There was always something about hospitality pulling Mary Nguyen in. Even during her time as an investment banker, she loved to entertain and serve. Similar to her parents, she enjoyed hosting family and friends and making them feel good through food and beverages.
Shelving her job in finance, Nguyen plunged into a career in hospitality. She started her day with a 3 a.m. morning shift at Starbucks because she heard they had a great training program, and then she’d head over 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 took an opportunity to work in the pantry, where she learned the dynamics and hierarchy of kitchen management.
At Hapa Sushi Grill, she was given the rare chance to work as an apprentice, eventually becoming an executive sushi chef—a position typically reserved for men, especially in the early 2000s. There were many challenges she had to overcome, not just from being self-taught but also as a woman in a male-dominated space. Nguyen recalls a particularly scary incident of harassment where co-workers keyed her car because they didn’t approve of her senior status.
“I left finance and started from the ground up. I just wanted to cook and learn, and I was in an environment where someone allowed me to prove myself and learn how to do a job as good as anybody else, male or female,” Nguyen says. “There was a lot of respect I had to earn, and it wasn’t until I started winning awards at my first restaurant that I felt like I had respect from others. Did it feel as if people were excited about including me? They saw me as this investment banker who opened a restaurant, but they never really understood what I sacrificed in my journey.”
Nguyen’s first foray into opening a restaurant was in 2005 when she introduced Parallel Seventeen as a French and Vietnamese full-service eatery offering upscale fare. She notes just how different the Denver restaurant scene was back then, with little to no understanding of a casual yet elevated dining experience.
“I was looking for great meals that were accessible, and back then, if you wanted something from scratch, you had to go to a fine-dining restaurant and there’s a certain expectation put on you as a guest,” Nguyen says. “I was a busy professional, and it just doesn’t make sense. Nobody had the time to eat at a full-service restaurant, but I wanted to open a place where you could still get chef-driven cuisine at a fair price.”
In 2011, she opened another concept called Street Kitchen Asian Bistro, serving street food with touches of Malaysian, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese influence. These initial restaurants prepared her for what would eventually become the Olive & Finch Collective, which combines fine-casual eateries, cafés, and a wholesale line of ready-to-eat meals and fresh bottled juices.
The first Olive & Finch location opened in 2013 with the idea of giving busy customers chef-driven, scratch-made food without the time or monetary commitment of a traditional sit-down restaurant. In the first six months of opening, it was named one of the best restaurants in Denver by local trade publications.
“Everything we do in back-of-house is fine dining, and everything in the front is casual, no more than $20. I call it fine casual, and we’re giving the people what they want. We’ve become this welcoming third place where the guests get to dictate their experience, and I think this is one of the reasons why we’re so successful,” Nguyen shares.
Little Finch opened in 2023 as a way to cater to those in a rush, on a first date, or to guests working remotely. The all-day café, a little sister concept to Olive & Finch, features coffee, cocktails, pastries, flatbreads, soups, salads, and sandwiches.
The miniature café features items made by On the Fly, the newest brand under Olive & Finch’s wing. On the Fly is a wholesale line of grab-and-go meals and cold-pressed juices that supply Nguyen’s restaurant, café, and eventually larger institutions like airports and hospitals.
“It was important to me to create a sustainable company with the ability to pivot easily. [On the Fly] plays into accessibility and affordability, and allows us to provide our products in environments that typically don’t have either of those things,” Nguyen says. “We have multiple arms of the business, and it provides us with an opportunity to scale up and allow our team to grow.”
Nguyen is ready to let her concepts take flight. The company hopes to double its store footprint in the next five years while expanding On the Fly to different wholesaling opportunities nationwide.
Markets similar to Denver can expect to see interest from the Olive & Finch Collective as the brand increases growth. Nguyen says she’s looking forward to expanding her brick-and-mortar restaurants in more Colorado cities before heading out of state. Amid these lofty ambitions, she is careful to not dilute her product or her mission.
“Sustainable growth depends on the business, but it also depends on the people. You can have an amazing concept, but if you don’t have the right people leading the charge, then it doesn’t mean anything, right?” Nguyen says. “I think my biggest takeaway in all this is that, when I look at my own experience, [Olive & Finch Collective] gives me more drive to make this industry and opportunity work for everyone equitably, whether you’re female or male, inexperienced or experienced.”
