Charlie’s mother is Arabella Boxer, a great cookery writer and a close friend of my own mother. She used to babysit me, and taught me all about cooking – my mum thinks food is something you eat so you don’t die, but Arabella taught me how to peel tomatoes and grind pepper. Charlie now has two sons, Jackson my godson and Frank, and owns Italo. That’s where all three of us started our businesses; it’s where Frank was before Frank’s Café and Campari Bar in Peckham; where Jackson was before he opened Brunswick House around the corner; and where Tommy Adams and I were before we started Pitt Cue. I met Tommy when I was working here in 2010 and he was at the Blueprint Café with Jeremy Lee, who brought him to a charity evening at the Bonnington Square Café, opposite Italo. We got talking and discovered a mutual interest in wine, and a few months later he ended up working in the kitchen with me. I needed another chef to realise my barbecue food truck dream, and it turned out Tom had been making smoked food since he was a boy. We opened the truck in May last year on the South Bank, and our Soho restaurant in January.I love this square so much that I moved here last summer. Everyone thinks of Vauxhall as just a hideous roundabout, but this place is quiet, and there’s a real sense of community. The Boxers are the closest thing I have to a family here, and I eat breakfast with them at Italo almost every day. They are a sort of South London mafia, and I’m the godfather.

via Happy shoppers – ES Magazine – Life & Style – Evening Standard.