Telephone: 020 7351 0761
Address: 7 Langton Street, London SW10
Dinner for two, including wine and service, is around £80.
Late on the evening of 3 June, the day of the golden jubilee pop concert, a venerable Italian restaurant called La Famiglia at World's End in Chelsea received a panicked phone call from backstage at the Palace. The show may have been a success but the catering hadn't been up to much; there were dozens of ageing rock stars and their bands desperate for something to eat. Could La Famiglia's kitchen rustle up some pasta? The restaurant agreed and, for the rest of that night, the simple white and blue-tiled trattoria, hung with its collection of black-and-white photographs, was filled with rock's aristocracy, some of them with both their own hips.
Alvaro Maccioni, the imposing Tuscan who first opened the restaurant in 1976, will not say who was there that night. But as those who have previously dined there includeTony Bennett, Bryan Adams and Eric Clapton, all of whom were also on the bill at the Palace, it's not hard to picture the scene. Naturally Alvaro tries to claim that such celebrity patronage is relatively unimportant. 'Every person who walks through the door here is an important person,' he says, with the kind of confidence that only a constant a-list clientele allows.
It has always been like this. In the 1960s, Maccioni was the Oliver Peyton of his day, an entrepreneur who knew how to attract the beautiful people. He arrived in Britain in 1958 and, after working as a chef and waiter, much of it with two Italians called Mario and Franco, often described as the godfathers of London's Sixties trattoria boom, he opened his own place on the King's Road. It was called, simply, Alvaro's and was soon so popular that he decided to take its number out of the phone book. Bridget Bardot went there and so did David Bailey, Michael Caine, Jean Shrimpton and Princess Margaret. Soon he was successful enough to open his own nightclub, Aretusa, and a chain of restaurants followed. In 1972 he sold out to the Golden Egg chain (think Pizza Express, only with eggs) and returned to Italy.
Within three years he was back. 'In Italy I was the Englishman,' Maccioni says now. 'So I thought I'd just open a small place here that would tick over. This is the only thing I know how to do.' La Famiglia was again an immediate success; it took just days for the 45-cover restaurant to be serving 90 people a night. Today it can seat 210, courtesy of its covered terrace heated year-round by portable burners.
As to the food, it is straight-up Tuscan. With the likes of Locanda Locatelli and Zafferano now on the scene, the menu can look almost quaint, a throwback to the days of wicker-bound Chianti bottles, but when it first appeared it was ground-breaking. Maccioni can tell the usual 1960s horror stories about being sent to the chemist's when he wanted to buy olive oil, and recalls a long debate at a restaurant he worked at in Soho about whether the customers would ever go for the exotica of spaghetti with clams.
The key, he says now, was just to be brave. 'In 1966 at Alvaro's we had sun-dried tomatoes on the menu,' he says. 'I knew what they were because my wife is Sicilian. My biggest problem, though, was getting the customers to understand. Sun-dried tomatoes? they would say to me. What are these, old tomatoes? My job was to educate people.' Today's menu at La Famiglia is roughly what it has always been, which is not surprising given that its chef, Quinto Cecchetti, has been there practically since day one (as has Gigi, the maitre d', who started out at the original Alvaro's). 'I like to tell my staff they are on a week's trial,' Maccioni says, and he may only be half-joking.
He argues, reasonably, that there is no such thing as 'Italian food'; only food from the various regions of a country called Italy. Accordingly, anybody who has spent time in and around Florence will recognise the dishes served here: the great panzanella salad made with tomatoes, basil and bread, dressed with garlic and glugs of olive oil; deep-fried courgette flowers and baby artichokes; angel hair pasta with shavings of summer truffles; salt marsh lamb with garlic and rosemary; and, of course, Bistecca alla Fiorentina, the charcoal seared T-bone served only rare, whatever the well-heeled punters may want. At £18.50 it's the most expensive dish on the menu.
'A lot of Italian restaurants in London have lost touch with their roots,' he says, dismissively, of food fashions. 'I say to my chefs that if you can cook like your mother then you are a good chef, but if you can cook like your grandmother then you are a great chef.' And then, displaying the turn of phrase that made him the darling of the press in the Sixties, he adds: 'To change a dish from any menu is to change a child in the family.' Though only up to a point: he admits that when veal became deeply unfashionable, he simply took it off, until he could find an organic source.
As to the future, he has it all planned. 'The happiest day of my life will be the day I drop dead here on the floor,' he says, pointing to a spot on the terrace just in front of the doors. Having a dead body in the middle of the restaurant may not go down well with the health and safety people, but doubtless his long-time customers will appreciate the gesture.
