‘When I first moved to London in 1999, the Italian food here was awful,’ says Masha Rener – head chef of Lina Stores' restaurant. I laugh, but she is deadly serious about the crimes committed against her national cuisine. ‘The pasta! I don't know what they used to do to the pasta, it was like it was left in water overnight! Then it would be dressed up with a bit of tinned tomato sauce and some terrible Parmesan. It was bad. Really bad.’
We can all laugh about it now of course – most of us anyway. London’s food scene has come on leaps and bounds in the last twenty years, and when Masha returned to the capital last year, she barely recognised the city and the food. ‘There’s so much more competition now,’ she says, ‘and this makes everyone better. You can find good Italian food quite easily in London now. I went to Bocca Di Lupo recently, and honestly, it was better than a lot of restaurants in Italy.’
Lina Stores has been a bastion of quality since 1944, when the eponymous Lina set up shop in Soho and started importing the best of Italian salumi, cheese, dry goods, wine and more. One suspects that the fresh pasta – made daily in the shop – is just as good as anything you’d find in Italy, and Masha is carrying on that tradition at the new restaurant, serving up pasta dishes that would feel just as at home served in the cobbled and colonnaded streets of Bologna as they do in the bustle of Soho. As for Masha herself, her upbringing in Italy’s gastronomic heartland has made her the perfect person to take on the kitchen at Lina Stores.