BY CHUCK MYRON cmyron@news-press.com

Alice Jenkins had been looking for a nice, quiet coffeehouse near her San Carlos Park home. She thinks she's found it in Ollie's Coffeehouse, in the Preserve Plaza on U.S. 41, which opened for its first full day last week. Owner Vern Haney and his wife, Jane, planned for more than three years to open the place, and after their building contractor got sick and had to stop work, the Haney family finished the build-out themselves, putting up counters and molding and finally decoration. "I knew it was going to be here and I was happy to see it open because there was no place here like this", Jenkins said. "It's friendly and quiet and relaxing." Named after Jane Haney's aunt, Ollie Schoonover, the coffeehouse is being designed to combine a prototypically subdued, chilled-out coffeehouse atmosphere with top of the line pastries that will differentiate the establishment from chains like Starbucks. "I think our pastries just surpass everybody", Vern Haney said. "I think that's where we'll shine." Vern Haney's life has been food, ever since he took his first job as a bus boy at a Howard Johnson's restaurant in Michigan. He opened his first restaurant, Haney's Cafe, in Bonita Springs in 1995, and began a second location in 1997 in San Carlos Park, in the Best Western hotel across the street from the coffeehouse. He said he wanted to expand the business to provide more opportunities for his family, seven members of which work in one of his restaurants, and to have more room to operate his catering business. He found that renting side-by-side commercial condos in the then-unbuilt Preserve Plaza was just as cost-effective as warehouse space for storing catering goods and equipment. He invested close to $800,000 to buy two 1,900-square-foot spaces, one of which will house the Whatnot Sandwich Co., opening in a couple weeks. Whatnot, which will focus on light meals, and Ollie's will complement each other, Vern Haney said. "They can go over there and have a nice panini sandwich or a nice salad and come over here and have coffee and dessert", he said. The coffeehouse, sandwich shop and catering business will require about 25 to 30 employees, fewer than the cafe, he said, and that was the reason they're trying different themes. "It's so labor-intensive", he said. "We thought that we would look to find something that didn't require a whole lot of employees. We were having such a hard time hiring people". The coffeehouse provides an opportunity to enlist a different kind of help as well. Artist Pearl Donaldson will have her work hanging on the walls, and Haney said he might arrange a session for patrons to come to the coffeehouse and meet Donaldson sometime soon. "We're going to try to have a local musician on Friday nights", he said. It's the quiet and the coffee, not the extras, that make Ollie's worthwhile for Fort Myers resident and Edison College student Stephanie Hines, who works nearby. "I go to the Starbucks at Barnes & Noble a lot just because it's a bookstore, but if I was going to sit down and just study, I'd probably come here", she said.