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Interview / Soho / Food & Memory
The Table Remembers: Nima Safaei on 40 Dean Street, Soho and the Memory of a Restaurant
Nima Safaei speaks to Litro about more than twenty years feeding Soho, the restaurant as a record of private lives, and why a cookbook can preserve more than recipes.
Soho is easy to talk about badly. People reach for the same words: chaotic, creative, seedy, glamorous, changed, lost. Some of that is true, but it can flatten the place. Soho is not one story. It is a set of rooms, habits, late nights, regulars, workers, tourists, performers, kitchens, bars and tables that keep crossing over.
A restaurant can hold that better than a slogan.
40 Dean Street has been feeding people in Soho for more than twenty years. That matters in a city where restaurants open loudly and disappear quickly. If a place lasts, it becomes more than a business. People begin to measure parts of their lives through it: first dates, birthdays, work dinners, late meals after theatre, the dish they still remember years later.
Safaei talks about Soho as somewhere that became home before it became business. Not celebrity Soho. Not postcard Soho. The working version: a room where actors, builders, tourists, regulars, staff and neighbours can sit close enough to become part of the same evening.
For Litro’s Future Archives, the cookbook is interesting because it is not only a book of recipes. It is a record of a room. It preserves the food, but also something harder to pin down: the feeling of walking into a restaurant that has absorbed years of conversations, routines and private memories.
“When you feed people day after day for decades, you become part of their lives.”
On Soho after twenty years
Eric Akoto, Litro
After more than twenty years feeding Soho, what does the area still mean to you?
Nima Safaei: Soho still feels like the heart of London to me. While it’s changed a lot over the years, particularly after the pandemic, it still has that chaotic, creative, unpredictable energy which I absolutely love.
Over the years, I’ve seen people come and go, and entire streets transform, but Soho has always kept this incredible energy where all kinds of people collide. You can have actors sitting next to builders, tourists next to regulars who’ve been coming for twenty years. There’s just something so special about it.
For me personally, Soho became home long before it became business; I’ve spent more of my life here than anywhere else. Some of my closest friendships started across tables in the restaurant. I’ve realised over the years that when you feed people day after day for decades, you become part of their lives.
That is the part of Soho that is hard to capture from the outside. The area is often described through its mythology, but a restaurant records it in smaller ways: who comes back, who brings someone new, who marks an anniversary in the same room where something first began.
On turning a restaurant into a book
Eric Akoto, Litro
What made now the right moment to turn the food and stories of 40 Dean Street into a book?
Nima Safaei: I think after being in business for so long, you realise you’re not just running a restaurant anymore; you become part of people’s memories, stories and traditions, and that deserves to be preserved. People have been asking me for years when I was going to write a cookbook, but I never wanted it to feel like just a collection of recipes.
Now felt like the right time because the restaurant has reached a point where it has its own history. Generations of people have grown up with it. I’ve seen customers who first came as students and now bring their own children, and even couples who had their first dates at 40 Dean Street now celebrating their wedding anniversaries. The book became a way of capturing the spirit of Soho and the feeling of walking into 40 Dean Street on a busy evening.
On restaurants as unofficial archives
Eric Akoto, Litro
Restaurants often become unofficial archives of a city — places where regulars, staff, artists, writers and neighbours leave traces. Does 40 Dean Street feel like that to you?
Nima Safaei: Absolutely. I think restaurants and bars absorb life in a way very few places do. Over the years, the walls of 40 Dean Street have seen thousands of conversations, relationships, celebrations, and moments most people never witnessed. Honestly, to be a fly on the wall…
Soho has always attracted creative people — actors after performances, musicians, journalists, fashion people, artists — and the restaurant became a place where all those worlds mixed together, which is something I’ve always loved about Soho. Some guests have been coming weekly for nearly two decades, and some members of staff have been with me for years. There’s a continuity there that feels very rare in London now.
The restaurant holds stories I’ll probably never fully know, and I think that’s beautiful.
This is where the cookbook becomes more interesting than a standard restaurant book. The recipes matter, but they sit inside a wider record: the continuity of staff, the regulars, the overheard life of a neighbourhood, and the private moments that never enter the official history of a city.
“Restaurants and bars absorb life in a way very few places do.”
On the dish that carries Soho
Eric Akoto, Litro
Is there one dish in the book that carries a particular memory of Soho?
Nima Safaei: The smoked salmon and dill ravioli with tomato, cream and vodka sauce probably represents Soho best for me. The lobster ravioli and shellfish bisque version on our 40 Dean Street menu has become one of those dishes people immediately associate with the restaurant. This tweaked at-home version captures the spirit of the area perfectly; it’s comforting, indulgent, slightly nostalgic and a little bit glamorous at the same time.
I remember serving versions of that dish late at night to people coming from the theatre, from bars, first dates, and long shifts working in Soho. It became part of people’s routines and memories. Even now, when somebody tells me they had it fifteen years ago and still think about it, that means a lot.
On what Soho has kept and lost
Eric Akoto, Litro
Soho has changed heavily over the last two decades. What do you think it has kept, and what has it lost?
Nima Safaei: It’s become cleaner and more refined, which was needed as every space in the city needs to change with the times. There are still plenty of unique, independent businesses in this small pocket of London — you need only look to the likes of Algerian Coffee Stores, Gerry’s, Ronnie Scott’s, and The French House that have become Soho institutions in their own right — and I think that keeps the Soho spirit alive.
I’d also say Soho has managed to keep its openness. There’s still a freedom to the area that you don’t find everywhere else in London. People still come here to express themselves, to escape and to meet like-minded people. They still come here to feel part of something. You can still walk around Soho and feel that strange magic where anything could happen.
That spirit is what matters most to me, and I hope it never disappears.
Safaei is not pretending Soho has stood still. That would be false. The useful distinction here is between change and erasure. A city can clean up, rebuild and refine itself. The risk is when the habits, independent rooms and mixed audiences that gave a place its character are priced out or turned into decoration.
On cooking Soho at home
Eric Akoto, Litro
What do you want people to feel when they cook from the book at home?
Nima Safaei: I want them to feel warmth more than anything else. The recipes are rooted in generosity, and are designed to bring people together around a table, to actually take a moment to enjoy each other’s company and the food.
I hope when somebody cooks from the book, they feel like they’re bringing my restaurants and Soho to their home. More than anything, I’d love to see people making their own interpretations of the dishes, just as I have with traditional Italian recipes over the years.
That’s the beauty of cooking; it’s a way to be creative, but also a way to show the people around you how much you care for them.
About 40 Dean Street
40 Dean Street is an Italian restaurant and bar in Soho. This interview forms part of Litro’s Future Archives strand, looking at the informal ways cities preserve memory through rooms, food, work, culture and everyday life.
The useful thing about a restaurant archive is that it does not pretend to be complete. It is made of partial evidence: dishes people remember, tables they return to, staff who stayed, streets that changed outside the door.
Soho has always lived partly through those rooms. Not just the famous rooms, or the mythologised ones, but the working rooms where people ate before and after the rest of their lives happened.
A cookbook cannot hold all of that. But it can hold enough to remind us that cities are not only remembered through buildings or headlines. Sometimes they survive through taste, repetition, service, and the people who kept coming back.
Nima Safaei is the restaurateur behind 40 Dean Street in Soho.
