Olive & Pearl was born out of survival, smoke, salt, and the sacred act of feeding people well.

This isn’t your typical glossy, Pinterest-friendly food brand with mason jars and microgreens (Although we do love a good mason jar). This is a rebellion disguised as hospitality. A brand forged in the chaos of childhoods half-raised by ghosts and fire, refined in cramped kitchens and coastal breezes, and unapologetically served with edge, elegance, and a side of profanity.

Our founder, Ollie, grew up in a remote village on Kodiak Island, where winters were endless, parents were complicated, and getting to school required a skiff, an axe, and possibly divine intervention. Her earliest memories are of cooking with a mother who could fillet a salmon while reading you for filth, and doing both with astonishing skill. The stakes were high. Food wasn’t a hobby. It was how you showed love, or the lack of it. It was survival. It was art.

Later, she escaped into design, graduating from FIDM in Los Angeles in textile design, chasing beauty in form and texture, learning how to layer color and meaning the same way she layered flavors. She worked the line, catered the events, plated with precision, wept into risottos, and burned herself on every surface imaginable—emotional and literal. Blending the casual elegance of coastal living with the grit and instinct of someone who knows what it means to make something from nothing.

But don’t get it twisted - Ollie didn’t just blow in with the California fog and artisanal vinegar. She may have graduated from FIDM, but she also graduated from Boise High, ran the mean streets of the North End back when it was still weird, and survived North Junior with a Walkman and a bus pass. If you know, you know. So please, kindly spare us your California transplant panic. Ollie had been splitting her time between Boise and Alaska longer than most folks have been buying kombucha at the Co-Op. She is  more local than the bitter bartender at Neurolux and twice as salty. There’s dirt under her fingernails from climbing the Black Cliffs, and the Sawtooth Mountains in her tread, and Ollie still remembers when Hyde Park was for punk kids and stoners, not strollers and Lululemon.

Twenty years on the California coast sharpened her palate and her bullshit radar. Between studio work, private chef gigs, and hosting dinners that felt more like curated rituals than meals, she began to realize something: there’s a hunger in people that goes far beyond food. We are starved for beauty, intimacy, presence, and connection.

That’s where Olive & Pearl was born—named for her great-grandmother (and Ollie’s name sake) and her daughter, a tether between bloodlines, eras, and the idea that food connects us across time and table. It’s a love letter to her past and an offering to the present: sensual, seasoned, soulful.

Olive & Pearl is a culinary studio, a lifestyle brand, a moveable feast. It’s catered experiences, edible art, and curated menus steeped in memory, regional flair, and just enough drama to be unforgettable. You’ll taste the ocean, the grief, the laughter, the madness, and the California light in every bite.

We serve real food for real people—people who like their greens bitter, their cocktails strong, their linens wrinkled, and their stories raw. People who’ve lived a little, lost a lot, and still want to set the damn table like it matters.

Because it does.