Fabulous Cookies: Some Things Are Better Left Exactly As They Are
ETX Uncovered · Longview · Published September 5, 2026
I don’t usually pick a cookie with pecans, but I’m not opposed to it. So when I saw that someone had brought Fabulous Cookies on a recent girls’ trip to Broken Bow, I tried the chocolate chip pecan.
One moment I am taking a bite, and the next I am six years old, picking up pecans in the yard with my brother at my grandma’s house.
That is what these cookies do. Ask around and you will hear the same thing again and again: this one tastes like my grandmother’s, this one tastes like being a kid again. A simple cookie, made the same way for twenty years, keeps handing people back a piece of their own life. That is not a small thing to sell.
Keeping It Simple
For most of those twenty years, every one of those cookies came from one man. Jeff Steinmeyer started Fabulous Cookies more than two decades ago, though it grew out of something bigger. Before the bakery there was a well-loved restaurant called Fabulous Foods, where GZ’s sits today, and the cookies were only a small part of it, sold alongside the raspberry bars and other desserts. Eventually he closed the restaurant and put everything into the one thing people never stopped asking for.
He kept it small. No employees, no advertising, barely a sign on the door. He made the cookies by hand, only so many in a day, and when the dough was gone he was done. If you wanted them, you learned to call ahead. Plenty of people never even knew the shop existed; they only knew the cookies, passed hand to hand at offices and closings until they seemed to arrive from nowhere. One longtime customer laughed that getting them felt like a secret you had to be let in on.
It would have been easy to read all of that as a business that never reached its potential. It is truer to say Jeff knew exactly what he had and refused to cheapen it to make more of it. He made a good thing and kept it good. For twenty years, that was enough.
Handed Down, Not Handed Off
When Jeff decided he was ready to step away, plenty of people wanted to buy what he had built. Jason Williams had been one of his customers for years, giving the cookies as gifts and quietly telling Jeff that if he ever sold, to call him first.
His pitch was plain: don’t sell this to someone who didn’t grow up on these cookies or won’t keep it in the family. Jason likes to believe that’s what won Jeff over, but he says he can’t really say for certain.
And then Jason did the most important thing an owner can do with something already loved. He left it alone. Same recipes. Same process.
“Why would we change it?” he says. “You don’t buy a business like this and then change what made it work.”
In an era that treats everything as something to optimize, choosing not to improve a thing is its own kind of respect. It is a way of saying to Jeff, and to every customer who grew up on these cookies: you were right. It was already good.
Keeping it in the family turned out to be literal. Jason’s brother John, who spent thirty-five years in restaurants, runs the bakery, and his wife Christi helps out a few hours a week. Their best friend Jason Holt, an attorney, handles the legal side, and his wife Krystal lends a few hours too. Jason runs the business. Their daughter Victoria makes the dough nearly every day. Their son Andrew came back to work full time, in production and behind the counter. Courtney, Jason’s wife and high school sweetheart, signed on for fifteen hours a week and happily blew past it. Their son Daniel works shifts around his job as a Longview police officer, and when things get busy the rest of the family fills in: Brittany Graham, Griffin Holt, Walker and Lainee Holt, and Cannon and Alli Walker, all children or in-laws of the owners. Rounding out the crew is Angela Reed, the rare hire who isn’t a relative, and who faithfully rolls and weighs dough from the minute she arrives until the minute she leaves.
That is a lot of people for a small bakery. That is the point. What Jeff built alone, a family now carries together.
Making Room for More People at the Table
Here is the one thing they did change, and even this was in service of the cookie, not a revision of it. They made it easier to get.
Jeff could only do so much by himself, so the cookies stayed scarce. The family opened it up. They knocked through the wall into the empty space next door and more than tripled the room, from about 500 square feet to 1,750. They are open all day now, Monday through Friday, and added Saturdays, which began as a summer trial and are becoming permanent. You can order online or simply walk in, and a mobile app is on the way. They are also rolling out flat-rate, two-day shipping across the lower forty-eight. They can ship internationally as well, at standard rates, which means a box of cookies can land on a doorstep almost anywhere for a birthday, a holiday, or a hard week.
None of that touches the cookie. It just means more people get to have the moment. Someone recently called in an order for twenty-six dozen. They made them and got them out.
The lineup is still the four it has always been: chocolate chip, snickerdoodle, oatmeal raisin, and chocolate chip pecan. Chocolate chip is the favorite by a mile. The quiet surprise is oatmeal raisin, a cookie many people never knew the shop made, now winning over everyone who finally tries it, usually with the same sentence about their grandmother. A lot of what Jason has picked up came straight from the regulars, like the trick of freezing a batch to make it last, or warming a day-old cookie for ten seconds so it tastes fresh from the oven.
It’s Just Cookies
Ask Jason where all this is headed and he will talk carefully about maybe opening in another East Texas town one day, always with a family member running it. What he won’t do is franchise it out, because the thing he is protecting cannot be franchised: the moment across the counter.
And there are a lot of those moments. Kids come in to trade a straight-A report card for a cookie. People come to mark graduations, new babies, promotions, a girls’ weekend. Every so often someone comes in on the worst kind of day and just wants something familiar, and that counts too. The cookies show up at all of it. They have quietly become the way a lot of people in this town celebrate, comfort, and say I was thinking of you.
I asked Jason about all the technology reshaping how businesses run and he didn’t flinch. It can make things faster, he says, but it can’t do the one thing that matters here: care about the person on the other side of the counter. He doesn’t believe that can be taught, let alone programmed. As he puts it, if you have to put “be kind to others” on a checklist, something is already missing from you as a person.
His whole philosophy fits in a sentence he keeps coming back to: take care of people, make something good, and do the right thing every time, and the rest tends to follow. It is not complicated. Neither is a cookie. Maybe that is exactly why both work.
Why I Interviewed Them
We spend a lot of energy chasing newer, bigger, faster. Fabulous Cookies is a quiet argument for the opposite: that a simple thing, made with care and left alone long enough to become part of people’s lives, is worth protecting. A recipe handed from one family to another. A taste that sends you home. Small, ordinary, and somehow not ordinary at all.
That is the kind of story ETX Uncovered exists to tell, the people and places right here that we drive past without realizing what they mean to the people around them. If you know a business like that, I’d love to hear about it.
Fabulous Cookies is a family-run bakery in Longview. Find them in the ETX Discovered directory or order from their website.
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