Lina’s Store, 18 Brewer Street, Soho, London

What a marvellous find. We were scuttling through Soho, like mice in a field one Saturday, when we found this shop. As the motto for the day was ‘Try something new’, we decided to venture into the shop.

My motto is usually ‘Why try something new’ so this was quite a remarkable change of motto.

From the outside, this resembles a hardware shop. Perhaps I was standing too far away, but something about the window display made me conclude that this place sold paint.

A closer peek at the window and I saw pannetone. Now, everyone likes panettone.

I like panettone.

With that, I had to check this place out.

The first impression of this place is that it is a rustic, charming, traditional-styled Italian mini-mart. It sold almost everything Italian I could come up with (food-wise, of course), and being someone who really likes Italian food, I had to buy something.

The first thing that took my fancy was the garlic and parsley, but I didn’t buy them.

The guy at the counter was nice enough, jumping in and out of my pictures.

Behind the guy, there were shelves full of spices, condiments and lots of herbs. I’m not sure how these herbs are different from the ones you get at the supermarket, but when they’re sold in an Italian shop, with many other Italian things, it must absorb some sort of authenticity. You just don’t question things like that.

Italian sausages chilling out, absorbing the Italian air, slowly transforming from Cumberland sausages to salami.

The most Italian thing I bought from this store was the 3 packs of instant risotto (tried one out, tasty). There were lots more I could have bought. In fact, while we were in there, customers came in to the deli which seemed to be the most popular bit of the store, but as I didn’t see how walking around Soho carrying sausages and garlic would be a good thing to do, perhaps I’ll do that another time.

Google Map to here!

View Larger Map