The Olive Tree Cafe

The Olive Tree Cafe is a small daytime sit-in café further down Freeman Street, in the stretch heading out towards Hainton Square. The format is a traditional British breakfast-and-lunch café rather than a counter takeaway — a warm-welcome small-shop atmosphere with table service, a homemade-cooking ethos and a focus on locally-sourced ingredients. The café has won repeat customer plaudits on TripAdvisor where it carries a near-five rating with a strong placement on the platform's Grimsby listing.

The kitchen pushes a daily-changing list of specials alongside the standard all-day breakfast and lunchtime menus, and the headline dish is locally-landed Grimsby haddock in a house-secret batter served with chips and peas — an award-winning fish-and-chips line in a café rather than a chip-shop setting, which is unusual and is the thing reviews repeatedly mention. The room is wheelchair-friendly with easy level access and welcomes children. The Olive Tree sits in an unusual position on Freeman Street — most of the food shops on the arterial are late-night kebab and pizza takeaways, so a clean, well-run sit-down café in this part of the East Marsh gives it a distinctive role and a regular daytime base rather than the post-pub trade the surrounding shops chase.