Mary Nguyen’s Olive & Finch Collective Redefines Accessible Dining

Mary Nguyen always had a hospitable side that drew her in. Even as an investment banker, she loved to entertain and serve. Like her parents, she loved to entertain family and friends and delight them with food and drink.

After leaving her finance job behind, Nguyen embarked on a career in hospitality. She would start her day at 3 a.m. at Starbucks because she heard they had a great training program, then head to Hapa Sushi Grill in the afternoon. She also had a brief stint at Beehive, another local Denver restaurant, where she found a sous chef ad in the paper and showed up with a three-piece suit and a dream. She didn’t get hired as a sous chef, but she jumped at the chance to work in the pantry, where she learned the dynamics and hierarchy of kitchen management.

At Hapa Sushi Grill, she had the rare opportunity to work as an apprentice and eventually become executive sushi chef, a position typically reserved for men, especially in the early 2000s. She faced many challenges, not only as a self-taught person, but also as a woman in a male-dominated industry. Nguyen recalls one particularly frightening harassment incident in which coworkers broke into her car because they didn’t approve of her senior status.

“I left finance and started over. I just wanted to cook and learn, and I was in an environment where I was allowed to prove myself and learn how to do a job as well as anyone else, male or female,” Nguyen says. “I had to earn a lot of respect, and it wasn’t until I started winning awards at my first restaurant that I felt like people respected me. Did people feel like they were happy to include me? They saw me as an investment banker who opened a restaurant, but they never really understood what I had sacrificed along the way.”

Nguyen’s first foray into restaurant opening came in 2005, when she launched Parallel Seventeen, a French and Vietnamese restaurant featuring chef-prepared dishes in a casual setting. She points out how different Denver’s restaurant scene was at the time, with little to no understanding of a casual yet refined dining experience.

“I was looking for quality food at affordable prices. Back then, if you wanted something simple, you had to go to a fine dining restaurant and there were certain requirements for you as a customer,” Nguyen says. “I was a busy professional and it didn’t make sense. No one had time to eat at a full-service restaurant, but I wanted to open a place where you could still enjoy chef-prepared food at a reasonable price.”

In 2011, she opened another concept called Street Kitchen Asian Bistro, which offers street food with touches of Malaysian, Thai, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese influence. These early restaurants prepared her for what would become Olive & Finch Collective, which combines fine-dining restaurants, cafes and a range of ready-made meals and fresh bottled juices.

The first Olive & Finch restaurant opened in 2013 with the idea of ​​offering busy diners chef-prepared food without the time and cost constraints of a traditional restaurant. Within its first six months of opening, it was named one of Denver’s best restaurants by local trade publications.

“Everything we do in the back is fine dining, and everything up front is casual, no more than $20. I call it ‘casual chic,’ and we give people what they want. We’ve become a welcoming third place where customers can dictate their experience, and I think that’s one of the reasons we’re so successful,” Nguyen shares.

Little Finch opened in 2023 to cater to busy people, first daters, and remote clients. The all-day café, a sister concept to Olive & Finch, offers coffee, cocktails, pastries, flatbreads, soups, salads, and sandwiches.

The miniature café features items made by On the Fly, the newest brand under the Olive & Finch wing. On the Fly is a line of grab-and-go meals and cold-pressed juices that supply Nguyen’s restaurant and café, as well as larger institutions like airports and hospitals.

“It was important to me to create a sustainable business that could scale easily. (On the Fly) plays on accessibility and affordability, and allows us to offer our products in environments that typically don’t have either of those things,” Nguyen says. “We have multiple lines of business, which gives us the opportunity to grow and our team to expand.”

Nguyen is ready to let her concepts take flight. The company hopes to double its store size in the next five years while expanding On the Fly into wholesale opportunities nationwide.

Markets similar to Denver can expect to see interest from Olive & Finch Collective as the brand ramps up its growth. Nguyen says she’s looking forward to expanding her physical restaurants to other Colorado cities before heading out of state. Amid those lofty ambitions, she’s careful not to dilute her product or mission.

“Sustainable growth is about the business, but it’s also about the people. You can have a great concept, but if you don’t have the right people to execute it, it doesn’t mean anything, right?” says Nguyen. “I think my biggest takeaway from all of this is that when I look at my own experience, (Olive & Finch Collective) gives me more motivation to make this industry and these opportunities work equitably for everyone, whether you’re a woman or a man, inexperienced or experienced.”