By Jeffery Fogg | This Is Topeka
TOPEKA, KANSAS — LOCAL DINING & COMMUNITY
There are restaurants you visit because they’re convenient. There are restaurants you visit because someone told you they were good. And then there are restaurants you keep trying to get into because you already know exactly what you’re missing.
Olive Cafe, now located near 17th and Fairlawn in Topeka, falls squarely into that third category.
We first discovered Olive Cafe back when it was downtown. And ever since its reopening, we’ve been trying to make our way back.
The problem? Every time we tried, the place was packed.
And, of course, we know why.
The food.
It’s always been about the food.
A restaurant worth waiting for
Some restaurants spend a fortune trying to convince you that they’re worth visiting. Others simply open their doors, turn on the kitchen lights, and let the food do the talking.
Olive Cafe has always struck us as the latter.
There’s something particularly satisfying about returning to a restaurant you enjoyed years ago and finding that the reason you loved it in the first place hasn’t changed.
A new location might bring new surroundings, a different dining room, and a fresh chapter in the restaurant’s history. But what brings people through the door, and keeps them coming back, is what happens in the kitchen.
For Olive Cafe, that’s the heart of the story.
We can talk about the crowds, the excitement surrounding the reopening, and how difficult it has been to find a time to stop in. But none of that matters quite as much as the experience of sitting down to a meal you have been looking forward to for months.
And when a restaurant has people willing to keep trying until they can get a table, that’s a pretty good indication that it’s doing something right.
And then there’s Tony
As much as we enjoy talking about great food, there’s another reason Olive Cafe deserves a little attention.
His name is Tony.
Tony owns Olive Cafe. He also owns Tony’s gas station on Sixth Street.
And if you want to understand what kind of person Tony is, consider this: he finds the idea of charging people for drinking water morally repugnant.
Not inconvenient. Not bad for business.
Morally repugnant.
Think about that for a moment.
In a world where practically everything has a price tag, where a bottle of water can become another opportunity to squeeze a few dollars out of somebody, Tony sees something fundamentally different.
Water is a basic human necessity. And to Tony, apparently, that means something.
But that’s not the only example.
At his gas station on Sixth Street, Tony also keeps Narcan available for his customers.
Narcan is a medication that can reverse an opioid overdose. It can save someone’s life.
And Tony makes sure it’s there.
Not because a gas station is a hospital. Not because he’s required to solve every problem in the community. But because he recognizes that sometimes the difference between life and death is simply having the right thing available when somebody needs it.
There’s something profoundly decent about that.
You don’t have to know the person who might need help. You don’t have to agree with every decision they’ve ever made. You don’t even have to understand how they ended up in that situation.
You just have to recognize that their life matters.
Tony gets that.
There are those who talk a big game, and there are those who just do it
I want to take a moment here to acknowledge someone else.
Mark Melton, from Dallas, Texas.
Since meeting Mark and his wife, I’ve found myself thinking about a particular distinction between the people who spend their time talking about making a difference and the people who simply get up every morning and make one.
As Mark put it:
There are those who talk a big game, and there are those who just do it.
It’s a simple observation, but one that has stayed with me.
And the more I think about it, the more I realize that recognizing those same qualities in the people around us is a pretty good place to start.
We have plenty of people in Topeka who work quietly, without fanfare, to make this a better place to live.
They don’t necessarily have foundations named after them. They don’t hold press conferences every time they help someone. They don’t need a camera crew following them around while they do something decent.
They just do it.
They open their businesses. They employ their neighbors. They feed people. They look out for someone who might be having the worst day of their life.
And sometimes, they make sure a person can get a glass of water without reaching for their wallet.
That’s the kind of thing that deserves recognition.
Good food brings us together. Good people make us a community.
There’s a reason we love writing about locally owned restaurants.
Yes, we love the food. We love finding a great meal, discovering a new favorite, and sharing those experiences with our readers.
But local restaurants are also part of the fabric of a city.
They’re where families gather, where friends catch up, where business gets discussed over lunch, and where the people behind the counter become familiar faces.
When you support a locally owned restaurant, you’re supporting the people who have invested their time, their money, and a substantial part of their lives into making something work right here in Topeka.
And every once in a while, you discover that the person behind that restaurant is doing a whole lot more for the community than simply serving a good meal.
That’s worth talking about, too.
Olive Cafe is the kind of place we keep coming back to because of the food.
Tony is the kind of person we’re glad to have in Topeka because of everything else.
And maybe that’s the point.
We spend an awful lot of time talking about what our city needs, what it could become, and who ought to be doing something about it.
Meanwhile, there are people like Tony who are already doing their part.
So here’s to Olive Cafe. Here’s to a restaurant that keeps people coming back. And here’s to Tony, who reminds us that being a great Topekan doesn’t necessarily require grand gestures.
Sometimes it just requires a good meal, a glass of water, and the willingness to look out for your neighbors.
Tony is the man. And Topeka is a better place for having people like him in it.
