“If there’s one smell that brings me back to my childhood, it’s fresh baked cookies. It reminds me of my mom’s homemade cookies she baked for us after school.”

The Phillips family moved from Ohio to sunny California in 1975. Mike Sr., known as Buck by his grandchildren, was busy co-founding what we know today as BJ’s Brewhouse in Santa Ana. All four of Buck and Sadie’s children, three daughters and one son, worked in the restaurant growing up. They learned the business from the inside-out and had hands-on experience from bussing tables to management.

With their world built around food, it’s not surprising that two of Buck & Sadie’s kids followed in their father’s footsteps and started their own successful restaurants around the state. When Buck retired, he was looking for something new to focus his time and energy on. He helped his son, Mike Jr. open a pizza restaurant in Southern California. His daughter Christine, known as Tino, knew she wanted to be a mom and stay at home to raise her children. And for 25 years, she did just that.

When she was ready to get back into the workforce, the timing was right for father and daughter to create a new concept. They started brainstorming and headed into the kitchen, testing recipes on friends and family for two years. While the heat was on in the kitchen, Tino’s son, Braxton wrote a story for a seventh-grade school assignment. Familiar with his family’s restaurant life, he came up with a business concept and called it Buck & Sadie’s, after his grandparents.

The name stuck. Buck and Tino knew their vision would be a family-style restaurant and would serve great beer along with comfort food like burgers, hot dogs, wings and big beautiful salads. The pièce de résistance on their menu? Homemade, fresh-churned frozen custard. They say it takes a village, but it really takes a family of foodies. Sadie, with her graphic arts background, designed the restaurant’s menu.

She’s also the accountant. Buck is in the “office” almost every day (the first booth next to the kitchen). Tino runs the day-to-day operations and her chili-based recipe, “Mama’s sauce,” is used on the Inferno Burger. All grown now, Tino’s children have inherited the love of cooking and work in the family business. Braxton has stepped in and works alongside his mom. Oliver, his brother, is enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America in Napa. Chapman, the youngest of the three, is finishing his last year at Roseville High School. During the summer months it is truly a family affair.