Mourn the passing of Soho’s Camisa deli but share the blame

The writer is a first-generation Italian living in Soho

Panettoni are stacked so high in its window that you can barely see into I Camisa and Son, the Italian deli on Old Compton Street. Boxes of the Christmas sweet bread also hang from the ceiling. Shelves are packed with wines, tinned delicacies, pastas. The original owner, Isidoro Camisa, told his staff to keep the shop full to the brim to give an impression of “plenty”.

The family name Camisa has been on a shopfront in Soho since 1929. This month may be the last. The owners have announced that it will close after Christmas. There is not enough custom, too much rent.

The locals are grieving and celebrities have been telling newspapers about their love for the store. There’s an anger that central London has failed a splendid small specialist shopkeeper. Is the anger misplaced?

The story is that the Italians were kind enough to bring the wonders of their cuisine to enliven the drab English diet — and that our losing Camisa shows ingratitude. They certainly did change the way we eat. When actor and food writer Stanley Tucci included London as Italy’s honorary 21st culinary region in his recent television series Searching for Italy, Camisa, of course, featured.

But the “plenty” of their table was a myth. The Italians who arrived in London were hungry. By 1927, there were 15,000 of them, many from the north, mainly coming after the first world war. A much larger wave came in the 1950s and 60s, mostly from the south where poverty was profound.

Sicily, now on the culinary tourist trail, could not feed its own people. The social activist Danilo Dolci recorded, in 1952, seeing a child dying of starvation in his mother’s arms.

Over those same decades, the Brits escaping suburbs and grey country towns met modern life in Soho. There was film, rock’n’roll, sex — it was the red light district — and a new frontier: continental food. It was thrilling.

As economic migrants, often ill-educated, needing work permits, the Italians found an abundance of work, money and dolce vita around Berwick Street market — food shops, vegetable stalls and cafés filled and run by fellow Europeans — French, Spanish, Jewish. My mother still pines for a Jewish bakery there that’s long gone.

Exotic supply met unrationed demand. The two sides fell in love. Those calling for Camisa to be saved — the last gasp of this romance — see it as the last original Italian delicatessen. (It isn’t actually: the family sold up in 2014 to Alivini, an Italian import company.)

Rapacious landlords are too easy a target. Camisa’s landlords made concessions on rent in the pandemic but now want it back at pre-Covid levels. Rents have indeed risen since 1929, but they were always a stretch. My father ran cafés in Soho in the 1970s and claimed he gave up because of the rent.

In reality he, like many other working-class foreigners, left because he’d made a success of it. Families moved to the suburbs as their children grew up to become engineers, financiers, journalists. This is the real immigrant dream: to not have the next generation run the family shop.

Replacement waves keep coming: there are great Turkish and Albanian cafés on Berwick Street, Lebanese, Korean — and even some decent English restaurants now.

But one trouble for Camisa is that it is not so special anymore. In 1971, there were just over 30,000 Italian-born Londoners. When Britain ran the post-Brexit EU settlement scheme, over half a million applied. Although not always as fine as Camisa’s, Italian food is now available on every supermarket shelf and in a restaurant in almost every town.

The anger at the closure of this much-loved institution may more legitimately be directed at Londoners themselves. Those who weep at Camisa’s demise must also ask: when did they last go there for a panini and when did they last go to Pret A Manger? Have they asked to work from home and contributed to the decline in daytime footfall in Soho — one reason Alivini cites for the tills not ringing? Do they have Jamie Oliver’s supermarket range of tortellini in their fridge?

Businesses can’t survive on nostalgia alone.