Italian restaurant designer firmly rejected the ‘candle in a Chianti bottle’ aesthetic
Life Story
‘‘I believe that even today, you can’t go to an Italian restaurant in London without seeing my mark.’’ Enzo Apicella in 2012
Enzo Apicella, who has died aged 96, was an Italian designer and cartoonist who became a well-connected and much-loved fixture of Swinging London, helping the city to slough off its reputation for culinary blandness with his innovative restaurant designs.
‘‘I believe that even today, you can’t go to an Italian restaurant in London without seeing my mark,’’ Apicella declared in 2012. Among his best-known works were his designs for Pizzaexpress, founded by the English entrepreneur Peter Boizot in Soho in 1965 to make real Italian food available in London at a reasonable price.
Apicella had no interest in authenticity for its own sake, and persuaded Boizot to back his own distinctive look, rather than traditional Italian designs.
Until then, as food writer Matthew Fort put it, ‘‘most [British] people’s experience of Italian food was out of a tin . . . Pizzaexpress, with an Enzo Apicella design of tiled functionalism and cool funk, offered something better. The democratic sophistication of what quickly became a chain was as much a part of the capital’s zeitgeist in the 1960s as the Beatles, Carnaby St and cannabis.’’
It was all very different from what Apicella had found on his arrival in London in 1954, when Italian restaurants in the city numbered fewer than 10, and tended to an uninspiring mixture of old-fashioned and kitschy.
The exuberant, mustachioed Apicella seemed to know everybody and was at the centre of a raffish group of artists, designers and the like that ate together regularly in the 1960s, including David Bailey, Terence Conran, Eduardo Paolozzi and Len Deighton. He ensured maximum publicity for one of the restaurants he designed, San Frediano, by squiring Christine Keeler and Mandy Ricedavies to the opening night party.
Reviewing that restaurant in 1967, The Times’ critic observed that ‘‘as the sun shines in on Apicella’s walls, you almost have the feeling that the Fulham Rd is running down to the Arno, not the Thames.’’
His first foray into restaurant design came in 1962 when he redesigned part of La Trattoria Terrazza, set up in Soho by Mario Cassandro and Franco Lagattolla, which, uniquely at that time, offered authentic Italian food. Apicella, a friend of the owners, repeatedly complained about the ‘‘bunch-of-plastic-grapes, candle-in-chianti-bottle, picture-of-vesuvius-in-eruption’’ decor until he was permitted to improve on it.
Apicella’s friend Deighton, the thriller writer and gastronome, recalled his unusual method of approaching his work: he would spend hours sitting in the restaurant doodling plans on the tablecloths. ‘‘Enzo never took the tablecloths away with him and I sometimes wondered if he did it just to annoy Mario.’’
Apicella combined his career as a designer with regular work as a cartoonist for Punch, Private Eye, The Observer, Harpers & Queen and many Italian periodicals. Although he specialised in political satire, which became more mordant as he grew older, he also became well-known for his sophisticated and usually captionless cartoons about restaurants and food.
He also designed several covers for Penguin Books in the 1960s and illustrated many cookery books, as well as more eccentric works such as Jonathan Routh’s Good Loo Guide.
Vincenzo Apicella was born in Naples, the son of a local councillor whose love of literature fired his son’s creativity. Enzo studied languages and then signed up for the Italian Air Force in 1942, on the grounds, he said later, that by that stage of the war there was only one plane left. He then moved to Rome, going to film school before becoming a journalist and self-taught freelance designer.
After setting up an opera magazine in Venice that quickly folded, he went to London with £200 in savings. ‘‘I spent all the money on a big party. I invited all the Italians in London and all the money went on food and wine. The party lasted for 15 days,’’ he recalled.
He went on to design the interiors of more than 200 restaurants over the course of his career, including some 70 branches of Pizzaexpress. He made a point of making each branch distinctive in its own right.
Many of his innovations became standard, including the tube downlights he had first noticed in a magazine shop window in Piccadilly. He was also credited with popularising the 18-inch pepper mill, nicknamed the ‘‘Rubirosa’’ in honour of Porfirio Rubirosa, a well-endowed playboy.
Apicella also became a restaurateur himself, setting up the Meridiana restaurant in Chelsea with Walter Mariti. His multistranded career meant he could not be at his restaurant as much as he would have liked, so to establish more of a presence he commissioned a friend who had worked at Madame Tussauds to make a waxwork of him, seated near the entrance and reading that day’s newspaper.
He and Mariti also set up a nightclub, Factotum, and later Apicella co-owned the Condotti restaurant in Mayfair.
But as writer Alasdair Scott Sutherland observed: ‘‘Apicella’s life seemed not to be touched by ordinary mortal cares and concerns, so that he would never send invoices, and when given a cheque, would forget to bank it.
‘‘The downside of this was that, generous on some occasions, he could be extremely mean on others. Once, when a gallery organised an exhibition of his work, he was said to have demanded to be paid for drawing a poster to promote his own show.’’
After many decades in London Apicella eventually returned to Naples. He would email a new cartoon to friends every day, his favourite theme being the malign influence of the United States. Latterly his admirers could enjoy his excoriating caricatures of President Donald Trump on Instagram. –