Keep the change

Redesign! Relaunch! To stay hip, Soho restaurants endure more make-overs than David Beckham. But Matthew Sweet knows a 1950s café where time stands still

The New Piccadilly lacks only one thing: a girl wearing a beehive and an A-line skirt, kissing off the excess with an Everly Brothers lipstick wipe. It has everything else that might convince you that beyond its cosy interior is a world in which Harold MacMillan is Prime Minister, Lady Chatterley is banned and Russ Conway's Warsaw Concerto is a serious piece of music. The pink enamel backing of the espresso-maker, the Festival of Britain-era squiggles on the Formica table-tops, the glass frothy-coffee cups (all originals, no reproductions), the twist of neon forming the glowing word EATS: little has altered in this Soho institution since it served its first plate of spaghetti half a century ago. Little, that is, except the clientele.

"I've seen 50 years of change in this place," says the proprietor, Lorenzo Marioni, whose late father, Pietro, founded the joint in 1951. "People and their mannerisms, attitudes, clothes. But the buzz is no longer around Piccadilly, it's moved to Old Compton Street and Greek Street now. We're a bit of a backwater here." The prostitutes who turned tricks in the nearby alleyways have long migrated elsewhere. The strip club next door, the grandly-named Casino de Paris, shut up shop years ago. And the Marionis, who once owned six cafés and trattoria on this narrow drag of Victorian buildings, have sold their premises, one by one, to the next wave of immigrants. Denman Street is now a row of tandoori restaurants, whose waiters hover outside the doorways, competing for passing pre- and post-theatre trade.

Over the years, all kinds of game have come to graze at New Piccadilly. The Soho gangster Albert Dines once sat here and told the young Lorenzo about his association with Prince Felix Yusupov, one of the conspirators who did for Rasputin and sought refuge in London in 1919. (After the poisoning and the shooting, Yusupov recalled, they had to finish him off with a metal chain before hoicking the body into the Neva.) In 1956, the café became a meeting point for Hungarian dissidents fleeing the Soviet invasion. (Lorenzo remembers the day when one of their number proudly showed his father a rival's severed finger, wrapped in a handkerchief.) Five years later, greasers with flick-knives were putting their feet up on the Formica tabletops. When the Marionis barred them from the premises, they returned with armfuls of rubble and unburdened the café of its windows. Wired glass ensured that the incident was not repeated.

Consequently, Lorenzo has little time for those who suggest that London has, in recent years, become a more dangerous place. Today's customers, he says, are much better behaved than their predecessors. But he misses the richer ethnic diversity of the Soho of his youth. "The whole place was a mixture of Italians, Greeks, Jews, Maltese and Irish. There was nobody English at all at my school." Which wasn't to suggest, he cautions, that these groups always got along. "Those Irish boys beat the crap out of me. But what you've got to remember is that only a few years previously, we were the enemy. We were the Eyeties, and all of us Italian kids were getting hammered."

When he was 13, Lorenzo found a solution. Pausing to look at a stuffed sturgeon in a local shop window, he noticed a card advertising judo lessons run by the brother of the wrestler "Tiger" Joe Robinson. Robinson was cast by Carol Reed as Diana Dors's boyfriend in the film A Kid for Two Farthings, and made a career for himself in Italy as the hero of sword-and-sandal melodramas. Dors, judging by Lorenzo's discreet response to the mention of * her name, was sometimes to be found sipping frothy coffee at the New Piccadilly.

Under the counter, Lorenzo keeps a stash of books on his favourite subject: the tribal history of Europe. Should you require any information on the history of the Lombards with your omelette and chips, he's happy to oblige. His own family history seems to have shaped this interest. In the first years of the last century, his maternal grandfather emigrated to Brazil to hawk icons, returned to Italy after his partner was killed by bandits, then departed again to try his luck in London.

Lorenzo himself was born in a village in the Apennines, not far from Pisa. His parents moved to London shortly after the Second World War to establish their catering business. He followed them in 1949, six years old and goggling at the sea, the white cliffs of Dover, and the gulls. Only a year later, he was put to work in his father's café, washing up and peeling the potatoes. Soon, however, it will be time for him to move on.

The redevelopment of Denman Street has already been agreed by Westminster Council, and it seems that only the recent wobbles in the world economy have delayed the developer's plans. When Robert Morley's character tried to bulldoze the cappuccino bar in The Young Ones, Cliff Richard, Melvyn Hayes and Carole Gray staged a musical protest in order to force him to reverse the decision. Lorenzo, however, is ready to go quietly. "I've been here 50 years," he says, "and apart from when I was in the army, I've been here on this street every day of my life. I've been here long enough." His problems are those faced by any small city-centre business: rising council tax and landlords who want the same rent from tenants like him as they can get from Starbucks and McDonald's. Lorenzo charges his customers 60p for a cup of coffee; 50p for a cup of tea: his profit margins are pretty skinny.

"This place used to make me a living," he reflects. "Now it's more like half a living. I'm the like last one on the ship. It's sinking, and there's only a little bit of it left above the surface of the water." There's not a trace of bitterness in his voice. "I'm standing there," he says, "smoking a Player's Navy Cut, and looking at the stars." *

New Piccadilly is at 8 Denman Street, London W1, tel: 020 7437 8530