The Marquise Cafe

Crepes, omelets and a French breakfast

The kitchen leads here, not the coffee counter. Crepes and omelets carry the French side of the menu, freshly baked breakfast items carry the morning, and the rest sits in the space between a Parisian café and an American breakfast room without committing fully to either. The chef-owner cooks for the room personally, which gives the place the character of a small restaurant rather than a café format dropped into a beach town. The morning pastry and bread come out of the same kitchen as the crepes rather than arriving off a delivery van. Coffee and tea are served, but they are there to accompany the food rather than to make a case of their own.

A beach-town café in a repurposed building

Treasure Island is a small barrier-island community on the Florida Gulf coast, between St. Petersburg and South Pasadena, and The Marquise Cafe sits in a building locals still know as the Taco Bus building. That history gives the room a modest, repurposed feel rather than a designed one, which suits the cooking well enough that the mismatch becomes part of the appeal. The rhythm is daytime first, breakfast and lunch through the week with brunch at weekends, and an evening service on top of that. The atmosphere is warm and casual, closer to a neighbourhood dining room than a polished café, and the French-leaning menu is a rarer thing on this stretch of the Gulf coast than the setting suggests.

How to approach it

Come for the food. The strongest reasons to go are breakfast, weekend brunch and a French-American lunch, and the named dishes are the place to start: a crepe if you want the French register, an omelet if you want the American one, and whatever has been baked that morning alongside either. This is not a specialty coffee stop and does not pretend to be; there is no roaster relationship or brewing programme behind the counter, and the drinks list stays where it belongs, next to the plate. What there is instead is a small kitchen cooking French fare in a Gulf-coast beach town, which is the whole reason to make the trip. Go for the crepes and the omelets, expect the room to be modest, and let the chef-owner's cooking rather than the fit-out carry the meal.