What do a coffee shop, an upscale bar and a pizzeria have in common? For three such businesses in the city of San Diego, the answer is: romance.
Some people may raise their eyebrows at the idea of a couple working together, much less starting a business together. As the saying goes, “never mix business with pleasure.” But in the case of these three couples, that's exactly what they did.
For Valentine's Day, KPBS spoke with the owners of Barrel and Board in Hillcrest, Sister’s Pizza in Marston Hills and The Coffee Drop in Golden Hill to ask how each couple started their businesses together and how they balance their work and relationships.
Moe and Dawn: Barrel & Board
“My lovely wife Dawn Stultz and myself were sitting at home, had a bottle of wine, maybe an edible, got creative, got juices going, and just started doing a plan. And we ended up here,” said Moe Girton, co-creator of Barrel & Board.
Barrel & Board is a chic bar and eatery with a specialty of charcuterie boards inspired by Stultz's love for a perfectly arranged board.
“My wife does a lot of charcuterie boards at home. She's known for these amazing charcuterie boards. And people always talk about 'whenever you go to the Stultz's house, they give you a glass of wine, and this gorgeous board.' So we took that concept and ran with it with Barrel & Board,” Girton said.
Food and a good drink has been what brought them together since the beginning, when they met at Girton’s first bar, Gossip Grill — also in Hillcrest.
“I looked around, and there was this lovely woman that was standing behind the bar making martinis. So that was Mo. And I asked her to make a martini for me,” Stultz said. “I didn't know who she was, what she did. My wife always says she doesn't date guests. And I'm someone that says, 'well, I don't date bartenders.' So it was truly fate, I believe, that brought us together.”
And 13 years later, they’re standing in the speakeasy of the business they thought up together. The place is decorated with French chandeliers dangling from the ceiling, shelves of alcohol that they say is nearly all sourced from women-owned companies, and large drip candles along the bar.
“I am so proud of Barrel,” Stultz said. “I watched it now turn into this place that is so enduring to the community.”
The key to their relationship is respect.
“The most important thing is mutual respect. Having conversations, being able to really listen to each other and have space to hear each other out. Mo and I have this rule. We don't fight. We never have in all the years. And people say, well, that seems ridiculous. How can you not fight? It's about having conversations, and if we ever have a disagreement, we can step away and we can go back and revisit. But once it's complete, it's complete,” Stultz said.
Emily and Trevor: Sisters Pizza
Customers walking into Sisters Pizza are greeted with the smell of freshly baked pizza with clever names like “Chickie Chickie Parm Parm,” green walls covered in photos of smiling faces, and a warm hello from co-owner Emily Green-Lake as her husband Trevor Lake assembles pizza behind the counter.
What customers may not suspect from the cheerful pizzeria is that it began after a terrible loss.
“In 2016, my sister passed away very unexpectedly,” Green-Lake said. “And at the time I was a teacher, but my dream was to own a pizza restaurant. And with her passing and realizing that life is so short, I decided to leave my job teaching and live the dream now and open the restaurant.”
Green-Lake’s sister, Kate Green, is remembered in every detail of the shop, which opened its doors in 2018. The walls are green for their maiden name, the pictures on the wall are dedicated to customers’ lost loved ones, and the pizza names, like “Uncle Jesse,” a reference to a show Green loved.
And of course, there’s the restaurant's name: “Sisters Pizza.”
However, she said the shop wouldn’t have been possible without her husband.
“It wasn't really part of the plan for Trevor to be as involved as he is. But the project was such a massive undertaking that I couldn't do it on my own,” she said. “So Trevor left his career, which was owning an auto body shop and paint shop, to come help me full time. And now he's our master pizza maker.”
Lake’s jump from mechanics to restaurant co-owning seems like a big change, but in reality, he said it was a “natural progression.”
“I think it's often a joke that people will make that, oh, you're working together, must be so hard. And it's not. It’s not really hard because we can fully depend on each other,” Lake said. “People talk about their work wife or their work husband, and we actually have that for real. So there’s more positives than negatives. It is a challenge, but it's worth it.”
He said the biggest challenge is finding separation between work and their personal lives.
"I think it's common among couples that work together. You talk about work at work, and then when you're home, you talk about work at home. So that's a challenge,” he said. “So just making that special time to go out to dinner, to have date nights, take vacation, that's the biggest part of trying to keep a balance.”
Soon, Green-Lake plans on going on a short trip with old friends. Because of her husband, she doesn’t have to worry about Sisters Pizza.
“I feel 100% confident being away from the business. Knowing that Trevor is there to hold down the fort,” she said. “Even if I'm gone for a few hours, I know that he has my back. And that's a really great feeling.”
Evan and Marissa: The Coffee Drop
“He just one day asked me out for coffee, and that was it. We just started hanging out from there,” said Marissa Lourenco, co-owner of The Coffee Drop.
Marissa and Evan Lourenco met in college and always had a vision: the two of them, making coffee together in their very own shop.
“Now here we are, 10-plus years later, still doing a lot more coffee than just a cup. Every single day, making it together, kind of a wild adventure,” Evan said. “We had never actually worked together. We just started this thing. It was a dream we always had, actually, from even before we got married.”
The Coffee Drop started as a teardrop shaped trailer bought with their savings, riding around their local neighborhood and asking friends and neighbors if they wanted a cup of coffee.
“We were filled with gratitude when we just went live on the first week of December in 2022, in our local community. And everybody was so supportive. We didn't do any marketing. We just showed up one day, and people just stopped and kept coming,” he said. “Within three days of our business, we already had people coming every single day, and we're like, 'Well, I guess this is the business that the neighborhood likes as well.'”
For them, working together was about finding boundaries and collaborating to have both of them represented in the product.
“I think as a couple, it definitely has made us stronger and has redefined the bond of working together. Because there are certain things I want a certain way, certain things he wants a certain way. But then we will meet in the middle because it's both of us. So it's a little bit of my ideas and his ideas,” Marissa said.
Now, they have their own official coffee shop, located in Golden Hill. It’s a peach and white building on a street corner, where you’re sure to walk in and find Evan and Marissa, the only employees of the cozy cafe, working on their specialty coffee, the OBSL (Orange Brown Sugar Latte). They call all their customers their friends.
“We're building it together. There's something really moving and very profound about that. We have created something from nothing, together,” Evan said. “And we joke, we don't have any children, but we joke that The Coffee Drop is definitely our baby. This is something that we have started from nothing, and we built it, and it has grown to be where it is right now. And we're so grateful for it.”
From an idea discussed over wine to a collaboration in memory of a lost sister to a neighborhood coffee trailer turned cafe, these couples started their businesses for different reasons, but all connect over their love for what they do.
