Owner, Chef Gioani Batissta Pagliano

(Courtesy of Colin Moretti)Gioani Batissta (John Baptist) Pagliano was born at Monastero di Vascho, Mondovi, Piedmont, in about 1774. Career : He was clearly an ambitious young man as in his teens he was working for the British ambassador in Turin, John Hampden-Trevor and clearly made a good impression; before he was 20 he was employed by the Venetian Ambassador to the Court of St James's, in whose service he came to England in 1794 . He did not stay in the Ambassador's service for very long, in 1798 he married an English woman and they established a small hotel at 15 Oxendon Street , Westminster. Within three years he moved to larger premises in St Martin's Street Westminster where he took on what had been Isaac Newton's house; Holden's Triennial Directory for 1802-1804 describes it as an "Italian Hotel" . Perhaps Italian cuisine was not to the taste of Londoners because most directories subsequent referred to it simply as an hotel or Newton's Hotel; the London and County Directory was an exception, as late as 1811 it lists it as an Italian Hotel and Eating House . In 1813 Pagliano make a further move, this time to much more spacious and imposing premises in Leicester Square, the Sablonière Hotel, what once had been the home of William Hogarth, although he retained Newton's Hotel for a few years more. In about 1817 Newton's Hotel was taken on by another Italian, Giovanni Dominico Bertolini . Bertolini was still in Newton's in 1851 although it would seem that the demand for Italian food had disappeared, he was listed in the Post Office Directory for that year as John Dominique Bertolini, a French Restaurateur although other types of records for the intervening period continue to give his name as Giovanni Dominico Bertolini .