About Our Chef

Highlights of Chef-Owner Marianne Powell's career:

• Worked various restaurants including Andreotti's Viennese Cafe and Wild Orchid.
• Ran own catering business.
• Culinary degree, Walnut Restaurant School.
• 1995, opened A Little Café.
• Philadelphia Magazine cover.
• Philly Cooks Chef Competition Best Dessert award
• Zagat-Rated Excellent 11 years in a row.

About A Little Café (from "New Jersey's Top 125 Chefs")

A Little Café is a dazzling restaurant emblazoned with vibrant colors. Small in size as the name states, this restaurant serves creative hip food, ringing with flavor in portion sizes that are anything but small.

Uplifting vibrant colors are everywhere, creating a kaleidoscope of color in a candlelit room usually packed with well-contented customers.

The vivid mix includes fresh flowers, walls hand-painted with flowers and grapes, peach ceiling tiles painted with little green leaves, purple valances, and purple linens and mauve napery. Even plates are a rich color mix of green, orange, red, and purple. Salt and pepper shakers are hand-painted. Should a morsel be left behind, a beautiful purple takeout bag will be at your disposal.

... Today, A Little Café remains one of the area's culinary gems, and Marianne Powell's catering business is more successful than ever and takes on bookings for private romantic couple dinners on up to extravagant events for 400 people.

Dining at A Little Café begins on a high note. Everyone gets started with tomato slices, coated in Japanese bread crumbs and in a pesto sauce. Nice crunchy outside—pesto adds the right zing—what a thrill; and it's complimentary.

Four soups created each day are characteristically rich, hearty, and flavorful—not for dieters, but certainly "to die for."

A mushroom soup was luscious. A little peppery heat brought out a beguiling flavor in a velvety textured soup flush with little mushroom bits. It was a generous bowl size portion, but simply too good not to finish.

Crab cigarettes can be addictive, but not harmful; jumbo lump crab meat is rolled in crispy paper thin crepes and served with a spicy red chili dipping sauce. Crispy wonton wrapper triangles layered with sesame-seared ahi tuna, mango-and-avocado salsa, and drizzles of a wasabi aioli are called ahi nachos and arrive in an abundantly generous, intricately stacked configuration. Filet of Norwegian salmon crusted with walnuts is finished with a banana berry brown butter sauce. Enjoy a full rack of lamb encrusted with pistachio nuts laced with a cabernet sauvignon demi glace.

Up to eight specials are added to the menu each night, such as Grand Marnier flambed boneless duck breast, escargot with a shiitake mushroom brandy cream sauce, and French crepes with shrimp in a Dijon champagne sauce.

Desserts are exceptional and Chef Marianne Powell's signature white chocolate bread pudding won "Best Dessert" at the 2004 Philly Cooks Chef Competition.