When Failure Doesn’t Mean the End of a Dream

Founder of Gideon’s Bakehouse Steve Lewis spent 15 years on his chocolate chip cookie recipe, but he never planned on opening a bakery, nor did he imagine anyone would ever wait 12 hours for something he made.

I first learned about these giant cookies in the spring of 2020, while living in San Diego, sitting in my worn gray IKEA recliner, doing what I did a lot of in 2020, watching Disney YouTube content, a way to feel closer to the home I left in Orlando, to the friends and family who were no longer just a plane ride away.

While watching a Disney News video one night, the only news I could handle for a time, the host AJ genuinely gushed over these new giant cookies selling out daily from a secret menu at the BBQ restaurant in Disney Springs, The Polite Pig.

She proclaimed it one of the best treats on Disney property.

It was also mentioned that these cookies were started in a smaller location in Orlando’s East End Market, a place I used to drive by every week when I lived in Florida. Who was making these cookies? And how did they get into Disney?

I googled and started by reading the Gideon’s Bakehouse about page, unlike any other I’d read. Their website copy had personality. It didn’t feel like it was trying to sell me anything; instead it felt like it was trying to tell me a story.

And the story that caught my attention was about why it was called Gideon’s Bakehouse, even though the founder and original creator of this giant cookie was named Steve.

Steve loves collecting vintage books, and he picked up a cookbook once from 1898 filled with doodles from a boy named Gideon who wrote his dreams of owning his own bakery one day.

So Steve named his bakery after Gideon, a way to make Gideon’s 100+ year-old dream come true.

Gideon may have dreamed of being a baker, but Steve never set out to become one.

He certainly didn’t plan to become a Very Successful Business Owner, or even his official title on the website: “The Sublime Prince of the Esoteric Order of Cookie.”

Why then did Steve Lewis  spend 15 years creating his own chocolate chip cookie recipe, and what is it about that cookie, and the Gideon’s brand, that has people still waiting in lines every day just to experience it?

 I moved back to Florida in October 2020, and one of the first things I did (after finally eating a Gideon’s cookie for myself, confirming its magic) was reach out to Steve for a profile. Once it was safe to do so, and once our schedules aligned, we finally met up at the original tiny Gideon’s Bakehouse in East End Market.

He arrived in all black – black jeans, black jean jacket, black t-shirt, with all his dark hair tucked under a black beanie. I ask Steve if he wants to do the interview upstairs in the shop and lounge called The Neighbors, which has both seating and A/C. He laughs and says, “Yes, definitely, do you see what I’m wearing?”

While Steve cares a lot about what he creates and takes it very seriously,  it’s immediately clear he doesn’t take himself too seriously.

 Steve was wrecked. It was the closest bond he’d ever allowed himself to build, the first family he chose, and it was as if the loss left him as alone as he felt as a kid when his family imploded.

“I couldn’t move,” he says of the moments after. “I locked myself in my house for three weeks. I remember my mom banging on my front door and I wouldn’t answer.

 “I was working on my cookie recipe.  I remember crying into that cookie dough and finishing the recipe then, because I decided I would dedicate it to my dog. I thought, this is it,  I’m never touching this recipe again. This is your cookie, Lupin.”

 (On the back of Gideon’s trading cards, in small print, is the holding company for all of Steve’s intellectual property: Lupius Maximus, LLC.)

 Eventually, needing to break out of his isolation, Steve started sharing his cookies. People loved them, exclaiming, “You should sell this!” But Steve was skeptical. “Everybody says that to anybody who makes anything. I didn’t really believe it was possible.”

 But he noticed that when people expressed joy while taking their first bite, it gave him that same feeling he’d get when he talked about comics or played music on stage.  He loved sharing what he loved, and while connecting with people didn’t come naturally to him, this kind of connection did.

 And while those moments helped, at the time, he was still lost. It was like his hand injury all over again. Except this time he’d pretty much cashed out all his dreams. He still couldn’t play guitar. His comic book store had closed. And his not-quite-a-shark buddy had died.

 “One of the beauties of failure is it forces creativity.”

 After losing everything that meant something to him he had a kind of nervous breakdown: “It was a rough few years. But while 90% of it was grief and pain, 10% was a healthy perspective of how to move forward.

“And as the days and months moved on, that 10% started to turn into 15%, then 20%, as I slowly started to climb out of that hole.”

 Once he did, he realized he needed a job; the loss of Überbot put him in a lot of debt.

 He got a job at an Apple store, and when his coworkers there also raved about the cookies he shared with them, he started to wonder about opening up a small side hustle of sorts, baking cookies for money from his house.

 When I ask Steve why then was the time he finally thought about selling his cookies, he shares that unlike his other romantic dreams, this choice was pragmatic: he was in debt. He needed money.

 “One of the beauties of failure,” Steve says, “is it forces creativity; if it weren’t for the loss of Überbot, I wouldn’t have been pushed in this direction.”

 When he wasn’t working his day job at Apple, he experimented with new cookie flavors, thinking he’d probably need to have some variety if he was going to sell them. He played with ingredients just like when he was a kid, only this time  he’d invite his coworkers over for “taste testing parties.”

 “I would give them this sheet,” he says, “and I would have them rate which ones were their favorite.”

Once he started finalizing his flavors, he started selling his cookies from his house. He bought a chest freezer and spent the first week of every month making dough and then selling the cookies the rest of the month.

 Pretty soon, there was a three-month waiting list.

There were even people buying the cookies and then reselling them for double the price. “That’s when I realized, okay, maybe I should start taking this a little bit more seriously,” Steve says.

 He also realized the cookie business was doing a lot more for him than just helping him pay down his debt. “I found that for me food is almost identical to music. The cookie is my song now.”

 So when it came time to play his first “show,” a pop-up at East End Market in Orlando, he felt ready. He showed up with three-week’s worth of dough for his three-week’s long pop-up stint, a calculation he made after talking to previous pop ups and asking what they sold each day.

 He sold out of his entire three-week inventory in one day.

 And that’s when he knew: “I saw the whole picture on that day. Like, okay, this is what I need to do.”

 “I was very much in love.”

Once the cookies turned into a full-fledged dream, Steve went into “what if” mode, creating with the same dedication he once gave to Bubblegumm and Überbot.

He named his business after the boy who dreamed in doodles in a vintage cookbook, and soon got a permanent, albeit tiny, location in East End Market. Steve loved designing its slightly-haunted-feeling library motif, adding his own vintage books to the shelves and even securing an old light that used to be in Disney’s Haunted Mansion.

He’d always loved the attention to detail at Disney, and dreamed of one day opening a second Gideon’s Bakehouse location there, perhaps 10 or 20 years down the road of course. He knew something like that was next to impossible, but his melancholy nature never stopped him from dreaming big.

He was in no rush though. He was content with his tiny nook and single employee, and incredulously happy that he was able to support himself with a few cookies. That was more than enough for him.

 But then he got a girlfriend.

 And she wanted more in life: “I was very much in love, so I thought I needed to get responsible about the business side of what I did and be a respectable earner so I could take care of her.”

 Maybe he should start moving forward with his bigger dreams, he thought.

 He struck up a partnership with The Polite Pig on Disney Springs property, another local Orlando business that made the move to Disney, and offered up his cookies as a secret menu item. There were stipulations, of course. “I’m very anti-wholesale, and I only agreed to do it if I could bake it, package it, and deliver it all on my own. And I had control of how many I gave them every week, so if I needed to pull back, I could.”

 While his insistence on control and limited quantity comes entirely from his deep desire to ensure everyone has the highest quality experience possible, he also knew from his comic book and vinyl toy-selling days at Überbot that making something “limited” also wasn’t a bad thing. In a world where many have instant access to almost anything, there is novelty in something limited, something collector communities know well. If the cookies were his songs now, the business of them was his comic book store.

The first day the cookies were available at The Polite Pig, The Disney Food Blog took a picture of it and proclaimed it to be the best thing to eat on Disney property.

 It didn’t take long for the cookies to sell out faster and faster each day.

A few weeks later, Steve was in talks with Disney about opening a Gideon’s Bakehouse in Disney Springs.

 “A terrible capitalist.”

 And while the Disney doors opened fast, the doors to the Gideon’s Bakehouse location at Disney Springs wouldn’t open for another three years. And it wasn’t slow because of Disney, Steve says, “it was a three-year conversation because I’m stubborn. I wouldn’t say yes to anything unless it was what I envisioned in my head.”

Like how the exact location he wanted for Gideon’s was the one next to where he and his girlfriend had dinner the night of their first kiss.

 “I have that space now,” he shares, “but I don’t have that relationship. So it’s bittersweet, part of being a romantic.” But that’s okay with Steve, as he often describes Gideon’s business as, “having a little bit of sadness and romance,” and himself as “a terrible capitalist.”

This business, right down to its location, is personal to him. Everything about Gideon’s Bakehouse is an extension of who Steve is as a person: “Gideon’s is not a theme that I created for the bakery. It’s what my brain would look like if you cracked it open.”

He’s managed to keep a grip on that part of his creativity, even as he got older, by continuing that early musician’s sense he had of not letting the world dilute who he was.

Music also helped him shed his ego long ago, ultimately giving him more creative freedom.While Gideon’s is deeply personal to him, it’s not about him. It’s why it’s hard to find pictures of Steve anywhere, and why he named it Gideon’s Bakehouse and not Steve’s Bakehouse.

 He still remembers the day his ego began to die, the summer his band took a break from touring and he got a job at a record store in the Florida Mall. Tourists would ask to take pictures with him because of his long hair and rockstar looks, while others actually recognized him from his band.

 But one day he came into work in a bad mood, and a group of girls kept trying to get his attention. He finally turned around to see one of the girls had a camera pointed at him. “No pictures, no pictures,” he said.

 “Um,” she responded, confused, “can you get out of the way? I’m trying to take a picture of my friends.”

 “In that moment,” Steve remembers, “I got over myself.

 “There’s nothing lofty about me at all – or anyone. We’re all just trying to get by. And when you start to lose your ego, you start to truly not care what other people think about who you are and what you’re doing, and hyperfocus on pleasing yourself only.”

 But that’s not to say he doesn’t care what people think about what he creates. 

 He jokes about how at the East End Market location he’d often “creepily” stare through the window at the small courtyard table outside to watch someone take their first bite.

 It’s a delicate balance, to not care what people think about you, but still care deeply about them. “What is our purpose in life if not experience?” Steve says. “ I’m just doing my part to create those memories.”

“I cry myself to sleep at night.”

With Gideon’s Bakehouse being so personal, it’s also why he still runs their Instagram account, which also means he’s on the front lines of any negativity that comes their way.

 How does he not take all the problems and criticism that comes with having a business personally when it is so personal to him?

 “I cry myself to sleep at night,” he says. “That’s how I do it. It’s hard.”

 He’s only half joking.

 But the good news is, he mostly gets positive feedback. And while the negative ones sting, it’s actually the mediocre responses that kill him.

 “Mediocrity is my enemy. I’d rather you hate it than not be moved at all by it.

 “I love when someone is like, ‘Hey, this isn’t my thing, but I get why people like it, and I appreciate your work.’ Rapid fire kisses to them.

 “The nasty people, I’ve tried to learn how to ignore it.”

 Though sometimes he does talk back, and people have even stopped him in public to say, “I love your Instagram comments.”

 Recently someone commented grumpily, “Why don’t you do x,y, and z instead of a, b, and c” and Steve’s response was “Because I’m an adult and I do what I want.”

 Many creatives have social media at the top of the list of things they can’t wait to outsource. I ask Steve why he still does it and why he likes it. “Well, I didn’t say I like it,” he laughs. “But to have someone else run my social media is to allow someone else to be my voice. And I can’t do that.”

 It’s the terrible capitalist in him, he says. But he can’t help it. The cookie started as a source of comfort and ended in his grief and love for Lupin. It’s so personal to him that no one but him knows the exact recipes. He works with two different companies to separately mix the dry ingredients that get delivered to the production kitchen.

He assures me the exact recipes are locked away in an undisclosed location should anything ever happen to him, but he says, no one knows his Instagram password so, he laughs, “from a social media standpoint they’re screwed.”

His obsession with quality control and experience also means he’s turned down a lot of lucrative financial opportunities, including the many requests they get to ship.

But he’s not doing this for the money. So much so that he feels uncomfortable when people congratulate him on his “business” success. “They’re congratulating me that there’s a five-hour wait to get inside,” he says, “but that’s almost embarrassing to me, and not a mark of a good person. Service to others is what matters.”

“You are what you eat.” 

Steve is also grateful for the people who have helped make Gideon’s Bakehouse what it is today, including 170+ employees. He still interviews anyone who will be interacting with guests personally, but he credits Patrick McKinney for helping him open the Disney Springs location and taking over a lot of the business operations so Steve could focus on creative.

Aside from his stint at Apple and the record store that one summer, Steve has spent most of his life working for himself, so he has no problem turning on his business side when needed, but that’s not what lights him up.

What lights him up, and what we talk about almost exclusively for the last hour of the interview is Gideon’s trading cards and his two cats, Vincent the Poet and Savant the White.

 “I got cats,” Steve explains, “because I thought, okay, I can’t handle that level of  relationship I had with Lupin ever again and then lose it. Cats are kind of aloof.”

 But his plan backfired. His cats sleep on him every night and love to be cheek-to-cheek with him and even know how to step on his Apple HomePod just right to play their favorite tunes.

“They’re such awesome creatures,” he says, “so now I’m hopelessly attached to my two cats.”

After he apologizes for showing me too many pictures of his cats on his phone, to which I reply there is no such thing as too many cat pictures, we walk back down the stairs of East End Market so he can show me the trading cards they’ve only recently (at the time of our interview) implemented in the bottom of Gideon’s cookie boxes, something he creates with resident Gideon’s artist Michael Reyes (whose first art show was at Überbot).

We scoot past a small line and past a few tall metal cookie carts into the tight, dark, old-library-like space. Steve searches briefly through a few drawers, as if hunting for treasure, and then carefully presses a card into my hand.

On the front of the card is an orange-headed boy (not red-haired; his head is an actual Florida orange), wearing brown suspenders. The card says his name is “Stuart Valencia”, and he smiles from the page with a heavy underbite and big gray eyes. I turn the card over and see “01” at the top, along with a short story about Stuart, ending with, “You are what you eat.”

Below in small print is: “Copyright 2022, Lupious Maximus, LLC.”

For many, Gideon’s Bakehouse is only about cold brew and cookies. And Steve is grateful for their support. But for those interested, he’s also built-in layers and layers of lore into every corner he can, as if Überbot never really died.

“The side effects of believing in yourself.”

A lot of people ask Steve “What makes Gideon’s so different?” and his answer is always the same: “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

 And he means that, but not as a lack of self-confidence or imposter syndrome, though he’s dealt with both at times. He sees not knowing what you’re doing as a creative advantage.

People online try to make and post copycat recipes of his cookies all the time, and he smiles when he sees them, enjoying their creativity, but knowing they’ll never quite get there. Not because he thinks he’s some sort of cookie genius, but because he came at making a cookie from a completely different place. He wasn’t a baker, he didn’t study cooking or even watch cooking shows. He lived in his own bubble, and created from his broken heart.

Gideon’s is a product of what can happen when someone shuts out the noise, takes their sweet time, makes something they love, and delights in sharing it.

“Chefs often create things to impress other chefs,” Steve notes, “but that’s not my journey. This is a kid’s bakery. So I stick to those rules with Gideon’s, and my creative process has always been just lots and lots of tinkering alone at home.”

Now he has a staff and sends over ideas to the production kitchen and then does taste tests and sends notes, but the creative spirit of it is still the same, which he knows for sure because his staff still often think his ideas are crazy, like his peanut butter and jelly cake idea or his coffee cake cookie idea.

But they come together to make new things, and have been able to shave off 14+ years from Steve’s original production time, keeping new cookies and cakes coming through each month.

What does all of it mean to Steve now?

 “When I go out to Gideon’s at Disney Springs it reminds me of the side effects of believing in yourself, thinking about the greatest possibility and shooting for it.

 “At the end of the day it makes no sense that a nobody like me is out there. It’s impossible, but somewhere along the line, I convinced myself it was possible.”

 “And, you know, it wouldn’t have existed without all of those previous failures.”

He says this because earlier we’d talked about a book I’ve been working on for eight years, a book about dreams come true, a book, especially in 2020, I’d thought about giving up on. I told him before we started the interview that what little I first learned about his story kept me going – from seeing how even a kid’s dream could come true 120+ years later, to seeing someone unapologetically spend 15 years making something.

I also told Steve that on my worst days I’d half joke to my husband that the new title of my book was going to be “Dreams Die Every Day.” Steve lit up when I said that and told me that we wouldn’t be here right now if it weren’t for all his dreams that died.

Gideon’s Bakehouse isn’t just Gideon’s dream come true anymore, it’s also Steve’s. He says he feels it everytime he sees the Gargoyle that sits atop the Disney Springs location: “Every single time I see it, it lights me up with happiness.”

Immediately after our interview, I drive south to visit the Disney Springs location for the first time; since I live closer to the East End location, I’d never been inside the Disney Springs one because of the long line. Before getting to know Steve I didn’t think I was missing anything because I could get the same cookies even closer to me.

Oh how wrong I was.

The bigger space allowed Steve to let his artistic skills and childlike wonder explode (he even won a THEA award for its design). This was also the only location where you could get the peanut butter cold brew, which I’d never had.

When I tell Steve where I’m going next and why, he smiles wide and asks me to tell him what I think afterwards. And I can tell he really means it, the part of him that will always be staring out that back window of East End Market watching someone take their first bite, hoping he did a good enough job to create a memory.

 I get to the Disney Springs location around 3pm; it’s a weekday, and there are about 40 people in line, baking in the hot Florida sun – yet no one is complaining. Instead, the line has the air of the lines in the four theme parks just a few streets over. People don’t seem to mind a line as much when they believe a truly unique experience, and chance at a personal memory, is on the other end.

 As soon as I enter the queue I’m greeted by a Gideon’s staff member and handed a menu card depicting that month’s special flavors. I notice there aren’t any windows to see what’s happening inside; it’s a mystery until you finally get to the front and a staff member welcomes you up the stairs and through the double doors.

To try to write about what it feels like inside Gideon’s Bakehouse at Disney Springs would be a disservice to it. It’s something you need to see (and smell) for yourself, the tiny oddities, the way the red light bounces off the bookshelves. All I can say is that it indeed felt like walking into the mind of the person I just spent hours talking to, the mind of someone who hasn’t let the world kill the childlike wonder in him, no matter how many other things it killed in his life along the way.

 Inside there is still a small line, which goes by all too fast, many of us longing to linger inside as long as possible, looking, searching, noticing.

Two young kids in line behind me are delighted by the décor, commenting on one thing after another, the brother telling the sister, “Ewww look at this!” The sister telling the brother, “Oh my gosh but look at that!” They use the word “creepy” more than once, elated.

 When I finally get to the counter I regretfully peel my eyes away from the walls and order a peanut butter cold brew and a white chocolate caramel macadamia nut cookie, the special for that month,  Pride month.

Once I’m handed my cookie and coffee the melancholy sets in that I have to now leave this cold magical lair and step back outside into the hot Florida sun.

 I find a short brick wall nearby to sit on and unwrap my cookie and take my first sip of the peanut butter cold brew.

Steve doesn’t ever say Gideon’s has the “best” anything; he doesn’t believe in “best” or “perfect” when it comes to art because taste is so subjective.

So when I send him an email later that day to thank him for the interview and give him the list of photos I’d like, in the PS I write: “I know you don’t believe in ‘perfect’ or ‘best’ but THE PEANUT BUTTER COLD BREW IS THE MOST PERFECT BEST COFFEE I’VE EVER HAD!!!”

Back on the red brick wall, I finish every last drop of the cold brew, and then, as I take a bite of the cookie I look up and realize I’m sitting just beneath the Gargoyle; I turn to grab my phone to add that to my notes for the story, something I do a lot because I have a terrible memory. But this time I stop myself and leave my phone in my purse and keep eating; I think I’ll remember this. And I do.