The Review - MY FAVOURITE RESTAURANT Published: 4 October 2007
Alexei Sayle with Sfizio restaurant owners Enzo Lagrutta and sister Paola
Alexei on cake and corporatism
Actor, broadcaster, writer and acclaimed stand-up comic, Alexei Sayle is serious about supporting independent entrepreneurs, writes Sara Newman
IN television history he’ll be remembered for his aggressive surrealist rants in the Thatcherite era of highly politicised comedy. These days, as a novelist, columnist and broadcaster, Alexei Sayle has a variety of personas.
Having published his latest novel, The Weeping Women Hotel (Sceptre, £12.99) earlier this year he is currently preparing a BBC documentary about Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture 2008 status in which, he tells me, he interviewed his wife and childhood sweetheart, Linda.
The couple grew up just a quarter of a mile away from each other in the city’s districts of Anfield and Everton.
They have lived in Camden, just round the corner from our meeting place Sfizio in Theobald’s Road, since 1984 when the cult comedy series, The Young Ones, was in full flow.
Their 33-year marriage, Sayle says, is what has kept his feet on the ground. “Rather than becoming friends with Elton John and David Furnish,” he says, “I have stayed with my own kind.”
Sfizio’s owners, the Lagrutta siblings, Venezuelan-born Paola, 29, Enzo, 34 and Raffael, 36, serve Sicilian food like their parents taught them.
They have owned their café, with its overspilling food counter of cakes, panzarotti and calzone for four years.
The aubergine lasagna was a real treat and Sayle’s verdict on his spinach, mushroom and cheese calzone was an earnest “excellent”. “It’s important to support local businesses of quality,” says Sayle. “You get a mix of people. The food is fantastic and they’re very entrepreneurial.”
Being entrepreneurial, he points out, is not the same as monopolising an area by price undercutting with the result of driving the rents up – like Starbucks.
This, he says, is classic addict behaviour. “They can never get enough cash and so there can never be enough branches,” says Sayle. “They are in the grip of insanity. “It’s like, if I learn a martial art and build up my muscles, it doesn’t give me the right to beat you up.”
Sayle’s Russian-Jewish parents – his father worked on the railways and mother was a Pools clerk – were staunch socialists.
He says: “It was like a family business. If we had had a van, Sayle and Sons, it would have read ‘Mayhem, Anarchy and Disorder’.”
Growing up in this environment led him to question the rigidity of thought associated with fundamentalist communists. “Right-wing people can be right,” he says with mock surprise, “and kind of nice as well.”
Although Sayle writes a motoring column for The Independent, he despises the carnage cars cause to the planet.
He cycled to the restaurant but hates cyclists. “I like cake,” says Sayle, slicing through his ricotta cheesecake. “Sometimes I don’t like cake. But if I had to stand on a platform and always like cake…,” he trails off. Even this subject causes an internal tug of war. “It’s important to defend against the forces of corporatism,” he insists. “But then again,” he quips, “maybe I’m just trying to get free food.”
