New Piccadilly Cafe

On Denmar street, just behind the tourist melee and the glaring lights of Piccadilly Circus, sits a treasure of an old fashioned cafe. The glow box sign of the New Piccadilly Cafe is just visible from the end of Shaftsbury Avenue, and has been a beacon to actors, playwrights, and students since the 1950s.

The look and feel of smart leather booths and smooth Formica surfaces makes it easy to glide back to the era when this cafe first opened. The menu is refreshingly simple, and offers the kind of home-cooked food that causes sentimental stirrings in the palate. A menu that has nourished beatniks and jazz singers, mods and rockers, struggling actors and homesick tourists has changed little to the present day. My favourite is the spinach and cheese carbonara (£5.50), delightfully stringy gorgonzola served with homemade pesto and parmesan served in kitsch glassware.

At the counter hums a bright pink coffee machine. Owner Lorenzo Maioni is reassuringly authentic as he polishes glass tumblers in the background, admiring his waiters' work from behind the billowing steam of the candy coloured machine. Waiters are over-attentive, the interior is cosy, the walls lined with promotional posters for West End productions, both in the coming week and over two decades ago. The wall of postcards from satisfied customers from all over the world confirm the cafe's status as a much loved piece of London's history.

If you're lucky, on a warm summer day you might find the place nearly empty, just an actor learning lines and a City old boy eating his regular meat and two veg dish, tried and tested over decades. Or on a winter weekend, craving warmth, you may find it bustling with people and laughter behind its steamy windows.

This is when you not only see that Mr Maioni is excellent at what he does, but also feel a slight deflation that the New Piccadilly Cafe is not only your secret to hold. I often see smug students taking their parents to the cafe, keen to show them that they have uncovered the real London. It always does the trick. It's the sort of place that, once discovered, pulls you towards it; any step near St James Park, or a mere glimpse of the increasingly grotesque Leicester Square, and the cafe cries out to you.

Today, however, the bewildering rise of land prices in London means the cafe is facing a fight to keep going. But, forty years after he took over the helm from his father, Mr Maioni seems philosophical about the Piccadilly Cafe's future, as though it is a question he is so used to answering that it rolls off his tongue.

"We will always have to fight, being as small as we are. But we will work it out, we always have."

He has no desire to see the building listed, as other historic cafes like the greasy spoon in Bethnal Green have been recently. If that happened, he reasons, his selling options in future would be severely curtailed.

But, for now, the cafe sits as a romantic reflection of how cafes used to be and, having seen through the fifties, the swinging sixties and the last few decades, I hope this gem of a place is allowed to continue and flourish as a rare outpost of old fashioned hospitality.