Think Italian, and what’s likely to come to mind is food: basil and tomatoes, pizza, ice cream, flirty waiters, cappuccino. This is an entirely natural way for a Londoner to picture Italy. There are Italian eateries on every street corner: from high-end after-opera restaurants to pizzerias and old-fashioned sandwich-and-coffee bars (still gamely fighting off the transatlantic challenge from Starbucks et al).
But something strange is happening. The Italians are vanishing. If you ask the people writing “mozzarella and prosciutto” or “Quattro Stagioni” on café blackboards where they come from, you’re likely to discover that they’re from somewhere completely different. Some are Albanians, for whom Italy’s Adriatic coast is at least a natural first port of call. Others have never been near Italy at all. The nearest place to The Times for lunch, on Pennington Street, is a slightly scary, purple-walled, Thai-themed, cocktail bar and disco by night; by day it serves delightful cheap Italian salads. Two beautiful blondes work there: one Hungarian, the other Ukrainian.
It was Pedrag who first opened my eyes to the unannounced population shift. He was a twentysomething Iranian with liquid brown eyes. I met him in a government detention centre, from where he was about to be sent home. (He’d been kicked out of university in Iran three years before for some student prank, got worried that the authorities might imprison him and decided to try his luck as an illegal immigrant here. Eventually he’d been picked up.) He wasn’t sorry to be leaving England. His mother was ill, and he wanted to nurse her. Anyway, he’d run out of steam with his extended unofficial gap year. So he was full of smiles and stories.
“What have you been living on?” I asked.
“Oh, I had lots of jobs, at pizza restaurants,” he answered happily. “You think the waiters are Italian – but everyone where I was working was Iranian. The word goes round. People tell you where to go, and you join the team.”
Pedrag’s patch had been in north-west London, around the Harrow Road. He’d ended up in one (Iranian) pizzeria whose closest competitor had been full of Iraqis. (But now, he added darkly, “The Kurds are moving in.”)
I’ve been looking out since then. In Clerkenwell, London’s Little Italy, where even the driving school is (mind-bogglingly) called the Italian Driving School, I stopped for a cappuccino recently next to a travel agency painted in Italian colours. The waiter was watching Portuguese TV. In Kentish Town, the Italian café on one side of the high street is staffed by Romanians. Its rival, over the road, has a Belarussian waitress.
Part of the reason for the change is that London Italians, descended from people escaping the upheavals of Risorgimento and war from the 19th century onwards, have assimilated. It’s only in the last generation that they’ve finally been accepted. Elena, the tiny 80-year-old matriarch of Elena’s L’Etoile, a gloriously Italian restaurant in Charlotte Street, has grandchildren who can’t speak Italian and don’t want to do what they think of as immigrant work in restaurants; but she also remembers Italians being treated as suspicious foreigners. She grew up in the slums of Clerkenwell and went to the Italian school attached to the Italian church, St Peter’s. You couldn’t get an office job with an Italian name in those days; you could go into catering, or lay parquet, or do asphalting. So girls like Elena didn’t think twice: they got jobs in restaurants. Elena remembers London children from the nearest school sneering “spaghetti eater” at her; and when the war came, two policemen tried to intern her elderly father. She gave them a piece of her mind, and they went away with red faces; but plenty of other London Italians – including Mr Bianchi, her first restaurant boss – did spend their war in camps on the Isle of Man, labelled enemy aliens.
These days, the waiters Elena hires are, mostly, Italian from Italy. But she’ll give anyone a chance if they want to work. The only thing she has no patience with is immigrant self-pity. She fired a black employee once for complaining that a waiter who’d called a terrible day a “Black Tuesday” was being racist. It’s always hard to set up in a new country: but you’ve just got to get on with it, she believes. The success of London Italians today is her best proof that this inner toughness can work.
But, if a new generation of foreigners is following in the Italians’ footsteps, and going into immigrant-friendly catering, why aren’t they also following Italian footsteps by selling their own national food from their own restaurants? Admittedly, the crowds might not flock in for Belarussian slabs of meat and pickled cabbage. But Iranian or Hungarian cuisine is delicious.
Partly, perhaps, it’s because many newcomers are still too unsettled here to be able to. Asylum-seekers or illegals can’t get their hands on the money, documents or loans this would take. They take what work others give them.
But I like to think that there’s more to it.
London Italian food is as sunny and happy as any back home. But what makes it taste so delicious to us is more than a memory of la dolce vita. There’s also a taste in it of immigrant success: of ignoring prejudice and making an unexpected marriage of national styles that suits everyone. Londoners are still not too sure about foreigners. But one of our more internationalist gestures is the ritual sinking of the nose into the cappuccinos that we’ve made as much ours as tea.
The Italian experience here, which every immigrant must hope to emulate, is one of hope rewarded: making the best of an imperfect situation, and making it all come right in the end. If today were my first day as an immigrant to London, I’d be making a beeline for the nearest no-nonsense Italian café to ask for a job.
E-mail vanora@timesonline.co.uk
