday Bash at Jillians’ Universal

ecuniversal2 — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:14:33 +0000

Kyle Massey star of That’s so Raven and Cory in The House celebrated his 18th birthday at Jillians Universal Citywalk. Fellow Disney stars Raven Symone (That’s So Raven), Dylan and Cole Sprouse (Suite Life of Zack and Cody), Mitchel Musso (Hannah Montana), David Henrie and Jake T. Austin (Wizards of Waverly Place) walked the red carpet and talked to reporters from Bop, Tiger Beat, and Teen TV. Once upstair’s Kevin Dees conducted on camera interviews with the stars. Guests enjoyed bowling and Guitar Hero while DJ Marz kept the dance floor going all night!

Making it our own with long lines for Jake’s Burger

pasadena — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 07:52:20 +0000

I am not too sure if many of you have heard of Pink’s Hot Dog in Los Angeles but, it is one of the most well known small town eateries in the United States known for their hot dogs. They are known for their long lines late at night for hot dogs. Well, Pink’s has finally made their match in Pasadena. Their competitor is Jake’s! Wow, this past Saturday night was a special night. The Rose Bowl hosted a friendly soccer match between LA Galaxy and Barcelona FC. Their was an estimate of 90,000 people to attend the game. So, we were very prepared for this day planning ahead. Great planning came with great success, total sales for the day were well over $9k and for the figure that were all proud of total food sales were over $5K. Well sold over 650 build your own burgers for the day. That is a lot of beef! I have to thank all the great staff and management team members for doing a great job! I would have to say the greatest thing to see was a huge line outside our doors for people about 40 deep waiting to eat our burgers. I over heard a couple say, “Wow its busy in here! I can understand the wait with so many people and, I have to say it was worth the wait. I have never had a burger like this. I would wait for 3 hours just to wait for the single taste of a Jake’s Burger.”

Jaime

Measuring your P-Mix

pasadena — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 01:37:28 +0000

Working on a side project for Jake on how the new menu is working for us, I have been using our P-Mix to find out and this what I have found out for using our new menu for a year….

In one year, we have used 13,388 lbs. of ground beef we sold in burgers that is an equivalent of 2 school buses.

In one year, we have created 196 gallons of chili that is 20 full tanks of gas for an average car.

For the amount of burgers sold, we have sold 52,170 that is 26,085 feet of burgers if you were to line the burgers up side by side, which is almost the size of 3 golden gate bridges, 72 Rose Bowl Football fields and is the distance of 4.94 miles.

Jaime

Lights, Drapes, Launch!

ecpasadena — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:54:58 +0000

NueroBrands, a trendy up and coming beverage company, hosted their Haralambos Launch Party at Jake’s. Lindsay Lohan is a huge advocate of NeuroBliss, & Lada Gaga is showcasing NueroSonic in her most recent video, are a few celebrities backing this brand, adding to the pressure of making everything perfect. All involved were surprised at the transformation of the VIP Room when the set-up was done. Even our visitor Tony Humphreys was shocked with the white linen walls, coordinated lighting, and creative touches throughout the room including product bottles for condiments, cupcakes molded in the shapes of the bottles, empty bottles for cocktail table vases, and food sign holders made out of the bottle lids. The team really pulled together on this one everyone adding their own little touch and putting in hard work and long hours, without this the end result would not have been so impressive.

Jake’s making a monster opportunity out of a hand sized monster!!!!

pasadena — Mon, 04 May 2009 03:54:59 +0000

You probably have seen those crazy eating competitions on the food network and tv, from huge pie eating contest or to eating hot dogs till you explode. At Jake’s, we try to bring that same kind of commroidtry and competition with the flare of our burgers. Speaking with Jake last “Wow, its great to see how much attention we get with our Monster Burger displayed on our window I have been only standing here watching for no more than 2 minutes and 25 guests walking by had to stop and simply look at the burger. There were many people who even stood, posed, and took pictures with the massive burger.” said Jake. Jake and I agreed using the monster burger display we generate an extra $200 in food sales because it looks so good! So, the following day Ray and I were discussing club ideas and our two servers Jason an Lincoln, came to us saying, “Someone has accepted the Jake’s challenge.” His name was Jeremy he said ” That burger looks pretty good I think I could eat it.” I replied, “All right you got it! If your able to finish this challenge you will be the first!” He accepted the Jake’s Challenge. The parameters of this challenge is that you must complete the entire burger of 5 patties 5 pieces of american cheese, and 10 pieces of bacon on a standard Jake’s Burger build in 10 minutes. Jeremy had started on a good pace eating meat first in quarters then eating the bread. ” Wow! this burger is so good but, its fresh its burning my mouth from mouth for being so hot.” He said laughing. His friends shouting “Shut up and eat you only have four minutes left!” At exactly 9:59 he ate his last piece of the Monster he was the pioneer of the Jake Challenge. He ate about 2.35 # of mouth watering goodness! “I never knew something so good can make you so full!” Jeremy laughed. As his reward we bought his burger and gave him a filled up Lucky Seven card stamped for another burger. Already, word of mouth has started and people wanting to break Jeremy’s record! That’s why at Jake’s we can take something as simple and a delicious traditional hamburger into a monster of free advertising of word of mouth!

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e378/shag0570/MonsterBurg532009.jpg

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e378/shag0570/MonsterBurg5322009.jpg

Jaime

Jake’s Cooks make it their own…Making perfection…

pasadena — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:11:30 +0000

The warmth of Southern California has come once again to the street of Colorado. You can see the many new faces and visitors of Pasadena walking up and down Colorado looking for a quick bite to eat. Then the smell finally hits them, the intense stong smell of the best burger of Pasadena Jake’s! It has been great to see such a turn around I’ve had with my cooks. We had a very strong amount of food sales in December around 9K a week but with their hard work, dedication to small detail, helping each other out, and most importantly passion for the love of the food they make we are averaging just short of 15k. “It takes a lot of time and planning to work in our kitchen.” say Everado Patino. “At first we use to laugh at Jaime about how much we should plan ahead and organize ourselves in the kitchen like office work or the military like it wouldn’t pay off but, when you have the cafe filled with customers wanting to eat “my” burger we have to keep our guard up and give them our best.” I have them constantly working with the tools I used in my training we have become legends when we use our Lettuce system we love the p-mix because we have the correct gauge on how much we need to prep and order. We also love the Kitchen Financials because we all sit together and organize the best times to fit the schedule and how much to prep. Yet I may have shown them a few tricks here and there with the Lettuce program, they impressed me with what they gave me this following week. My cooks have made their own daily cleaning program. They worked on what was the best time to get the kitchen clean to “our” standards. I was very impressed what they came up with and how dedicated they have been on getting it done; especially with our new dish machine and the installation of Butler Chemicals. Their doubled efforts have carried on another trend another perfect score from the Health Department. Now their next goal is to be the best burger in Southern California. And I believe to the fullest they will do it and do so much more!

Jaime�

Bar Fights at Jake’s

ecpasadena — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:53:37 +0000

Street Fighter IV was released with great anticipation in January of 2009 and sold out before it was even on shelves in stores. Despite it’s popularity we were not too sure of the success that could come with hosting a Street Fighter tournament at our club. Not willing to turn away any possible sell whether it be $200 or $2000 Jake and I met with someone interested in doing a tournament here. After a few meetings we decided that the event was worth trying if nothing else but to get 100 people in our club that wouldn’t normally come.

Shortly after we started to realize how “BIG” this community of Street Fighter acutally was. Our host Ryan is one of the top players in the nation and had committment from the other top players in the nation. It turned out that Ryan “Gootecks” has his own very well established website and was a star within this community. The excitement started to build when he came in and filmed a mini commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A4rHDgt8Vg&eurl) talking about the event and Jake’s, and informed us that people from Japan and Canada wanted him to stream the event for them.

Although there seemed to be some buzz about the event we never would have imagined that it would turn out to be as “BIG” as it was. The event was scheduled to begin at 5:00 pm, but we had guests starting to arrive as early as 12:00 pm. By 3:45 we had a line that stretched down the alley to Colorado Blvd of the attendees that wanted to enter the “Beat a Pro Contest”. We realized by 5:00 pm that we were at our 278 occupancy and we would have to start a line. We had employees from neighboring bars coming over to see what was going on, we even had the Pasadena Police who were eating next door perturbed at the amount of people waiting to see this event. It turned out that the Pros were all stars within the community, there was filming, interviewing and tons of picture taking.

The best part of all was that these were people coming in to just watch so they were generously purchasing food & drinks. In order to take the event to the next level we set-up promos with Jager and Bud Lt to have their girls come out, and we had a sampling from a new beverage company.

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Team SFO Kicks-off Q1 with Great Communtiy Service

gmsanfrancisco — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:50:32 +0000

As you all know each Jillian’s & Jakes location must participate in one meaningful Community Service effort each quarter. At the beginning of each year at our Annual New Year Managers meeting I pair the entire management team to head up one or more initiatives per quarter.

To kick-off Q1, RaeAnne Turner ESM and Gil Frias AGM selected a great effort. Jillian’s of San Francisco Adopted a City block. In conjunction with the City of San Francisco Public Works Department the team cleaned up an area just down the street from the club. The main area is the over and underpasses to HWY 101 and a major transportation route out if the city. So on March 27th they, Gil and RaeAnne and a few trusty warriors headed down to the fwy area to start. The team picked up garbage, swept, removed and painted over graffiti and the general clean up of the area are just a few of the important jobs they completed.

Many people stopped to watch the team in the “Jillian’s Volunteer” shirts and thanked the team for helping keep our city clean. In the coming weeks there will be a sign posted that the block has been adopted by Jillian’s of San Francisco. it will also serve as great exposure as this route exiting the city is very heavily traveled. I was blown away by this effort and even more grateful for the effort once I found out the team will continue with this effort once a month. Wow, is all I can say! We have once a month clean up and from last year we have continued with on-going Volunteering at the world famous Glide Memorial Church Soup Kitchen (seen in the Will Smith movie Pursuit of Happiness).

Thank you team for giving your on-going efforts to the community and city at large. You are all truly making a difference in this world one person at a time.

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ecpasadena — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:59:24 +0000

Universal and Pasadena have become old pro’s at teaming up to get our name and venues out in any way possible. We start scheming weeks in advance about how we are going to do something with our set-up, presentation & materials that will make us stand out from the rest. Thanks to our organic mini-cupcakes, awesome Nintendo Wii set-up, and our “green friendly” sales kits on Cd’s we defintely stood out from the rest. Not to mention we were the only ones without the standard white table cloth. We were told by almost every attendee, not to mention multiple vendors that our booth was the most elaborate and impressive.

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