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.