Rick's Café

This guide to Rick's Café in Casablanca starts with an inconvenient truth: the bar from the 1942 Hollywood classic Casablanca was a Warner Brothers soundstage, and no version of it ever stood in this city. It follows Kathy Kriger, an American diplomat who quit her job after watching the towers fall on television in 2001, determined to prove something by building the fictional café for real. She bought a crumbling 1930s courtyard mansion by the old medina walls, financing its restoration through a company she named, half-joking, the Usual Suspects.