Sometimes life takes you places you didn’t anticipate. Sometimes — if you’re Jade’s Cafe owners Mason and Halle Squires — it takes you to a corner of Heber City, where you start a cafe in pursuit of dreams, and in pursuit of reflection.
“I don’t have a background in coffee or food. My wife, she’s a designer,” Mason said. “She designed the whole place, and I just did a lot of research and figured it out.”
He’s from Highland and Halle from Pineview, though they’ve both made the hop over the mountains to Wasatch County several times in their lives.
A fly fisherman, Mason has regularly visited Heber Valley over the past decade, and he loved the place before it became home. His wife felt the same way, with her family regular boaters on Deer Creek Reservoir.
The couple has been together for six years.
“We always split up here and hit the Back 40 or somewhere for dinner or lunch,” Mason said. “It just was a spot that we wanted to be. Since I was young I’ve always wanted to live in Heber, so it was a good thing we did it.”
When they started Jade’s Cafe, the pair did so without any significant restaurant or business experience. It just seemed like a great opportunity.
Halle had wanted to open a restaurant since she was 16. He attended Utah Tech University — formerly known as Dixie State University — for a year before finding success in sales, but that career was starting to wear on him.
The answer to both of their hopes came in the form of a small shop conjoined with the design business Halle, her mother and her sisters decided to lease for their design shop, Nomad Soul Interiors.
“This was a good chance to kind of redirect the path of my life,” Mason said.
“It’s always been my dream,” Halle said. “It was my dream since I was a teenager. This was my thing. But I didn’t know how to make it happen. I knew how to make it pretty, how to make good drinks, but then he was the one that really brought it to life and figured out the business end.”
The family got the lease about two and a half years ago, and Jade’s Cafe opened in December.
“We got it kind of when we were coming out of COVID, so everything was just taking a little long,” Mason said.
Since opening, however, he said they’ve been embraced by the community, and have started to collect their own set of regulars.
Mason said he believes Jade’s Cafe stands out because the owners care not just about serving quality coffee, but also making sure the food is worth ordering.
“We care about the food. Like 99% of it is made in-house from scratch. I think it makes a difference,” he said. “Coffee shops are notorious for having great coffee and then a few pastry options. So we ready had this idea like, ‘Hey, let’s do a coffee shop and then have a full menu.'”
That menu’s theme is Food for the Mountains, and it was constructed by Halle’s brother and chef Michael Griego. It includes not only the breakfast staples you might expect from a shop trying to make sure its food meets the high bar it sets for coffee — pancakes, breakfast sandwiches, porridge — but also other options that aren’t as common, like salmon toast, lemon parmesan salad and pork belly and beans, the latter of which Mason considers to be their most underrated dish.
Mason and Halle have been working through their first months to figure out the best hours to be open and the other aspects of running a small business that might not be apparent on day one.
“I feel like I’m learning something every day,” Mason said. “Whether it’s taxes or just even simple things like spreadsheets. … It’s incredibly engaging.”
Halle said the first week brought up subjects she hadn’t considered very thoroughly before, things as simple as spoons the restaurant needed and how many cups went missing.
In the future, the couple hopes to continue opening Jade’s Cafe locations in their favorite towns, the next likely headed for Saint George. Each location, Halle said, will come with a different style of restaurant and menu to “be true to where it is.”
“Come hang out,” she said. “We’re excited to have you here.”