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IN THE SUN
The Continis, Edinburgh’s royal family of fine Italian food, are the recipients of a Judges’ Special Award in this year’s edition of The List Eating and Drinking Guide. Charlie Fletcher explains why the family plays such a vital role in Scotland’s culinary life.
The facade of Valvona 8- Crolla (top, centre) was boarded up when Mussolini declared war on Britain in 1940, and the hardboand has never been removed. Inside, Mary, Francesca and Philip Contlnl (main picture, left to right) ensure that the produce is ever changing.
why so many Italians like his dad had left the Mediterranean for the grey and uninviting British Isles. 'You can‘t eat sunshinef he said. My father—in-law remembers Edinburgh in the immediate post-WWII years. It wasn't yery
I once asked my friend Loren/o. a cafe-owner.
continental cuisine when Frenchmen up for a rugby international ‘wafted past reeking exotically of Gauloises and garlic'. He also
24 THE LIST 28 Apr—12 May 2005
cosmopolitan. He got his first whiff of
V
recounts his first pasta. cooked by a fellow an student. just demobbcd from lighting a war in Italy where he'd learned the mysteries of something called 'Spaghetti Bolognese‘.
That it is now a staple is part of the story of how our national eating habits haye changed: and the Contini fattiiiy“s history is a pan of that story.
In the early 50s Carlo (‘ontini. a young Neapolitan policeman barracked in Genoa. came to Edinburgh to learn English. He met ()liyia