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.