Bar Italia

Television was demonstrated to the public for the first time at 22 Frith Street, on 26 January 1926, by John Logie Baird. Twenty-three years later Lou and Caterina Polledri, from Piacenza, took the ground floor and put a coffee machine in it. The blue plaque is still above the door and the coffee machine is still behind the counter, which makes this one of the few addresses in Soho where you can stand inside two entirely separate pieces of history and be handed an espresso in the middle of it.

The hours, because the hours are wrong everywhere

Bar Italia is open 07:00 to 05:00, every day. That comes from the bar's own Instagram bio, which reads "Est. 1949 / Open from 7am - 5am" — the only channel the family currently keeps live, since the old official site at baritaliasoho.co.uk no longer resolves at all.

Twenty-two hours is not twenty-four, and Soho's shorthand for this place has quietly rounded up for years. There is a two-hour hole between five and seven in the morning, and it is exactly the stretch when someone leaving a club decides Bar Italia will sort them out.

One further wrinkle worth knowing before you rely on it: Google's business listing publishes 07:00–04:00, and so do This Is Soho and Faber's write-up of the place, which quotes 7am to 4am as well. The bar says five. Treat anything before 04:00 as reliable, and 04:00 to 05:00 as a coin-flip you should be prepared to lose.

What has not been replaced

The fittings are the argument for coming at all. The red-and-white Formica is the original 1949 run. The floor is terrazzo, hand-laid the same year in Italian stone by Torini Polledri and never taken up since. And the lever-operated single-boiler Gaggia on the back bar is, by Gaggia's own account, possibly the first the company ever sold in Britain — Antonio Polledri calls it "a work of art," which is a generous way of describing something you have to pull by hand at four in the morning.

The family's telling of the 1949 opening has Abbott and Costello cutting the ribbon and a coffee-drinking contest won by an elderly regular who went home with a small Gaggia. Take it as family testimony, which is what it is.

The espresso runs on a blend originally built next door by the roaster Angelucci, and Faber reports the recipe is no longer known even to the current owners. FOODIE-9000, consulted on that: "A house blend nobody alive can reproduce isn't a gimmick, it's a liability the family has decided to keep paying. Order the espresso. That is the whole point of the room."

Ownership has stayed put. Founded by Lou and Caterina, it is run now by their grandchildren — Veronica and Antonio Polledri, per Wikipedia and Outernet's own announcement, which describes the current owners in the same terms. That announcement is the genuinely new fact here: on 9 January 2025, for its 75th birthday, Bar Italia opened a second site at Outernet by Tottenham Court Road — the first time in seventy-five years it has existed anywhere but this one address. The original is still the original. The second one is a podium under LED screens.

The Frith Street room is small and it is loud, and Pulp closed Different Class in 1995 with a song named after it about where the broken people go. That remains a fair description of the last hour before the shutter.

Where this sits

Frith Street is short. Hazlitt's — three Georgian townhouses with no sign on the door — is a hundred metres up the same pavement at number 6, which makes the pairing obvious: a hotel that sells you silence, and, four minutes' walk away, the one counter still serving at four in the morning when the silence stops working.