When Sarah Mattinson opened Olive Cafe in Mission Beach in 2005, her hopes were to have the cozy restaurant become a part of the local community. Five years later, the breakfast and lunch restaurant is exactly that — a Mission Beach mainstay. “I really appreciate all the local people and I’m glad I’m part of the community,” Mattinson said. “I hope to be here for years.” Olive Cafe celebrated its five-year anniversary at Santa Clara Place on May 12. It combines breakfast and lunch with a homey, neighborhood feel, mirroring a community deli Mattinson frequented growing up in New York. “I had grown up with a place like that in New York where the woman who ran it just knew everybody and everyone really felt like it was their place, too. That’s what we try to do,” Mattinson said. And that is precisely what Olive Cafe has done over the last five years. The restaurant has its fair share of regulars with their own mugs, some of whom have even beefed up the menu with items like Neighbor Dave’s Turkey Melt. The sense of community Olive Cafe has fostered in its first five years extends beyond the menu, though. A regular customer even maintains the flowers outside the restaurant. “She loves doing gardening and has done a really nice job,” Mattinson said. “She walks here five days a week for iced tea and pastries and she’ll do all this gardening. It’s cute and I really love it.” As Olive Cafe has grown, so has its menu, expanding two full pages from when it first opened. The menu has a little bit of everything — scones, healthy egg scrambles, wraps, quesadillas and even some Turkish food as homage to its culinary predecessor. “If you see my menu it’s like a book. It’s like, ‘This person likes this and this person likes that,’ and then we’ll try new stuff like specials that may turn out really well and we’ll add it to the menu,” Mattinson said. Mattison lives in Mission Beach and is a member of the Mission Beach Woman’s Club. She is active in the community along with the restaurant, which just this year adopted a section of Mission Bay near Santa Clara Point to keep clean. The first Olive Cafe cleanup in January had 45 people. “That was really neat that we have the support with the community,” Mattinson said. Olive Cafe is located at 805 Santa Clara Place in Mission Beach and is open daily from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. For more information, visit www.olivecafe.biz.
