Francesco Mazzei, head chef of L’Anima

L’Anima, a modern Italian restaurant near Liverpool Street station in London, opened six months ago to justified acclaim. The bright, white modern interior would not look out of place in a city centre in Italy. Small windows in the wall between the restaurant and the kitchen allow any interested diner a good view of not just what the chefs are preparing at the stoves but also when they are on their mobile phones.

No sooner had I sat down for lunch and taken in the wonderful, bustling scene than L’Anima’s owner, property developer and first-time restaurateur Peter Marano, asked me to leave. I hadn’t done anything wrong – he simply wanted me to see the surroundings. We went outside to look at the giant new 500,000 sq ft office development that sits above his restaurant and dwarfs it.

Marano, 50, is a tall, rangy Californian who came to London in 1986 and has ridden the highs and lows of its property market ever since. But he really wanted to own a restaurant. “I knew there was a market for an ambitious restaurant in this part of town because I had worked here for so long and I was fed up having to take the Tube to the West End to entertain my guests. If I felt like that, I was sure there would be many others who would.”

He was right. Siting a restaurant here is good for lunch business. Some 30,000 people, most of them earning high salaries, work within a five-minute walk. Although many of the City’s financial institutions are ailing, and expenses have been cut, Marano points out that there has been a compensating increase in bookings from other professionals, such as insolvency practitioners.

Liverpool Street is on the edge of the City, close to hip residential areas such as Shoreditch and Hoxton. To Marano’s delight, many of these affluent city dwellers like to eat out locally at night. As a result, the restaurant is now open on Saturday.

Marano’s conviction that this site would be successful was not reciprocated by the restaurateurs he approached as potential partners. Then, through a business connection, he met the chef Francesco Mazzei. Mazzei joined first as a consultant (he was chef at St Alban, in the West End, at the time) and then as a partner in the business.

Mazzei’s cooking draws its inspiration from Naples and the Campania region to the south. First courses include a warm salad of octopus, cannellini beans and ricotta; red shrimps with a tuna, anchovy and caper dressing; and crab avocado and carasau, the addictive Sardinian flat bread.

The heartiness of some of the main courses – Sicilian rabbit, a fish stew with couscous and slow-roasted pork belly – is balanced by a simpler range of grilled fish and meat. Desserts include the soufflé Mazzei is continually perfecting, and there is an excellent wine list overseen by Gal Zohar, an enthusiastic Israeli sommelier.

L’Anima has so far cost £3.2m, excluding initial operating losses and £500,000 incurred when a last-minute planning dispute delayed opening by seven months. Marano has permission to build an outdoor extension but that would mean closing the restaurant for at least a month.

Back at our table after the tour of the area, and speaking over a particularly good dish of tagliatelle with a duck ragu, Marano talked about the challenges of being a first-time restaurateur. “First, I didn’t think that I would have to work as hard as this. Second, I didn’t appreciate how easy it is to make a mistake when you’re dealing with the general public every day. And I certainly didn’t appreciate quite how obsessive people have become about food. I had Mazzei’s rendition of linguine with crab one night with several friends, one of whom mentioned it was cooked differently at another Italian restaurant in town. Within 24 hours I had e-mails from all of them detailing which version each preferred and why.”

In spite of the expense and the stress, there are, of course, some perks to being the owner of a very good restaurant. At the end of our meal Marano pointed to his stomach and said: “The funniest thing is that before L’Anima opened, as I was running around so much, I got thinner. Now, as the chefs are working so hard, they seem to be getting thinner and I’m putting on weight.”

L’Anima, 1 Snowden Street, London EC2; www.lanima.co.uk

nicholas.lander@ft.com
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