The spaghetti tree

Part cultural history, part biography, part sixties memoir, The Spaghetti Tree is a picture of the era when modern restaurant culture first emerged in Britain. This book tells the story of the transformation of Britain's food and restaurant scene, from the days when eating out was a luxury for the middle classes only, and most of us believed spaghetti did grow on trees, to today when there are three Italian dishes in Britain's ten favourite meals. In the last fifty years, the Italian influence has changed not just the food we eat in Britain, but our ideas about the values of simple cooking, quality ingredients, and freshness. But the principal reason why Italian food first became popular in Britain has been forgotten - except perhaps by a few who were there at the time. When Mario Cassandro and Franco Lagattolla opened La Trattoria Terrazza in Soho in 1959, they were the first in Britain to serve the kind of simple food to be found in a neighbourhood trattoria in Italy. La Terrazza became the most popular and fashionable restaurant in London - the new place where the artists, writers, actors, journalists, politicians, and musicians who were to transform Britain in the 1960s, merged together. At the same time, the Terrazza changed the way restaurants looked, as Mario and Franco's designer Enzo Apicella threw out the traditional carpets, wallpaper and candelabra of 1950 restaurants and brought in the intimate downlights, tiled floors and white plaster walls which came to be known as Trattoria style. When Terrazza manager Alvaro Maccioni left to open his own place, the scandal made the headlines and the trattoria revolution started to spread across London. Other young Italians jumped on the bandwagon, opening their own restaurants with Mario and Franco's design, formula and menus - and sometimes with their staff and their customers. Modern British European restaurant menus and much of our restaurant design has evolved from the Mario and Franco model, and fifty years later, it is clear than Mario and Franco were the most influential restaurateurs, and Enzo Apicella the most influential restaurant designer, of the British 20th Century. The author was a London restaurateur in the 1960s and 70s, and his colourful and fascinating story is given depth both from his personal experiences and from interviews with many of the leading characters of the Trattoria Revolution. For fifty years, Britain has enjoyed a deepening love affair with Italian cooking, an affair which was born in the first trattorias when Italian food was new, fashionable and delicious, which grew and strengthened because it was different, full of colour and variety, and finally blossomed later at home, as we learned it was also healthy, inexpensive and easy to prepare. And this love affair started at Mario & Franco's Trattoria Terrazza.