Vittles Reviews: Adapt or Die
What is Bar Italia doing at Outernet? Words by Simran Hans.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review by Simran Hans is about the second branch of Bar Italia at Outernet, the diverging fates of I Camisa and Lina Stores, and what this all says about the survival of Italian Soho. If you enjoyed this edition, please also listen to Lucy Dearlove’s podcast on the Lost Food of Soho here.
A reminder there is only one more week to pre-order Issue 1 of Vittles. From 24 April, we still stop pre-orders and revert to the RRP of £20. Copies have been selling fast so we would highly recommend ordering one if you wish to guarantee a copy.
Finally, we have assembled a panel at this year’s British Library Food Season dedicated to the question ‘What is the point of a cookbook?, featuring Ozoz Sokoh, Rukmini Iyer, Sophie Wyburd, and Ruby Tandoh. The event will take place at the British Library on 28 April at 7pm. Tickets are £10 and you can buy them here.
If you’ve ever been to Bar Italia, your memories of it might have a cinematic, sepia tinge. I remember one particular Saturday night during the summer of 2017. It was 11pm and the sky was pouring out rain. The film had just finished and all the pubs were closing; a group of us made a dash for it. We wove through Chinatown and into Soho, beckoned by the neon glow of a familiar red and green clock. I remember cramming into Bar Italia’s long, narrow room and dripping over its tiled terrazzo floors. Everyone was drinking Peroni. I had mine with a cannolo.
Established on Frith Street by the Polledri family in 1949, Bar Italia has something close to mythical London status. It opens early, closes late and was immortalised in a song by Pulp. It is rich with Old Soho history and rooted in time. The engineer John Logie Baird hosted the world’s first demonstration of television at its address in 1926 (his legacy is honoured by a blue plaque, and by the Polledris with a large, flatscreen TV). In 2006, when Italy won the World Cup, dried pasta rained down on the 5,000 revellers who had gathered outside to celebrate. Inside, there are strings of Italian flag bunting and boxing gloves that once belonged to Rocky Marciano hanging proudly above the bar. The classic Gaggia coffee machine was recently replaced with a newer, shinier model, but otherwise, Bar Italia is unchanged.
Up until now, Bar Italia has been one of the few Italian institutions in Soho which has managed to resist selling out or closing up. The same cannot be said for its neighbour Lina Stores, which opened as a deli on Brewer Street in 1944 and in 2018 expanded into a fresh pasta chain restaurant backed by ‘hospitality incubator’ White Rabbit Projects. Yesterday, Lina Stores opened its tenth location, in Manchester. Meanwhile, its longstanding Little Italy competitor, the deli I Camisa & Son, announced it was closing its doors last summer after more than 60 years of trading. If this is the forecast, the climate looks bleak. How will Bar Italia survive?
In a recent podcast interview, the place’s industrious owner Antonio Polledri teased what sounded like a plan. ‘It will be all hands on deck to get it up and running,’ he explained of his decision to open a second, smaller café. When I learned where it was, I giggled. A five-minute walk north of Old Soho, next to Tottenham Court Road station, is Outernet, an ‘entertainment district’ and corporate advertising space that I’d best describe as future dystopian. From a distance, it looks like a hulking, sci-fi cube, panelled with Times Square-style digital billboards. This ‘immersive brand experience’ houses an art gallery with floor-to-ceiling wraparound screens and two music venues in its bowels. It’s a clinical £1 billion spectacle, but dodge past the soulless brand activations and tourists catching augmented reality butterflies on their phones and you’ll find the second Bar Italia, nestled among blaring screens.