6 - Authentic food served in Newcastle

Italian cuisine flourishes in British city thanks to immigrants Addis and Cardone

NEWCASTLE (United Kingdom) — The owner of the mine at Ingurtosu, some 40 km from Cagliari was a British baron, Lord Armstrong, who also owned some mines in northern Britain. When the governments in London and Rome struck the deal allowing Italian labourers to enter the British economy, Lord Armstrong offered his Sardinian employees the chance to do their mining job in Wales.
“My brother-in-law,” says Adriano Addis, “jumped at the offer and left with my sister. He began working as a miner, but on the weekend he helped a friend of his who had a restaurant. When, a couple of years later, the friend decided to get rid of the restaurant, my brother-in-law bought it and started calling my elder siblings to come and help him. Our family is quite large, with eight brothers and two sisters, so labour was not lacking. Well, that’s how our story began.”
And how does it continue?
“In the early Seventies, half of my family was in Britain and the other half in Sardinia,” says Addis. “Then my mother told my sister, the one who had come first with her husband: ‘Our family must stay united: either all in Sardinia or all in Britain.’ To make a long story short, we all moved to Britain, first in Middlesbrough, then in Newcastle. That’s when I came too, at 15, with my 60-year-old mother and 62-year-old father. They were really brave, starting anew at their age.”
Nowadays, British newspapers call the Addis family ‘restaurant’s artistic dynasty’. Adriano, the head of this dynasty, smiles. “I think this is an exaggeration, but there is some truth in it,” he says. “Today we own 14 upscale restaurants in a 40-mile radius in north-eastern England: five are mine, the rest belong to my brothers and nephews. We all share, in addition to family bonds, also a commitment to quality food. If we serve an Italian dish, especially Sardinian specialities, be assured that they are truly Italian and Sardinian, not fancy mixtures of ingredients. This was what conquered the Britons.”
And Britons, especially those of the upper and middle classes, crowd (one needs to book at least one week in advance) the sophisticated “Da Vinci’s” in Newcastle, the flagship restaurant of the chain led by Adriano Addis.
Adriano got his basics at a hotel school. “But we all attended it: a brother of mine was for years first chef in restaurants of the Hilton hotels and in those of the chain owned by Sir Rocco Forte. In short, we are not adlibbing.” The rest followed naturally.
“However, nobody gave me anything for free, you know,” he adds. “In the late Seventies, for instance, we served veal sweetbreads in a lobster sauce to people accustomed to equating Italian food with overcooked spaghetti. It wasn’t easy. Our revolution began from there.”
How did it proceed? “We, the Addis family, made an impression because we were the first to explain in our menus how our dishes were made; we also impressed people with our crugujonis — a big raviolo filled with ricotta cheese, eggs and saffron; with gnocchetti alla campidanese, or with roasted piglet. At the time, if you asked for pasta alla carbonara you got served a soup. What can I say, those chefs were former miners, what they did was more than commendable. They only sinned by presumption; they thought that we Italians had an instinct for cooking, so that the simple fact of being born in Italy turned anyone into a chef. We represented the transition from pizzerias with flatware wrapped into a paper napkin to restaurants with linen tablecloths where waiters are discreet yet competent advisors on dishes and wines.”
Italians in north-eastern England left their mark mostly in the restaurant industry. “Until 30 to 35 years ago, Italian restaurants in Newcastle and vicinity could be counted on one hand,” says Antonio Cardone, an Apulian from Canosa, near Bari. “They weren’t bad, but hadn’t managed to turn Italian food into a trendy product. The change came in the Seventies, and I arrived in Britain in those years.”
He left Canosa at 16, bound for Milan. There he did a little bit of everything: plumber, tinsmith, bricklayer (“but those where hard jobs, especially for a kid.”). His luck came when he found a job as a waiter in a pizzeria. “There, I had two revelations: first, the tips, enough for me to pay for my accommodation so that I could send home my wages; second, my lifelong passion: making pizza. Pizza became my great passion.”
Antonio Cardone also understood something else: in order for him to become somebody, he needed experience. So he got it. He worked as a chef and as a waiter at a long string of restaurants in Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany. He learned the languages and the trade.
He was working in a big restaurant in Dusseldorf as second waiter (“I was making good money”) when a friend told him that his brother, owner of a restaurant in Newcastle, was looking for Italian waiters. “The pay being offered was good,” remembers Cardone. “So I went. It was in 1971. I found that life nice, but I didn’t want to work as a waiter any more; by then I could make excellent pizza. So, after a couple of years, I decided to go on my own. First, however, I went to Bari’s Fiera del Levante and I bought an oven and had it shipped and assembled in a tiny place I had rented.”
The tiny size of Antonio Cardone’s place was its success. There was just space enough for preparing and cooking the pizzas and serving them; the customers were therefore compelled to eat them while standing.
“This did not deter my customers. On the contrary. For the first time they could see how real Italian pizza was made,” remembers Cardone. “At the time, pizzas were cooked in a pan, or even fried, and they were thick and full of fat. They were focaccias, more than pizzas. But most of all, customers could not see the preparation. Without even knowing it, I made a small revolution: I introduced thin-crust pizza, prepared under the eyes of my customers, and I put it in the oven in front of them. Everything in plain sight.”
As a result, Antonio Cardone’s pizzeria could be identified by the long line-up that formed from 6 p.m. But there is a line-up still today, over 25 years later, at the big Pizzeria Francesca (the name of a daughter of Antonio’s) that Cardone operates in Jesmond, one of Newcastle’s most exclusive neighbourhoods. He’s bought a whole block here, and the pizzeria is flanked by a bar, a food store (Daniela Delicatessen, bearing the name of his other daughter; everything rigorously Italian) and a newsstand. On the other side of town he’s bought an old building, restoring it and transforming it into a restaurant, Casa Antonio, permanently crowded, run by a nephew.
“I got lucky,” he admits, “but I worked hard. Do you know that some customers never left me ever since I opened the first pizzeria? They come every Friday. But now they don’t need to stand, they can sit at a table,” smiles Antonio Cardone.

Publication Date: 2002-09-01
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=1710