Up West (29 page)

There was only one place, though, where you could always find an actual selection of decent eateries, and this was Soho. Soho restaurants were famous as far back as the late eighteenth century, when the artist Sir David Wilkie sang the praises of the King's Arms in Poland Street. The food was simple, tasty, cheap, cheerful and, what is more, ‘we have all the advantage of hearing all the languages of Europe talked with the greatest fluency, the place being mostly frequented by foreigners: indeed, it is a very rare thing to see an Englishman; while there are Corsicans, Italians, French, Germans, Welsh and Scotch.'
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According to Richard Tames in
Soho Past
, a review of Kettner's restaurant in
The Times
towards of the end of the nineteenth century kick-started Soho's wider fame as
the place to eat. Before then, its establishments had largely catered to locals. Oscar Wilde loved Kettner's, and dined there often. Kettner's
Book of the Table
became a must-have reference work for anyone interested in things culinary. The founder of the restaurant, an Austrian, had formerly been chef to Napoleon III, Emperor of France. I don't know how he wound up bringing his skills from the French court to the modest, sooty surroundings of Soho in 1868, but we can only be profoundly grateful that he did.

France also sent us Maison Bertaux, which set up shop in Greek Street in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian war deposed Napoleon III. It is believed to be the very first French pâtisserie in London, and is still providing gorgeous cakes and strong, French coffee almost 140 years on. Sonia Boulter remembers that ‘They used to serve the most beautiful coffee cake, luxury, really nice.' I'll second that.

The 1886
Baedeker's Guide to London
recommended ten ‘cheap and good foreign restaurants in Soho', and more were to follow. Georges Gaudin opened L'Escargot around 1900, and this, too, survives into the twenty-first century. Around the same time as Gaudin was introducing the joys of snails in garlic to the English, there was a rash of theatre-building in the West End. The theatre crowd – audiences, players and the supporting cast of dressers, lighting bods, scenery shifters, stage managers, prompts and all – opened up a whole new trade to the enterprising restaurateurs in the area. Then, as now, audiences tended to eat before the show, while the players and the rest came after it, exiting
the stage door looking for food, good company and a place to unwind.

Gennaro's is thought to have been the first Italian restaurant in Soho. It opened its doors in Old Compton Street in 1909, but was bombed out in 1940, and moved round the corner to 44/45 Dean Street, where the Groucho Club is now. John Carnera was bought up in the flat above the restaurant, where his father, Secundo, was employed.

Many Italians love their opera, and the Royal Opera House is close by in Covent Garden, so, naturally, once Gennaro's had settled in, Italian singers and patrons, looking for a taste of home, soon found the restaurant and passed the good news on to their friends, colleagues and relatives. Both Caruso and Gigli ate there in their day, along with many another famous, and less famous, face.

Penelope Seaman wrote in
Little Inns of Soho
that 160,000 people had dined at Gennaro's in the previous year, suggesting that the English appreciated decent food, just as much as the visitors to our capital. ‘In the forties and fifties,' John Carnera told me, ‘it was one of the most famous restaurants in Soho. If you wanted Italian food, that was the place to go.' Mr Gennaro was a man who simply loved to serve his patrons, taking real pleasure from ensuring that people were both well fed, and served with courtesy, knowledge and charm. John Carnera described him as a ‘wonderful old Neapolitan, with a handlebar moustache. There was a rose in his lapel and he used to greet the ladies, “Ah, signora,” he would say and kiss their hands. He was a real old smoothie.'

‘Our aim is not to make money and get out – our business is to look after our customers,' John Koiza is quoted as saying in 1988 about Jimmy's, a Greek restaurant that was opened by his cousin, Jimmy Christodolus, in August 1949. It's a theme that keeps cropping up in reference works and in the interviews I conducted. Providing the very best in food and service really was a labour of love for Soho restaurateurs, and in many places it remains that way to this day.

Peppino Leoni opened the Quo Vadis restaurant in Dean Street in 1926 with just seven tables. By working hard and, most importantly, providing food of a consistently high standard, impeccably served, he saw his enterprise grow. He always felt that it was important to make a customer who wanted beans on toast and a glass of water as welcome as the customer who wanted a three course meal and a bottle of wine. This philosophy helped him build the place up until it was serving more than 450 meals a day in the tourist season, and a little over half that number in winter. He took pride in keeping up exacting standards, and employed seventy people to make sure that they did not slip. ‘My kitchen is not as clean as the Savoy's . . . the Savoy's is as clean as mine,' he assured Jeffrey Bernard when he was interviewed by him in the mid sixties.

Wheelers, in Old Compton Street, was one of my father's favourite haunts. During his time in Soho, it was a hangout for an arty, bohemian crowd. Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Deakin, Colin MacInnes and Daniel Farson were just a small handful of the regulars who could be found
knocking back white wine and oysters throughout the fifties. In the same period, Wheelers was offering more than thirty different recipes for lobster and the same again for sole, which illustrated that English fare didn't have to be dreary, and that inventiveness was alive and well in Old Compton Street.

Most of Wheelers's cooks at the time were Chinese – which may explain the diversity of the menu – but the boss was a Whitstable man, Bernard Walsh. He originally took the Soho property to sort his Whitstable oysters for the kitchens of the big London hotels, but as soon as he opened, he found that the local people kept dropping in to sample his shellfish. Oysters were thought to be an ace cure for a hangover, so eager local tipplers were often the first through the doors in the morning. Walsh decided to make his informal customers more comfortable, and built a bar for them to sit at. It wasn't long before he was running a full-blown fish restaurant and, over time, a modest chain of restaurants that were to become nationally – and indeed, internationally – famous.

In complete contrast, Pitta's, at 10 Old Compton Street, was a relatively cheap and cheerful place run by a reticent, retiring Greek Cypriot called George Pitta, who was rarely seen out of his kitchen. His fellow countrymen, Andy and Nick, waited tables, along with a red-headed waitress called Ruth. She was Irish, and had a prodigious memory, which made the service both efficient and friendly. Like all successful restaurants, they knew that good service always adds to the charm of a place. It is such a pleasure to be recognized, to have your favourite order memorized and to be made much
of. Of course, such treatment brings patrons back time and again.

I am pretty sure that Andy and Nick went on to found the Star, just a few doors down from Pitta's. Pitta's was the favourite haunt of theatrical people and artists of all kinds, whereas the Star catered for many musicians and, like Pitta's, also provided basic English food at reasonable prices. By the late fifties, diners had grown a tad more adventurous, so that the Star also offered a variety of Greek dishes.

Most of the places I have mentioned so far started life in Old Compton Street. If one street could boast so many good eating places, it isn't hard to imagine just how many there were spread around and about Soho as a whole.
Little Inns of Soho
lists twenty-six places that its author, Penelope Seaman, thought had something special to offer: they included representatives of France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Russia and Austria, all of them cooking away and enriching the gastronomic lives of Englishmen and women, as well as children like me and a good few of my interviewees.

Soho was also virtually the only place, apart from the docks, where you could find Indian and Chinese food in the decades after the war. Sonia Boulter grew up in Newport Dwellings, in what is now Chinatown, right beside where the pagoda stands today. Opposite her flat was the Canton – it is there to this day. ‘It was the second Chinese restaurant or café in the area that I can recall. That's going back to the forties.'

Maxim's, at the Wardour Street end of Gerrard Street, was the first Chinese restaurant in the area. It boasted a small band, complete with a bandleader, and there was music and dancing to accompany the food. ‘It was quite posh in those days,' Sonia Boulter recalls. ‘I knew Maxim's Chinese Restaurant very, very well, because my dad worked there. He was a barman. After school, I used to go down to the staff entrance, a long way downstairs, and I'd be fed by the Chinese people with noodles and that. It was the first place I ever had a lychee. I was eating Chinese food from about the age of eight [in 1948]. We didn't say no to any food in those days.'

At the time Sonia remembers, the area between Shaftesbury Avenue and Leicester Square was on the cusp of a massive change. It was about to metamorphose from a typically multicultural, working-class district of Soho, into the Chinatown we know today. Property was old and cheap, and was offered on short leases only, which made it cheaper still. The landlords were hoping to make a post-war killing on the land for redevelopment. Before the war, England's Chinese population of around two thousand souls had been concentrated in the docklands areas of Liverpool and in London's Limehouse. These areas had been battered by bombs, and after the war were flattened by the bulldozers that came to finish off the job that Hitler had begun. As well as losing their homes, the Chinese lost their jobs, as the authorities made it difficult for non-British nationals to sign on as merchant seamen. To top it off, much to the delight of
British housewives, the twin-tub washing machine had been invented, and was soon making its appearance in our homes: launderettes began to flourish, too. This was not good news for the traditional Chinese laundries that had flourished for decades, but now began to disappear.

Something had to be done, and, in the late fifties, Chinese businessmen and entrepreneurs began to move Up West and open restaurants. Earlier Chinese restaurants had catered mainly for their own people, but the war changed all that. Servicemen who'd been stationed in the Far East came back home with a taste for Chinese cuisine, and soon the restaurants began to flourish. Farm workers displaced by changes in the world rice markets flooded in from the Hong Kong Territories to staff the new restaurants. Not long afterwards, Chinese food outlets of one sort or another had spread beyond London, to towns and villages everywhere.

Indian food has had a place in our hearts since the sahibs and memsahibs who served in the British Raj brought a taste for its spices back with them on retirement to Blighty. Then, of course, there were the lascars, or Indian sailors, who had to eat when they arrived in our ports. Once again, military service in India during the war brought back men who loved the food, and they, in turn, introduced it to a wider range of appreciative stomachs. As a 1956 food guide, which lists four Chinese restaurants and two Indian in Soho alone, suggests, many Londoners liked to embrace cuisines very different from our own.

Italians returning to post-war London from the Isle of
Man and Canada, where they had been interned for the war years, were joined by a new wave of Italian migrants fleeing an economically depressed, war-battered Italy. With them, they brought trattorias. These were considered by Italian restaurateurs, such as Peppino Leoni of Quo Vadis, as cafés rather than restaurants. They were less formal for one thing, dispensing with crisp, linen napkins, heavy cutlery, sparkling glassware and courtly service in favour of brightly coloured Formica tables and counters, mirrors, mosaics, frescos and potted plants. They brought a little of the colourful Mediterranean to grimy old London and drew even more people into Soho – especially the young.

The coffee bar and espresso culture of the fifties also began in Soho, partly because of the large Italian community and partly because Gaggia had their first British premises in Dean Street. Achille Gaggia invented the espresso machine that bears his name in Milan in 1946. Pino Riservato, an Italian dental technician, set up Riservato and Partners to import the machines to England, and in 1953 got Gina Lollobrigida to open the Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street, England's first coffee bar, to show off his wares. The Moka claimed to be ‘patronised by over fifty nationalities', a claim to fame that typified Soho's pride in its traditionally multicultural appeal.

The advent of espresso was the beginning of the end for milk bar culture, which lasted well into the sixties, and even the seventies, in provincial towns. Mr Gaggia's shining machines transformed many traditional ‘caffs' and Italian
‘greasy spoons', which cut the grease and stodge from their menus and acquired a set of toughened glass cups and saucers (which not only looked modern, but also made sure that drinks soon got cold, discouraging those who wanted to linger all night over a single cup).

The colourful informality of trattorias and the all-important coffee bars made Soho the Mecca of the newly discovered teenager. Before the fifties, those who had reached their teens were just young replicas of their parents, on the cusp of joining Mum and Dad in adulthood – teenagers as a separate, distinct group with their own tastes and cultural influences, entirely different from the stifling conformity and rigid class structure of their parents and grandparents, were unknown.

The older generation had had their crack at running things their way, and two devastating world wars had been the outcome. It was time for change. It was time for the young to make their own, distinct mark on society. Teenagers began to create their own music and their own fashions and they were as radically different from what had gone before as it was possible to be. Many of them made the pilgrimage Up West to buy their new fashions and to hang out in the coffee bars, to socialize and set the world to rights.