Remember this iconic Tower restaurant? A Bay Area chef from Fresno’s recreating its burger
Do you remember Cafe Midi?
The restaurant and coffee shop in Fresno’s Tower District closed decades ago. But in its heyday during the 1960s and 70s, it was quite the trendy place.
Cafe Midi was on the corner of Fern and Maroa avenues, just down the street from Strummer’s. Now it’s boarded up, painted over and abandoned – and visited more by homeless people than the avant-garde crowd that used to sip espresso there.
Posts about Cafe Midi popped up on social media this week, particularly about its French burger and a new Bay Area restaurant recreating it.
Chef Paul Canales – who grew up in Fresno and left to become a big deal in the culinary world – was executive chef at Oliveto and owns Spanish restaurant Duende, both in Oakland.
He grew up in the Fig Garden area, graduated from San Joaquin Memorial in 1979 and later went to Fresno State.
This week, he opens Occitania, a Southern French-inspired restaurant that’s also in Oakland.
An Eater San Francisco story about the restaurant is making the rounds with a mention of Fresno and Cafe Midi’s French burger.
Canales remembers going to Cafe Midi as a kid and has recreated the burger for Occitania’s menu.
“Cafe Midi was such an amazing place and such an institution in Fresno,” he said. “It was the first place (in Fresno) that had a really amazing espresso and that kind of vibe like that, that you’d find in Berkeley or San Francisco.”
The restaurant’s 1964 opening played a role in turning the Tower District into the bohemian neighborhood that it is today.
You can read all kinds of colorful memories about Cafe Midi at LostFresno.com. User Carol said the place was full of characters, including the “glassy eyed drop out hung-over from the last hallucinate he’d taken, an old hermit, serious college students, some business people from the surrounding area and just looky-loos like me taking it all in with my post adolescent mind imagining stories about each character I stared at.”
Cafe Midi was founded by Mort Bennett, a military-trained chef in post war Germany (and father to Tower District regular and self-proclaimed “Fresno’s most offensive comedian” Jaguar Bennett).
Said Canales about Mort Bennett: “He was just the dopest dude. He just had that flair. It was just like being transported to a French cafe.”
Bennett later opened a second location, Caffe Midi II (and no, history does not have a definitive answer as to how the business name was spelled, with even their own ads featuring different spellings). It was at the northeast corner of Maroa and Shaw avenues, within walking distance of Canales’s home.
The Cafe Midi burger
“This burger was something that was etched into our memories as kids,” Canales said. “When it came time to do Occitania, I thought ‘Oh, we have to recreate the French burger.”
The original burger was on a French roll, with beef bought fresh daily from the Mayfair Market across the street, according to Fresno Bee archives.
Canales’s version is on a grilled baguette with garlic butter.
“What made that thing was Mort’s secret sauce,” he said. “I can taste it in my memory.”
Canales and his siblings recreated the sauce. The final version features green dijon mustard, Parmesan cheese, and aoili.
They’re a little unclear on whether the burger had caramelized onions and mushrooms or not, but the Occitania version does.
What happened to Cafe Midi?
In the early 1970s, Bennett moved to Berkeley, closing the original cafe and selling the second one, according to his son. The second location continued under the name The Peasantry for a while.
Bennett later moved to Virginia. He managed the dining facilities for the U.S. Senate and became part of “an intentional community of spiritual seekers.”
He died in 2010.
As for Canales, he still visits Fresno, though his parents have moved away.
A guitar player, he comes to the Tower District to play music with old friends. They’re recording music under the band name the Blackcoats and have a reggae band called The Wholesale Butchers.
Today, Cafe Midi’s rundown appearance would probably break the hearts of people who remember it fondly. The building was vacant for 27 years, before someone attempted to open a bar there in 2001, according to Bee archives. It never happened.
However, the street has caught the attention of city leaders and others lately, who hope to revitalize it.
A cannabis dispensary, Dr. Green Thumbs, is slated to open in the former Bank of America down the street.
Fresno City Councilmember Esmeralda Soria envisions the street with murals, brighter lighting, more police presence, and outreach efforts to aid the area’s unhoused residents.
This story was originally published June 3, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
