Decatur restaurant Jaybee’s Tenders thrives on ‘tender love’ and family hustle

On Jul 27, 2024

The hand-breaded chicken tenders are marinated for 24 hours in a wet batter, dry seasoned with a five-spice blend, and deep fried in peanut oil for three-to-four minutes. The fruit-infused lemonade is freshly squeezed, and each sauce is made-from-scratch.

Credit: Seeger Gray / AJC

Other popular items include chicken sandwiches on buttery Texas toast, loaded fries, banana pudding and peach cobbler egg rolls. The Harringtons take pride in making everything by hand.

Credit: Seeger Gray / AJC

“We feed the public the way we would want someone to feed us. It’s all from the heart,” Erika, a Panama native and Jaybee’s CEO, said.

Jaybee’s Tenders is celebrating its four-year anniversary with a Family Fun Day on Saturday. The outdoor event will have free food for the kids, a game truck, inflatable bounce houses, face-painting, access to the nearby basketball court at South DeKalb Family YMCA, and backpack giveaways with school supplies.

The couple wanted to host the outdoor event to show their appreciation to their diverse and loyal customer base.

“I wanted to give back to kids that constantly run up to the window and the regulars that come two-to-three times a week,” Erika said.

Will and Erika met in 2015 when their sons, Javonte and Anah-j, became best friends from playing football together on a Little League team Will was coaching.

Credit: Seeger Gray / AJC

Erika cooked fried chicken for a parent gathering hosted for the team at Honeysuckle Park in Doraville. A private chef trained at Le Cordon Bleu and former purchaser for Wolfgang Puck Catering, Will asked who made it and wondered what was in the recipe.

Erika, taking a liking to Will, said she took the opportunity to attempt using what has been called the fastest way to get to a man’s heart: his stomach.

“I grabbed the chicken, took my little fast behind over there to the concession stand, and he pulled back like he didn’t want me to feed him the chicken,” she said with a laugh.

The single parents connected again later, on an evening when their sons asked if they could have dinner together. Erika walked into Will’s kitchen, saw him cooking, and started feeding him food from the pot.

“She was basically flirting, and that’s what caught my eye,” Will said.

Erika prepared the same chicken she’d fried at the kids’ event in front of Will, who was again blown away by the taste. Their romance blossomed.

“Fast forward, after we got together, he asked me what I put in that chicken. I took what I did and made him taste the tender, and he was like ‘Oh my God. That’s it.’

That was the birth of the entrepreneurial couple who now call themselves “the tender lovers.”

The Harringtons decided to make Erika’s fried chicken their official recipe. They started regularly frying tenders and serving lemonade under a tent at their kids’ games and kept noticing bees flying nearby. They came up with the name Jaybee’s Tenders as an amalgamation of the first letter of five of their seven kids’ names and seeing those schools of bees.

They decided to get married at the courthouse on Sept. 11, 2018. “He just woke up, said ‘Get dressed,’ and had all of our passports, birth certificates and documents in an envelope. It wasn’t a fairytale, but it was my fairytale, because it worked for us,” Erika said.

Credit: Seeger Gray / AJC

Erika, who’d worked at Piedmont Hospital since moving from Brooklyn, N.Y. to Atlanta in 2012, was thinking about starting a business. She resigned in 2019 to create something simple that their children could own and was partially motivated by the fact that one of their sons, Jarvis, was diagnosed with autism.

“We started thinking about what the future would look like for him,” she said of their thinking at the time, “and [wanted to] allow them all to sustain as adults,” she said.

In early 2020, the Harringtons purchased the Jaybee’s building with no assistance. They raised seed money by selling preordered meals out of their home.

Operating from April-December, each family member pitched in. They say the home kitchen operation also helped supplement their household income, as Will’s catering gigs dried up due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Qu Jones, their eldest child and Jaybee’s manager, said the experience taught him the essentials to managing a staff.

“Consistency is key. It was stressful, but we got through it together because we encouraged everyone to help out where they could,” he said.

Credit: Seeger Gray / AJC

Customers started forming lines in their cars, creating concerns from people living near the Harringtons’ subdivision.

“The neighbors were asking what we were doing, because the lines were all the way to the front,” Will said.

Credit: Courtesy of Erika Harrington

Jaybee’s Tenders officially opened at 2575 Snapfinger Road in March 2021, after being delayed by permits. Sales started off slow, and taxes caused financial challenges the following year.

The new business owners learned to pay attention to details, such as refreshing their fryers’ oil regularly. They also learned how to interact with customers, who initially reacted negatively to Jaybee’s no-modification policy. But Erika insisted the mandate was created out of respect to Will’s culinary training and attention-to-detail.

“Will puts a lot of technique into what customers eat. When professionals create with all of their skills, heart and passion, you have to…