About us
The story of Café Fausse
The only thing false is the name.
Founded in 2010 by Chef Antonio Rossi and restaurateur Maria Lopez, Café Fausse blends traditional Italian flavors with modern culinary innovation. Our mission is to provide an unforgettable dining experience that reflects both quality and creativity.
Since 2010 · The people behind the room
Since 2010
A lie on the door
In the spring of 2010 Antonio Rossi and Maria Lopez signed a lease on a former bookbinder's workshop in Washington and argued for three weeks about the name. Antonio wanted his mother's. Maria wanted something nobody would mispronounce. Antonio's cousin from Cagliari, shown the shortlist over dinner, laughed and called every name on it falso — a café that wasn't a café, a borrowed name over an Italian kitchen, a menu that changed with the weather. Antonio's answer became the house motto: falso il nome, vero il sapore — the name may be false; the flavour is true.
They kept the joke. Café Fausse would be the only false thing in the building: bread baked from four in the morning, stocks made from bones, pasta rolled by hand, a wine list tasted bottle by bottle, and thirty tables — never more — so that Maria could know every guest by the second visit.
All these years on, the bookbinder's press still stands by the bar. The menu still leans on Antonio's mother's recipes and the Chesapeake's best ingredients. And the name still gets a raised eyebrow, which is exactly what it was for.
Let the name be the only lie in the building.
The founders
The people behind the room
AI-generated portrait of a fictional person. Antonio Rossi
Founder & Executive Chef
Raised above his parents' trattoria in Modena, trained in Bologna and Lyon, and cooked in New York for a decade before opening Café Fausse in 2010.
Recipes are true or false. The name on the door can be whatever it likes.
Antonio RossiFounder & Executive Chef Read Antonio’s story
Antonio Rossi learned to cook by standing on a crate at his mother's stove in Modena, where the family trattoria served the same eight dishes for thirty years and nobody complained. He left at nineteen for the hotel school in Bologna, then spent four years in Lyon learning, as he puts it, "what the French do to butter."
In 1996 he moved to New York, cooking his way from line cook to chef de cuisine in two Manhattan dining rooms. He met Maria Lopez in 2006, when she hired him for a single private dinner and then refused to let him leave the conversation.
At Café Fausse he cooks the food he grew up with, made with the ingredients he found here: Chesapeake fish, Piedmont beef, Appalachian mushrooms. His rules are short and posted above the pass: taste everything, waste nothing, and never send out a plate you wouldn't serve your mother.
- Trained
- Bologna, Lyon, New York
- First dish he learned
- Tortellini in brodo, age nine
- Off duty
- Fishing the Potomac, badly
- Favourite dish on the menu
- Tiramisu — his mother's recipe
- Often told
- That his portrait looks like Jesus meets Columbus. He takes both as compliments.
AI-generated portrait of a fictional person. Maria Lopez
Founder & Restaurateur
A restaurateur and sommelier from San Antonio who spent fifteen years running dining rooms in Washington before co-founding Café Fausse.
Hospitality is remembering. The rest is furniture.
Maria LopezFounder & Restaurateur Read Maria’s story
Maria Lopez grew up in San Antonio in a family where Sunday lunch lasted until dinner. She paid her way through Georgetown waiting tables, discovered she was better at running the room than the economics department wanted to hear, and never left hospitality.
Over fifteen years she managed dining rooms across Washington and earned her sommelier certification along the way, building a reputation for remembering every regular's name, table and wine. She met Antonio Rossi in 2006 at a private dinner she had organised; by dessert they were planning a restaurant.
Maria runs the front of house, the wine list and the business. She still seats guests most evenings and tastes every bottle before it reaches the list. The thirty-table limit was her idea: "any more and I stop knowing who you are."
- Studied
- Economics, Georgetown University
- Certified
- Sommelier
- Signature move
- Remembering your wine from three visits ago
- Favourite dish on the menu
- Vegetable Risotto with a glass of Nebbiolo
What we promise
Our commitments
Unforgettable dining
Excellent food
Locally sourced ingredients
Recognition
Awards
2023
- HonourRestaurant of the Year
- HonourBest Fine Dining ExperienceFoodie Magazine
2022
- HonourCulinary Excellence Award