Since opening in 2021, Café Olli’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner services, extensive pastry and bread programs, and busy catering arm have made it feel like several businesses operating as one. Despite the calm its minimalist aesthetic and restrained, Italian-inspired cuisine project, the first few years have been a whirlwind, with a few moments of regrouping. To make a little room in their existing kitchen, owners Siobhan Speirits and Taylor Manning quietly moved their bread and pastry operation into the vacant bakery next door, ferrying baguettes and strawberry–fig leaf danishes across the King neighborhood restaurant’s parking lot.

Later this summer, the bakery next door will become its very own mini-Olli. Ollini, Café Olli’s yet-to-open wine bar and bakeshop, will be exactly what its name suggests: a pint-size version of its parent, serving pastries and coffee by day, wine and snacks by night. This new space, which they plan to open in late August, will help maintain Café Olli’s all-purpose spirit—a restaurant ready to satisfy any mood, any time of day, without running its wheels off. Ollini will play host to diners waiting for a table next door, as any good sister bar does, and serve takeout bomboloni and espresso tonics to anyone looking to side-step brunch crowds. But it will also have its own charms.

Thursday through Saturday evenings, Olli’s wine director Kiah Thornton plans to rotate natural wines regularly, with a wider range than fits the restaurant. Oysters on the half shell, a few fish spreads on the restaurant’s gloriously burnished and craggy breads, and Italian snacks like arancini will make up the food menu. Saturday and Sunday mornings are for grab-and-go pastries, bread, and a full espresso bar of coffee drinks.

In an exciting turn, there will also be bagels, bagels our critic Karen Brooks once heralded as “Gandalf blinding the dark forces with holy light.” On Mondays, cult-favorite baker Josh Fairbanks’s elusive, preorder-only Honey Bagel pop-up will serve blistery, long-fermented bagels as sandwiches, alongside Dear Francis coffee.

The new café space was once home to the very pink bakery St. Beatrix, which closed this April (the takeover involved a few coats of white paint). After moving bakery production next door, Speirits and Manning expanded their wholesale baking substantially, now selling baguettes, sourdough, and seasonal loaves to restaurants like Sweedeedee, Gabbiano’s, and the Heathman Hotel.

But the plan was always to open Ollini to the public. It’s a shoebox of a space next to a ceramics studio and a falafel shop, with checkered tile floors and arched openings that peak into the bakery in back. Really, it’s tiny, “like a New York kind of wine bar,” Manning says. They were partially inspired by Hart’s, the cozy Brooklyn restaurant where Manning cooked before moving to Portland. “Something tucked away, unassuming, and quiet,” Speirits adds. “Well, that’s the hope anyway.”

Quiet is one thing Ollini probably won’t be. Other than hanging at the three bar stools and the couple of tables they’re planning to throw on the sidewalk, most customers will stand, maybe setting down a drink or snack at the counters lining the windows, like a crowded European bar.

Starting out, they’re limiting hours to peak times and don’t plan to immediately hire any devoted staff. It makes the project feel like an organic expansion, another exciting facet added to the restaurant’s long list of projects. “One thing that we learned from opening the café is not to do everything at once,” says Manning. “Don’t open a restaurant, a bakery, a catering company, a wholesaler, and an all-day café at the same time,” Speirits says with a laugh. The goal is for Ollini to help “mitigate the crush,” Speirits says, to move the more casual offerings across the parking lot to offset the restaurant’s highest-traffic moments. 

Speirits and Manning hope to expand hours and the menu slowly. “I have some ideas of quick, deli-esque things,” Manning says. He mentions building up the café’s pre-assembled sandwiches, which sell out early at the original restaurant, and serving market salads by the ounce, like marinated vegetables and legumes. He also teased resurrecting one early Café Olli staple, the ovoid, Roman-style pizza alla pala. When served by the slice, it’s a rectangle with crust on each end. Here’s hoping.