Blood Orange, Chicory, and Olive Salad

& the story of a man who delivered flavour to London

Can a single person change the way a city eats? I wonder as I step through a heavy plastic curtain and enter the sprawling warehouse. The air is cool and as I look around, piles of beautiful fruits and vegetables sit humbly in carefully stacked wooden crates: gem-like chicories in Seussian forms, knobbly blood lemons with rinds blushing like a sunset, bulbous eggplants so deeply purple that they seem to drink in light, thick-stemmed and thorny artichokes from various provenances. “Give a Sardinian chef an artichoke from Puglia and they’ll laugh at you” my host, Alexandro, tells me. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of this warehouse’s contents, rattling off the variety and origin of every fruit and vegetable we pass by. This makes sense when I learn that, alongside his father Vincenzo Zaccarini, he has helped to select them from farmers across Italy and a few other Mediterranean nations, overseeing their journey to many of London’s best kitchens.

Minutes later, I’m seated across from Vincenzo himself beneath a plaque that reads service and quality. He is relaxed and warm with a no-nonsense demeanour, and as he shares the story of how he built his namesake produce supply company, Vincenzo’s, I listen and slowly become convinced that the answer to my question is yes, they can.

Vincenzo’s life began in Naples, where he spent his early years steeped in a world of wonderful food. He recalls the delicious Neapolitan pizzas, frittatas, and his mother’s cooking, often tasting her sauces early in the morning as she prepared a meal for later in the day. In 1981 at the age of eleven, his family moved to London, arriving at Victoria Station pushing trolleys laden with their worldly goods. His parents quickly found work in restaurants and at 14, so did Vincenzo, working as a waiter and food runner and, on the side, helping his father supply produce to a small handful of chefs.

Life in the UK was different from Italy: the weather was grey and the food even greyer. Every day, Vincenzo watched the chefs at work receive ingredients for their kitchens, crates of produce uniform in shape and size but that seemed anemic and were profoundly lacking flavour. Here, he saw an opportunity for his casual business to become something bigger. He knew that if these chefs had access to the beautiful ingredients he remembered from his childhood, the peppery rocket, crinkled cavolo nero, sweet and tart blood oranges, they would fall in love with them. At sixteen, restless in the classroom and driven by this vision, he left school to begin supplying restaurants full-time, recruiting his relatives in Italy to help ship ingredients that were, at the time, nearly unheard of in Britain. But not for long.

Timing was on Vincenzo’s side. The rise of budget airlines in the ‘90s made European travel more accessible, allowing Brits to explore the Mediterranean and develop a taste for Italian cuisine. Meanwhile, Italian immigration to the UK was growing, bringing with it a new generation of chefs, restaurateurs, and food lovers eager to recreate the flavours of home. Vincenzo was at the heart of this movement, working shoulder-to-shoulder with chefs like Gennaro Contaldo and Jamie Oliver, figures who would go on to shape food culture in London and beyond. He continued to visit Italy on a regular basis, sourcing producers to work with and bringing their beautiful ingredients back to London for his clients. “A good salesman is someone who can show the customer that there is value in spending a bit more on high quality ingredients” Vincenzo tells me. Quality is something that he has never been willing to compromise on, his company was built on the belief that it was something you could taste and this intuition proved to be right. As a key supplier for many kitchens, the produce Vincenzo brought in became the quiet foundation for a food renaissance in the city and, as time went on and demand grew, many of the products that he brought were sourced by larger grocery store chains and became mainstream.

In stark contrast to the 1980’s, London today is full of exceptional food. The idea that someone might struggle to source fresh basil or proper parmigiano seems absurd, but it wasn’t always this way. Did Vincenzo single-handedly change the way London eats? Perhaps not. But shifts in how ingredients spread and flavours travel don’t happen in grand revolutions, they happen farmer by farmer, crate by crate, through the work of people who care.

In 2006, Vincenzo was knighted by the Italian republic for his work connecting Italian farmers with British kitchens, but sitting across from him, it’s clear that accolades aren’t his driving force. “We are in the service industry” he says, his voice matter-of-fact. “The end game is to please the customer. That’s it.” In Vincenzo’s world, this means changing the way his customers think about food, giving them a taste of something they didn’t know they were missing, and making them demand better. Today, he continues to connect restaurants and households across London with beautiful produce from exceptional farmers, working with more producers every year and never, ever, sacrificing quality.

This bright salad highlights the beautiful ingredients available at this time of year. Here, sweet citrus, bitter chicories, briny olives, tart pickled shallots, and buttery almonds come together in a fresh seasonal salad worth making on repeat until spring.

Blood Orange, Chicory, and Olive Salad

Serves 2-3

Ingredients: