Stores editor John Ryan pays a visit to Italian store and restaurant Mercato Metropolitano at a striking repurposed building in south-east London
A store-cum-restaurant-cum-meeting place opened in London’s Elephant and Castle last week. Mercato Metropolitano is a theme park for Italian food, eating and drinking and the plan is that it will function as a destination in this part of south-east London.
No reason why it shouldn’t, really – it has all the requisite parts, from ice-cream to fresh pasta, cured meats to a pretty decent-looking selection of Italian wines. This, in short, it the sort of place you go to treat yourself and perhaps wander away with a few goodies that you can consume at a later date and which will tide you over until the next time you pay a visit.
All of which is fine, but what really makes the place is not the food – you can find fine Italian regional food across the capital with relatively little effort these days. What in fact matters is the building that houses the whole wood-fired pizza shebang.
Standing out
Mercato Metropolitano looks set to exert a pull on London foodies principally because it is housed in a former light industrial building that was built around half a century ago. It has everything that you’d expect of an inner-city manufacturing unit of the era, from very functional metal-framed window and brick walls for the shop part, to metal girders that support the ceiling in what would have been a warehouse and is now a casual dining area.
“Mercato Metropolitano looks set to exert a pull on London foodies principally because it is housed in a former light industrial building that was built around half a century ago”
John Ryan
And while things have probably been cleaned up a little, no attempt has been made to change either the structure or the architectural components – these are what make it interesting. It also means that this new building will continue to sit well with the local urban fabric, rather than something new being imposed on the area.
It also happens to look good because it reminds of us how things were, but with a slight twist to make them appropriate to today. About half a mile north of Mercato Metropolitano is Borough Market, which is foodie central for most of London these days and where you might find yourself paying close to a fiver for an exotic cabbage.
The point is you don’t mind doing so because the pay-off is that you have been offered an experience that takes you away from the world of straightforward commodity provision. This is what retailers big and small should be aiming to do and there are signs that it is happening on the high street with the continued move towards localisation, but there is still a long way to go.
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