Panini and paradoxes: a Brixton café
How one independent business has held its own through thick and thin
You are in London and you are in a café. It doesn’t really matter which café or where, because the chances are it has a faux-rustic aesthetic, plenty of plug sockets for everyone’s MacBooks and its defining feature is what kind of bread the smashed avocado is served on. If you are in Brixton, you are probably at Canova Hall, a sleek, glittering mecca for millennial brunchers. But if you look thirty yards across the road, you will see the unassuming San Marino café hugging the corner of the high street and the market and inviting you in.
With its unpretentious décor and its food served in eco-friendly cardboard dishes, you could be forgiven for not deeming the setting Instagram-worthy enough to get excited at first glance. You could not, however, be forgiven for looking at the display cabinet and not drooling instantly. Your eyes skim across everything from elaborate pasta salads and bulging panini to an array of Sicilian snacks for the sweet-toothed. There are cannoli, cakes and something that looks like the red lovechild of an éclair and a doughnut all posing tantalisingly for the customers.
The hot menu is equally eclectic, but in a different way. Despite priding itself on its Italian roots, San Marino can serve you up a full English just as easily as a vegan or halal meal, and, as Mario Schifano (the owner of the business) tells me, the most popular option is his coriander chicken which, of course, can be served with a Venetian bread. I order my breakfast from Dorina, the manager, whose granddaughter is Mario’s goddaughter, and am served my latte made by the barista, his nephew.
Brixton has undergone gargantuan change in San Marino’s lifetime. Local novelist Alex Wheatle has claimed that “Brixton is losing its identity”, because what used to be an area bustling with neighbouring independent businesses largely belonging to the Caribbean community has been hit hard by the influx of big chains and the middle classes. San Marino’s existence has run parallel to this gentrification, but not as part of it. Himself born and bred in Brixton as the son of Sicilian immigrants — whose portraits hang modestly on the wall — Mario founded the café in 1993 and is now the only remaining independent on the high street. “We’re trying to beat the big corporates, the Prets, the Starbucks, the Costas of the world… It’s a battle against those guys”, he tells me as we sit in his establishment just a stone’s throw from Pret A Manger.
But San Marino is not quaint or insular. Mario used its closure during the first Covid-19 lockdown to renovate and revamp and will continue to do business during lockdown 2.0 through newly founded (if reluctant) dealings with Deliveroo and JustEat. The café has not just survived the uprooting of much of the local population, an economic crash and a global pandemic; on a more personal scale, Mario has stood at its door and defended it during riots — on one occasion, opening the very next morning to give free coffees to policemen.
Such warmth and sense of community is not just confined to San Marino’s four walls; it seeps from the café into the wider locality. As a member of the Brixton BID (Business Improvement District), San Marino has worked with Lambeth council to further the interests of the area. It fought the development which replaced Brixton market’s car park, the railway bridge which the café faces has Mario to thank for pushing for its vibrant makeover of green, black, yellow and red paint, and at one point, San Marino was the supplier of food for the local mosque.
And so, in an odd way, San Marino retains a few characteristics of the ‘old Brixton’ which many mourn: independence, family orientation and community spirit. Both quintessentially Sicilian and unapologetically multi-cultural, both moving with the times and resisting the gentrification of its beloved neighbourhood, and both a white-owned establishment but a constant in supporting the diverse population, San Marino is an intriguing mix of paradoxes that make it as unique as Brixton itself. If Brixton is losing its identity, this place is certainly helping to slow the process. In this case, the ‘which café’ and ‘where’ matter.
