Cherished Soho Pasta Restaurant Vasco and Piero’s Has Found a New Home

50-year-old fresh pasta restaurant Vasco and Piero’s Pavilion will open at a new premises on D’Arblay Street in Soho in October, having been reportedly forced from the site it occupied since 1971 on Poland Street in April.

Owner Paul Matteucci, son of founder Vasco Matteucci and the business’s current owner, told Eater London that the restaurant was now taking reservations and would replace the Levantine restaurant Ceru at 11 D’Arblay Street from Tuesday 5 October. Ceru is relocating to Queensway, according to its website.

Vasco and Piero’s own website has been updated to include the quote: “Same old, same old... but better. Tradition. We hate change it.” Bookings can be made online. The owners did not immediately respond to a request for comment on their securing of the new premises, nor about the fall-out with the landlord at Poland Street site.

In April, after a reported dispute with the landlord, Thomas Pocklington Trust, a charity for blind and partially sighted people, Matteucci told Eater that the landlord had eventually been unwilling to negotiate on back-rent and debt, which the restaurant had accumulated over months of closure owing to the coronavirus pandemic during 2020. Matteucci said that the restaurant had made every effort to pay the monies it could, on time, and with the agreement of the landlord. Around Christmas, he said the landlord’s demand changed, though Pocklington Trust’s chief executive Charles Colquhoun told Eater that he felt it had “absolutely [...] acted fairly and reasonably in reaching agreements with all our tenants.”

Vasco and Piero’s is an Italian restaurant, which has served an unfashionable Umbrian-inspired menu and fresh pasta before it was trendy in London, has been a Soho favourite — of actors, creatives, and chefs — for decades. In April, Matteucci, said on Twitter that the team “will be back”. He wasn’t wrong; they’ll literally open around the corner.