Our History
In 1984, Alice Waters wanted to open a French cafe where she could
serve delicious little dishes to her friends and guests without all
the complications of a serious restaurant. The menu would be simple,
the cafe wouldn't need a real kitchen--just an oven, an espresso
machine, and a couple of steamers for poaching eggs.
Café Fanny is named after the exquisite heroine of Marcel
Pagnol's 1930's Marseilles movies (as is Alice Water's daughter)
because she wanted to evoke their spirit: an ideal reality where
life and work were inseparable and the daily pace left time for the
afternoon anisette or the restorative game of petanque, where eating
together nourished the spirit as well as the body-since the food
was raised, harvested, hunted, fished and gathered by people sustaining
and sustained by each other and by the earth itself.











