Jacqueline Mearman has fond memories of growing up in Millersville on a 10-acre piece of property with various uncles, cousins, and her paternal grandmother, Vivian.

“We rode go-karts and dirt bikes and spent most of our time outside,” she recalls. “In the summer, we’d eat crabs on her porch, then jump in her pool.”

Vivian passed away when Mearman was 10, but left an indelible impression thanks to her penchant for bright nail polish, mowing the lawn in a bathing suit, and passion for flashy Stingray Corvettes.

So, when Mearman, founder of Kitsch Hospitality (including Kitsch Café in Remington, and Tuscany-Canterbury), was getting ready to open her fourth restaurant on the site of the former Rize + Rest space, it was an easy decision to name the all-day Patterson Park cafe after her grandmother, Vivian. (For the record, she was close with her maternal grandmother, too, but her name, Shirley, was already taken by another popular local breakfast spot.)

“If you’re going to break your back and put all this work into opening a restaurant,” says Mearman, “you might as well give credit to the people who helped raised you.”

How did Vivian’s come about?
My husband stopped in to say hi to Rize + Rest owner Randall Matthews, because we all worked at the Four Seasons together, and it set the conversation in motion. He was looking to get out, and we were interested in a new concept that would be another second-generation space. We walked the property and thought it was perfect for us.

What did you want to do with your menu?
We started with smaller bites, salads, and sandwiches. When we signed the lease, we had no plan of leaning into breakfast as much as we have, because Pie Time was across the street, and we didn’t want to be competitive. But once Pie Time announced its closure, there was a void. Our bestseller is a sandwich with two eggs, breakfast meat, cheddar on a brioche bun with a special sauce of chile, mayo, and maple [pictured above]. Our menu has a lot of seasonality.

What did you want the vibe to be at Vivian’s?
We wanted to create a nice third space for people to feel comfortable. Where are people most comfortable? A grandparent’s home. I literally pulled the color scheme of Vivian’s sunroom—peach, sage, and olive—it’s absolutely adorable.

How did you initially get into cooking?
I wanted to build space shuttles and go to the Naval Academy—I was dead set on it. My mom was, like, “When you’re an aeronautical engineer, you have to sleep in a sleeping bag on the shuttle and live in Florida,” so like everyone else in my family I went to tech school. I signed up for culinary arts and baking pastry and loved it.

I’ve heard you won a few baking awards…
My tech teacher had this saying, “If you stick with me, you’ll be wearing diamonds.” He would push me so hard—he was a Marine. I would be decorating a dummy cake and he’d walk by and run his finger through it and say, “Do it again.” Eventually, he told me it was time to compete and I won a state-level award for cake decorating. The second year I came in second in the nation for a commercial baking award—it got me immediate acceptance, and half tuition, to the Culinary Institute of America.

Having worked mostly in corporate pastry jobs—from Disney World to Four Seasons Baltimore and most recently at Atlas Restaurant Group—owning a tiny cafe is new territory for Jacqueline Mearman.

“As small and simple as this operation is operationally, every single step of my career has gotten me to this point of being able to run this operation and make it make sense,” says Mearman.

Indeed, her charming 400-square foot cafe in Tuscany-Canterbury, which features egg sandwiches, house-made chicken salad, and vegan smoothies, opened in October of last year and is not only surviving, but thriving, as a carryout cafe.

“People ask me when we are going to have indoor seating,” says Mearman. “I’m like, ‘We are just across from Stony Run Park—we have the largest outdoor dining anywhere,’” she says.

How did you get into pastry?
To get out of math and science class, I took baking and pastry at CAT-North (the Center for Applied Technology) in Severn. About a semester in, I was like, “Oh, I really enjoy this, and I think I’m pretty good at it.” I was lucky to have figured out my passion at an early age. From there, I went to the CIA [Culinary Institute of America] and graduated by the time I was 20.

Who was your most memorable mentor?
I go back to my teacher, Pete Akerboom at CAT-North. I would be practicing for competitions and icing Styrofoam cakes again and again and he was the kind of guy who would run his finger through it and say, “Do it again.” He’d correct how I scraped the bowl and even how I scraped the dough off my hands—I still do it the same way he taught me at that age of 16. The food industry is very militant, but baking has a special place for the constant perfection of things.

So why did you decide to open a cafe?
In culinary school, every person had to say what they wanted to do with their degree and every person wanted to open a bakery or a cafe. I was like, “Y’all are crazy.” But once the pandemic hit, it was the constant opening and closing of [Atlas] restaurants and having [to wear] a mask and laying off people. We had to make difficult decisions because we were in survival mode—it felt like my dream job was just gone.

What gave you the courage to take the leap?
I live in an apartment building, and the first floor was a cafe that’s been closed for the last two years. I called the leasing agent and when he told me what the rent was, I sat my partner down, and he was like, “We can do this.”

How did you come up with the concept?
We were limited with what we could do in such a small space. When we signed the lease, we had no idea what we were going to do. First, we thought we’d have deli sandwiches, and then one night we were like, “Breakfast sandwiches!”

Those hoping to start their day with a delicious egg sandwich in Tuscany-Canterbury will soon need to look no further.

Kitsch, a cafe offering griddled egg sammies, La Colombe coffee, a small selection of pastries, and locally sourced snacks, is aiming to open the week of October 12 on the ground floor of The Carlyle Apartment Homes on West University Parkway near the Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus. Owner Jacqueline Mearman, former executive pastry chef for Atlas Restaurant Group, and her team will serve up quality egg sandwiches—as well as some non-traditional specials.

“We’ve got a few surprises,” Mearman says. “It won’t just be all egg and cheese.”

The cafe is using bread from Stone Mill Bakery that will be griddled (instead of toasted) using Made In cookware on induction burners, “so that we have a really consistent product,” Mearman says. “With our experience in fine dining, that’s the goal, even if it’s an egg sandwich, it still needs to be a quality product.”

Customers can build their own sandwiches and select different cheeses, meats, and veggies. A rotating specialty sandwich will always be on the menu, and will probably be “a little over the top,” according to Mearman.

Although Mearman has previously worn many hats within the restaurant industry—including working as a sous chef and even a distiller—most of her career thus far has focused on pastry. In keeping with that background, there will, of course, be a limited selection of sweet treats.

“I am doing a very small pastry offering because I don’t think I’d be able to get away with not doing it,” she says with a laugh.

Expect desserts such as a to-go cheesecake trifle made with local chutneys and a fudge-like chocolate bar filled with butterscotch, pretzels, and marshmallows.

Speciality coffee roaster La Colombe, out of Philadelphia, will provide the coffee, but Mearman says just about everything else will be sourced from around the region—including the hand sanitizer, which comes from Mount Royal Soaps in Remington. Wild Kombucha products, from Mobtown Fermentation, will also be available. Other locally sourced snacks include Capitol Kettle Corn out of College Park and beef jerky from Landcrafted Food out of Southwest Virginia. (Mearman says the Cajun-flavored sticks are a can’t-miss.)

All will be easy to grab-and-go out of Kitsch’s 400-square-foot space, which Mearman is renovating herself.

She says that the cafe’s inception was nothing short of serendipitous. The concept came after seeing the space, which went up for rent at a low price while Mearman and her partner, also a chef, were quarantining in their home—which is very close by—this spring and summer. The size and location of the space, coupled with the makeup of the neighborhood, called for something easy and efficient, but still delicious.

When the space became available, it was also a time when the restaurant industry was very much in flux due to shutdowns from COVID-19.

“We knew and accepted that we were going back into an industry that was going to be a complete 180,” Mearman says. “And it was very disheartening.”

She made it one month back at her previous job before she realized it wasn’t nearly the same, and some of the issues facing the restaurant industry were more prominent than ever.

“This is something that [famed Momofuku founder] David Chang is talking about a lot right now—that our industry, in more recent years, even before COVID-19, is kind of going off the rails,” Mearman says, “We have employees that don’t make livable wages. A lot of times they don’t really have training available to them to move up. It’s just something that’s been talked about in the restaurant industry for the last few years. Why are we working 70 hours a week? Why don’t we have lives? Why don’t we have time for our families and our kids, if we have them?”

Mearman sees Kitsch as a place to start changing the narrative, and to create a better work-life balance for herself and her staff. She supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15, and plans to pay that rate to her employees. Her workers will also all begin at the same level and learn every task required to make Kitsch run smoothly.

The cafe also has a community-focused mission, with one percent of proceeds benefitting two local organizations dedicated to health education.

“We really believe in the city,” Mearman says. “If I can just create five jobs for people that don’t have them right now because of what’s happened [with COVID-19], or give a little bit to these organizations so they have just some way of growing and improving our community, then I’m happy. That’s the most important part to us.”

Kitsch will be open 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday. But Mearman hints that once breakfast gets rolling, she won’t stop there. She has plans to host an evening pop-up inside Kitsch down the road. Stay tuned.