BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT:

Annie Morgan rises every morning around 2:30 a.m., drives through dark streets to her tiny restaurant at the far end of an Eastside strip mall, and sets to work preparing meals for the day.

The meals might go to a private school, a California State University chancellor’s meeting or a presidential candidate. Regardless, Morgan approaches her job the same way.

The owner of the Taste Buds restaurant and catering business on East 17th Street sets her alarm shortly after midnight, spends the next 20 hours or so in the kitchen or visiting clients, then calls it a day around 11 p.m.

Morgan, a Hawaii native, has been in the professional food business for more than a quarter-century, and not much can keep her from it — least of all sleep. The Newport Harbor High School alumna believes in using fresh local ingredients in her cooking, and that means getting an early jump each day.

“I’m not a fast food middleman, so I don’t go there,” she said Friday morning as she and her staff prepared 345 boxed lunches for Waldorf School of Orange County’s Grandparents Day.

“We start every morning preparing lunch from a fresh point.”

Taste Buds, which doubles as a restaurant Monday through Friday and has a flower shop on the side, packs hundreds of boxed lunches every day. The caterer’s main customer now is Carden Hall School in Newport Beach, which orders lunches daily, but it also covers special events for Waldorf, the California State University system and a number of private schools.

Oh, and Rudy Giuliani. Morgan catered a Newport Beach fundraiser for the Republican presidential hopeful this year, and her restaurant prominently displays a picture of the two shaking hands.

“It was quite the evening,” Morgan said.

Before Morgan and her husband, Charles, opened the Taste Buds restaurant in May, they had operated a catering business in several locations for more than 25 years.

The couple managed the Lido Diner for a time before purchasing a former consignment store in the East 17th Street strip mall and renovating it.

Morgan said despite her prestigious client list, she often focuses so intently on her kitchen work that she doesn’t know who the recipients are until later.

She got her break with the California State University system, she said, when the chancellor’s wife took one of her cards at a home tour that Morgan was catering; she didn’t realize until years later, when she was serving university officials every month, who the interested party had been.

“The presidents and the trustees know who I am,” Morgan said proudly. “They love my cookies.”

TASTE BUDS

LOCATION: 130 E. 17th St., Costa Mesa

SPECIALTIES: Restaurant, catering, flowers, special event planning

OPENED: May 2007

FOUNDERS: Annie and Charles Morgan

CONTACT: (949) 722-1177

MICHAEL MILLER may be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at [email protected].