1 · Position
Marie and Martin Sénéquier opened a patisserie on the port in 1887. In 1930 Lisette Sénéquier decided to turn it into a luxury café alongside the original pastry shop — the second generation making the decision that defines the house, as at Chesa Veglia five years later. It was destroyed by bombardment in 1944, rebuilt and reopened in 1951 with the thirty-metre terrace, the director's chairs and the triangular tables, and added a brasserie in 2013.
2 · Why it is in the Library
Its nougat. Artisan nougat in Provence predates most of the café's competition by centuries, and Sénéquier has kept its own as a commercial identity in a town where every surface has been monetised — the product has not been repositioned or rebranded to chase a season. In a group full of houses that survived by reinventing, this one survived by declining to.
3 · Candour
⚑ One widely-repeated account gives the founding as 1930, which is the date of the café rather than the house; the Library follows 1887 and records the confusion. Chanel turned the quay and the café into a runway for its 2010–11 cruise collection, and Karl Lagerfeld — LHL-P-308 Elie Saab — was a regular for years: the refusal to change is itself now a marketable asset, which is a tension the entry states rather than resolves. Prices are widely reported as reflecting the location rather than the food.