Café Olli: a bread shop that also serves dinner

Café Olli is the stop we describe twice, because people keep trying to file it as a bakery and then getting confused by the pizza oven! It is a restaurant with a serious naturally leavened bread program, and Portland bread fans have been wondering how to do the visit without missing either half. We can FINALLY say the correct move, for us, is both: take the country loaf, then stay for the plate.

The counter is on NE MLK, in King. Siobhan Speirits and Taylor Manning opened Café Olli in 2021 after New York kitchens and Portland stretches at Ava Gene’s and Coquine. Speirits leads the bread and pastry side. Manning leads the savory kitchen — pasta, wood-fired pizza, the dinner that makes this place not-a-bakery. The project started as a worker-minded all-day café and has settled into the thing it actually is: a restaurant with a bakery habit, employee ownership in the mix, and a sister room, Ollini, across the parking lot for the weekends when the main room fills. We are not sending you on a scavenger hunt. We are telling you the loaf lives here, and so does lunch.

Walk in and we can also see why this room refuses to be just one kind of place. A massive wood-fired brick oven glows at the heart of the dining room, bright and a little rustic, with a patio outside that collects dogs and committed eaters on nice mornings. Loaves sit on the counter with dark, craggy crusts and peel marks still showing, the kind of naturally leavened bread that looks like it belongs next to a wood fire. The pastry case is not a side thought: blonde Danishes piled with potato, bacon, sour cream, and shaved cheese, knotted cardamom buns with sugar in the folds, and whatever Speirits decided was the day’s bake. It feels super MLK — a little hidden off the boulevard, cozy, the smell of bread and pizza occupying the same air — and that mix is the whole personality of the shop!

Naturally leavened, then the rest of the plate. That is the sequence we use because it is the honest one. The bread is not a basket afterthought. It is the first product. The country loaf is the must-get — dark-crusted, sometimes sesame-dusted, the loaf you carry out in paper if you are not sitting down, the loaf that also shows up under the toasts and sandwiches if you are. Ask for it like you mean it. If they have another naturally leavened loaf on the rack that day, it is a legal second, but we do not substitute the country loaf away.

Then the pastry case, because Speirits did not build a bread program and forget pastry. The potato-bacon-sour cream Danish is the savory-sweet we take when we want the pastry to eat like breakfast, all golden laminated dough and a creamy, salty middle. The cardamom bun is the one we take when we want spice and soft layers and we are already holding a loaf. Across the parking lot, Ollini is the relief valve on weekends — a smaller bakery counter for croissants, cookies, monkey bread, and those pastel de nata that sell down first — so if the main room is slammed and you only came for bread and coffee, THAT is where we send you. If you are staying for the plate, pizza and pasta are the restaurant half, and we are not writing a dinner review inside a bread journal. We are saying this is why the bread tastes like it belongs to a kitchen. The same people who ferment the loaf are cooking the rest of the day!

Know this before you go: decide before you park, loaf-and-go or loaf-and-stay, because weekend mornings fill and this is a restaurant morning, not a bakery pop-in. If you only want bread, get to the counter, take the country loaf, look at the pastry case, and leave before you get absorbed into a wait you did not plan for. If you want the full Olli, sit down near that oven. We keep coming because this is one of the few places where “naturally leavened” is the start of the sentence, not the whole personality. Take the loaf home. Eat the Danish in the car if you have to. If you stay, let the plate remind you why the crumb is the way it is!

Want the short version? It’s on the Café Olli page.