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MARA BERNI, who has died aged 79, ran with her husband Lorenzo for 50 years one of London's most successful and influential restaurants, Osteria San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place.
San Lorenzo has been the favourite haunt of famous figures such as Princess Margaret, Diana, Princess of Wales (who used to call Mara her "Mother Confessor"), Boris Becker, Elton John and Sting.
More recently it has been a destination of choice for Hugh Grant, Jemima Khan, Guy Ritchie and Gwyneth Paltrow, while the photographer Terry O'Neill, Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger have been regulars since the 1960s. Mara Berni liked to recount how the Rolling Stones rang her bell at 3am demanding that she cook them dinner after a late-night recording session.
Within 18 months of San Lorenzo's opening on October 17 1963, the influential critic Quentin Crewe was raving about the new trattoria in his column for Queen magazine: "No one before has so perfectly created in London the kind of backstreet trattoria which you would find in every Italian town." Nearly 50 years later, while its reputation for innovative northern Italian food has dimmed, the restaurant occupies a space three times the size of its original basement, and remains full.
Mara Berni was born Maria Theresa Lasilier in Piedmont on August 22 1932. After moving to London for a job with Alitalia, she worked at a pizzeria in Soho.
In 1960 the Italian film director Mario Zampi had opened one of the earliest London Italian pizza restaurants, close to a pub where the newly arrived Lorenzo Berni, already with six years experience as a steward on liners, had found work behind the bar. Lorenzo soon found his future wife working in what became La Romanella Pizza Express.
He and Mara married in 1960, and...