The sudden closing of an iconic and mouthwatering Central Valley steakhouse rattled its employees, including a single mother of two who is now left trying to find another way to feed her children.
Tahoe Joe’s Famous Steakhouse in Visalia suddenly closed Monday, stunning the more than 30 employees the restaurant laid off.
Crystal Ervin used her job as a bartender there as her primary source of income to feed her kids. Ervin said she found out of the closing when she walked through the steakhouse’s doors on Monday and was told she would have to look for another job.
Ervin received an email notifying her of the closing earlier that day, but she missed it, getting ready for work as she had done at the steakhouse for the past 15 years for her Monday morning shift.
The regional director informed employees, gathered at the steakhouse that the restaurant was closing because it never recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic crippled many small businesses across the country.
“I was shocked. I was shocked. I felt betrayed. And to be honest, I felt hurt,” she told YourCentralValley.
“I felt like we just did not matter, you know, ever or at all… We had been in there so long just to be tossed like rags, you know, with nobody having any direction to go.”
She felt Tahoe Joe’s left her “high and dry” after she just bought a home for her family.
“It was pretty devastating. I’m a single mom. I have two kids. I just bought a home about two months ago. And so to be left high and dry like that was, was pretty, it’s still detrimental,” she said.
The single mother hopes California employment laws change to allow more notice for employees.
“I feel like if they could have given employers two weeks, heck, even one week, it gets them a jump start on getting an unemployment [claim] filled,” she said. “It gives them a jump on starting to find another job before they’re just left out on the street without anything.”
The meatery’s closure leaves just two Tahoe Joe’s Famous Steakhouse locations left: 7006 N. Cedar Ave. in Fresno and 9000 Ming Ave. in Bakersfield. Several other locations had either closed or been bought out in preceding years. The original Fresno restaurant on West Shaw Avenue closed back in 2016.
Tahoe Joe’s specializes in thick, charbroiled steaks in an atmosphere reminiscent of a “warm, friendly, lodge with pine log beams stretched throughout spacious ceilings and hand-painted teepee lamps.”
Ervin wrote on Facebook Tuesday that she still has a part-time job but is looking for work.
“I’m devastated to know this kind of pain, fear, uncertainty, especially as a single mama doing my best for my kiddos,” she wrote.
