Italian café culture

Welcome to the world of formica and frothy coffee: it's the 1950s Italian café. But soon it will disappear as the coffee empires take over London's streets. So visit the New Piccadilly while you still can.

After World War 2, London saw an influx of Italian immigration. Today you have to look pretty hard to find the reminders of this post-war Italian invasion.  But some gems survive.  Like - the New Piccadilly on Denman Street in Soho, owned and run by Lorenzo Marioni, who has been working here since the early fifties, it is a magnet for café aficionados such as writer Adrian Maddox author of the bible - 'Classic Cafes'.

According to Adrian, The New Piccadilly "is really the St Paul's Cathedral of cafes". He celebrates the style and feel of the place: "What I love about it so much is just that all the detailing left from that Festival of Britain era.  You've got the amazing UFO light fittings, you've got the astounding colourful range of laminates, the sort of grey, the reds, the yellows.  You've got the amazing horseshoe menu with, you know, all the dishes on which has been there for centuries.  You've got the classic café chair and that's a sort of big feature in these kinds of places and finally you've got the New Piccadilly menu itself, a design classic and a sort of graphic masterpiece in its own right and pretty well the same display of dishes its had since, you know, the early fifties and all of them every bit as good today as they were then."

At the end of the war lots of Italian families settled in London - and many of them ended up in Soho. They brought a welcome splash of colour and style to a dour post war capital. And Italian coffee bars became the place to be seen but now independent café's like Lorenzo Marioni's are rarity. Why? Let Lorenzo explain;

"Its just high overheads, rents, rates from the council and of course there's limits to what you can actually charge people for this sort of environment and product.  Now you get the big money boys, no names mentioned of course, they are just swamping the area.  I mean, they are so big, these people want to be intergalactic and that"s how it is and the little one off sort of Momma and Papa set up, you just can’t compete and now this is the last one really.  The last of the Mohicans, catering Mohicans and, I mean, I should be retired sort of thing, you know, pottering around in the shed at the bottom of the garden really but I’m still here, I want to be the guy that switches the lights off. "

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