The Italian influence on British food and restaurants|: From Castelvetro and Casanova to Mario and Franco
Created | Updated Jul 4, 2009
INTRODUCTION
A new book, The Spaghetti Tree; Mario and Franco and the Trattoria Revolution - part social history, part biography, traces the Italian invasion of British restaurant culture during the heady days of the early 1960s.
Britain’s post-war love affair with Italian food was largely shaped and coloured by the extraordinary influence of two Italian men, Mario Cassandro and Franco Lagattolla who opened their famed La Trattoria Terrazza in London’s Soho in 1959. It was to be the start of a restaurant revolution which was to change the way we eat out now.
An edition of the BBC Radio 4 Food Programme, based on the story of the book, and including interviews with author Alasdair Sutherland and several characters from the book, was broadcast in June 2007.
Tom Jaine, food historian and former editor of The Good Food Guide, looks at the context:
*****************
There is a long history of Italian influence on English food, ever since Giacomo Castelvetro, on the run from the Inquisition in 1614, advised his patron Lucy, Countess of Bedford, on the best ways to cook and serve vegetables (anything, you may think, would be better than boiled cabbage, English-style). A later visitor from Italy, Giacomo Casanova – whose greatest reputation lies in other fields of endeavour – was happy to dine in London taverns save for their inexplicable refusal to serve soup with their dinners. Had he come to the capital a hundred years later, in the reign of Queen Victoria instead of good King George, he would have found stracciatelle and minestroni aplenty in the small Italian restaurants that offered home cooking to their fellow countrymen.
How that was all to change as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth. What had been a small foreign enclave opened its arms to the city at large. City gents and West End swells flocked to Soho in search of relaxation. But that food was for the most part French in character and inspiration, whatever the nationality of waiter or chef, whatever indeed the avowed identity of the restaurant itself.
For the first time, in the late nineteenth century, English restaurants emerged that might be recognisable today. Before 1890, no woman of position could be seen dining out in public, but when César Ritz, manager of the newly opened Savoy Hotel, began to offer dining rooms for private entertainment and hospitality, the practice very soon became fashionable. If such notables as Lady Randolph Churchill and Consuela Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough, could be seen to arrive at the Savoy’s private rooms to dine on Maître Chef Auguste Escoffier’s concoctions, it would not be long before everyone else was ordering from the same menu, in public, downstairs. Dining out in company became not only acceptable, but respectable and, eventually, positively chic.
Very soon, the norm in the grand places was that Italian waiters served French food to their English customers. The catering field, from the grandest hotels to humble corner cafés, became an unrestricted open door for immigrant labour in Victorian Britain – especially the Italians.
Ten years into the new century, there were several thousand Italian waiters, chefs, bakers and confectioners in London alone, while 500 Italians owned cafés and restaurants and at least another thousand were in domestic service. The Ritz Hotel opened in 1905 and, as in the other grand palaces, its restaurant served an Anglo-French menu, with French titles and French wines. Like the others, it was managed and mostly staffed in front of house by Italians and in the kitchens by Frenchmen. It was Sir George Smith, Chairman of the Savoy Group of hotels in the 1930s, who first coined the phrase “Dans la salle les Italiens, dans la cuisine les Français.” For nearly seventy years, this was the system which worked so well in British restaurants, both grand and less so.
When Mario and Franco decided to leave the grand surroundings of The Mirabelle to start up on their own, the catering and restaurant business was still stuck in a pre-war time-warp, on the whole with very low standards. In 1947, bread, petrol, sugar, bacon, jam, oatmeal, semolina and macaroni were still all rationed. Restaurant meals were limited to three courses, which always included soup and cost a maximum of five shillings (25p). Short of food and luxuries during the war, the British had learned not to complain. If anyone did, the standard reply was always “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” Little remained of former grand restaurants beyond out-of-date ceremony, and only a few family-run hotels and restaurants, in which the food was prepared by a dedicated professional, maintained anything approaching 1930s standards.
Onto this scene of French cooking, sometimes with a mild Italian twist, and sometimes with a cheerful Italian ambience, burst the former waiters Mario Cassandro and Franco Lagattolla, when they opened their first restaurant, La Trattoria Terrazza, in Soho in 1959. It was the first in Britain to serve the kind of simple Italian dishes to be found in a neighbourhood trattoria in Italy. The authentic Neapolitan food, informal setting, wide appeal and value for money made their restaurant very popular, and soon it became a place where the many different worlds of early Sixties London – artists, writers, actors, journalists, politicians, film people, advertising and business, all merged together.
This social and gastronomic success was made the more memorable when in 1962 their friend, the designer, Enzo Apicella, transformed the visual framework for their cooking: out went the Chianti bottles, the fishing nets and the slightly cheesy Italian mural, and in was ushered the new look of the tiled floors and white plaster walls of southern Italy. The effect was electric and has proved extraordinarily influential on restaurant design in Britain and abroad.
From its Soho roots, Mario and Franco’s empire and influence spread across the country and over the next few years, many Terrazza employees left to open their own trattorias, using the same formula, the same style and very often the same designer. Several of the young waiters who arrived to work at La Terrazza in the Sixties are now the successful, grey-haired proprietors of respected Italian restaurants across London, the Home Counties and as far from Soho as Leeds and Bristol. Their restaurants, and the staff who worked in them, have played an important role in the lives of several generations, because those trattorias were much more than just somewhere to go for lunch or dinner – they helped transform the UK restaurant landscape.
It will always be a matter of debate – if not arm-waving argument – which innovation contributed the most to the way we live, cook and eat today. Was it the rise of the French-style bistro? The emergence of an English cohort of chefs and restaurateurs? The spread of chain restaurants that combined speed, economy and style? The pervasive influence of television and popular education? Claims could be made for each of them, but the part played by Mario and Franco and their Trattorias should never be discounted. At the outset of a thrilling decade, they seemed to offer a potent recipe for living: one that encompassed visual style, good things to eat and drink, conviviality. On the one hand, they tolled the parting knell to red plush and carpets, and on the other, their food was lighter, simpler, more directly flavoursome than had been available for many a long year.
The effect was immediate, electric. And it had longer-term consequences. The new generation of English men and women who came onto the restaurant scene in the Seventies and Eighties took note of their success. The centre of gravity of restaurant cooking shifted eastwards and southwards, away from our apparently ineluctable homage to all things French, towards an exploration and celebration of the Mediterranean and Italy.
If statistical analysis were made of the menus of new restaurants in the twenty-first century, it is likely that Italian dishes would outweigh those of any other culinary style.
In the last fifty years, Mario and Franco’s Italian influence has changed not just the food we eat, but also our ideas about the values of simple cooking, quality ingredients, and freshness. In addition to bringing us their food, the Italians have taught us their enjoyment of eating and the role a good meal has in celebrating life, love, friendship or a good day at the office – as well as making great compensation for a bad one.
Note: this article first appeared in Taste Italia Magazine.
The Spaghetti Tree: Mario and Franco and the Trattoria Revolution by Alasdair Scott Sutherland, was published by Primavera Books on April 1 2009 ISBN 978-0955789205
A new book, The Spaghetti Tree; Mario and Franco and the Trattoria Revolution - part social history, part biography, traces the Italian invasion of British restaurant culture during the heady days of the early 1960s.
Britain’s post-war love affair with Italian food was largely shaped and coloured by the extraordinary influence of two Italian men, Mario Cassandro and Franco Lagattolla who opened their famed La Trattoria Terrazza in London’s Soho in 1959. It was to be the start of a restaurant revolution which was to change the way we eat out now.
An edition of the BBC Radio 4 Food Programme, based on the story of the book, and including interviews with author Alasdair Sutherland and several characters from the book, was broadcast in June 2007.
Tom Jaine, food historian and former editor of The Good Food Guide, looks at the context:
*****************
There is a long history of Italian influence on English food, ever since Giacomo Castelvetro, on the run from the Inquisition in 1614, advised his patron Lucy, Countess of Bedford, on the best ways to cook and serve vegetables (anything, you may think, would be better than boiled cabbage, English-style). A later visitor from Italy, Giacomo Casanova – whose greatest reputation lies in other fields of endeavour – was happy to dine in London taverns save for their inexplicable refusal to serve soup with their dinners. Had he come to the capital a hundred years later, in the reign of Queen Victoria instead of good King George, he would have found stracciatelle and minestroni aplenty in the small Italian restaurants that offered home cooking to their fellow countrymen.
How that was all to change as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth. What had been a small foreign enclave opened its arms to the city at large. City gents and West End swells flocked to Soho in search of relaxation. But that food was for the most part French in character and inspiration, whatever the nationality of waiter or chef, whatever indeed the avowed identity of the restaurant itself.
For the first time, in the late nineteenth century, English restaurants emerged that might be recognisable today. Before 1890, no woman of position could be seen dining out in public, but when César Ritz, manager of the newly opened Savoy Hotel, began to offer dining rooms for private entertainment and hospitality, the practice very soon became fashionable. If such notables as Lady Randolph Churchill and Consuela Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough, could be seen to arrive at the Savoy’s private rooms to dine on Maître Chef Auguste Escoffier’s concoctions, it would not be long before everyone else was ordering from the same menu, in public, downstairs. Dining out in company became not only acceptable, but respectable and, eventually, positively chic.
Very soon, the norm in the grand places was that Italian waiters served French food to their English customers. The catering field, from the grandest hotels to humble corner cafés, became an unrestricted open door for immigrant labour in Victorian Britain – especially the Italians.
Ten years into the new century, there were several thousand Italian waiters, chefs, bakers and confectioners in London alone, while 500 Italians owned cafés and restaurants and at least another thousand were in domestic service. The Ritz Hotel opened in 1905 and, as in the other grand palaces, its restaurant served an Anglo-French menu, with French titles and French wines. Like the others, it was managed and mostly staffed in front of house by Italians and in the kitchens by Frenchmen. It was Sir George Smith, Chairman of the Savoy Group of hotels in the 1930s, who first coined the phrase “Dans la salle les Italiens, dans la cuisine les Français.” For nearly seventy years, this was the system which worked so well in British restaurants, both grand and less so.
When Mario and Franco decided to leave the grand surroundings of The Mirabelle to start up on their own, the catering and restaurant business was still stuck in a pre-war time-warp, on the whole with very low standards. In 1947, bread, petrol, sugar, bacon, jam, oatmeal, semolina and macaroni were still all rationed. Restaurant meals were limited to three courses, which always included soup and cost a maximum of five shillings (25p). Short of food and luxuries during the war, the British had learned not to complain. If anyone did, the standard reply was always “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” Little remained of former grand restaurants beyond out-of-date ceremony, and only a few family-run hotels and restaurants, in which the food was prepared by a dedicated professional, maintained anything approaching 1930s standards.
Onto this scene of French cooking, sometimes with a mild Italian twist, and sometimes with a cheerful Italian ambience, burst the former waiters Mario Cassandro and Franco Lagattolla, when they opened their first restaurant, La Trattoria Terrazza, in Soho in 1959. It was the first in Britain to serve the kind of simple Italian dishes to be found in a neighbourhood trattoria in Italy. The authentic Neapolitan food, informal setting, wide appeal and value for money made their restaurant very popular, and soon it became a place where the many different worlds of early Sixties London – artists, writers, actors, journalists, politicians, film people, advertising and business, all merged together.
This social and gastronomic success was made the more memorable when in 1962 their friend, the designer, Enzo Apicella, transformed the visual framework for their cooking: out went the Chianti bottles, the fishing nets and the slightly cheesy Italian mural, and in was ushered the new look of the tiled floors and white plaster walls of southern Italy. The effect was electric and has proved extraordinarily influential on restaurant design in Britain and abroad.
From its Soho roots, Mario and Franco’s empire and influence spread across the country and over the next few years, many Terrazza employees left to open their own trattorias, using the same formula, the same style and very often the same designer. Several of the young waiters who arrived to work at La Terrazza in the Sixties are now the successful, grey-haired proprietors of respected Italian restaurants across London, the Home Counties and as far from Soho as Leeds and Bristol. Their restaurants, and the staff who worked in them, have played an important role in the lives of several generations, because those trattorias were much more than just somewhere to go for lunch or dinner – they helped transform the UK restaurant landscape.
It will always be a matter of debate – if not arm-waving argument – which innovation contributed the most to the way we live, cook and eat today. Was it the rise of the French-style bistro? The emergence of an English cohort of chefs and restaurateurs? The spread of chain restaurants that combined speed, economy and style? The pervasive influence of television and popular education? Claims could be made for each of them, but the part played by Mario and Franco and their Trattorias should never be discounted. At the outset of a thrilling decade, they seemed to offer a potent recipe for living: one that encompassed visual style, good things to eat and drink, conviviality. On the one hand, they tolled the parting knell to red plush and carpets, and on the other, their food was lighter, simpler, more directly flavoursome than had been available for many a long year.
The effect was immediate, electric. And it had longer-term consequences. The new generation of English men and women who came onto the restaurant scene in the Seventies and Eighties took note of their success. The centre of gravity of restaurant cooking shifted eastwards and southwards, away from our apparently ineluctable homage to all things French, towards an exploration and celebration of the Mediterranean and Italy.
If statistical analysis were made of the menus of new restaurants in the twenty-first century, it is likely that Italian dishes would outweigh those of any other culinary style.
In the last fifty years, Mario and Franco’s Italian influence has changed not just the food we eat, but also our ideas about the values of simple cooking, quality ingredients, and freshness. In addition to bringing us their food, the Italians have taught us their enjoyment of eating and the role a good meal has in celebrating life, love, friendship or a good day at the office – as well as making great compensation for a bad one.
Note: this article first appeared in Taste Italia Magazine.
The Spaghetti Tree: Mario and Franco and the Trattoria Revolution by Alasdair Scott Sutherland, was published by Primavera Books on April 1 2009 ISBN 978-0955789205
