Summer 2023“We’re a town built on hot tea & limp toast.”

Tom McNeeney’s love letter to San Remo.

When I wanted to start this feature about things in Rochdale we maybe take for granted, my little love letters to this town, I did what I always do when I need to get my head together. I wandered up Drake Street and through some familiar red doors, asked Tony for a coffee and sat myself down. Because there’s something about San Remo that has always made me feel, well, at home.

So for a while I sat there with my brew and watched the world go by. Casually writing down ideas of where to start, what are the small, everyday things around us that make here feel like nowhere else? While I’m sitting there listening to the rain bouncing off the window - over the steam coming out of that coffee maker that’s made more brews than I’ll see in a lifetime and hearing person after person coming in and letting on to the staff by name - it hits me.

This is it; this is the place. We’re a town built on hot tea and limp toast and for forty, fifty, years there’s been one place and one family who’s been keeping that dream alive. In these walls I’ve watched breakups over breakfasts and flirting over formica; it’s a constant soap opera years in the making and one almost all of us have been in at one point or another.

I remember my mum talking about Sunday mornings here back in the day, sore heads all round and never a lesson learnt. Mention San Remo to people round this end and they’ll go glassy-eyed over chips and gravy in a way only Northerners can and they’ll reel off the times they spent here, but then, it seems most of us have, because you don’t become an institution by accident.

Getting a second brew, there’s some small talk at the till, two lads behind me are having a very serious chat about plate pies over Hollands pies that I don’t feel qualified to get involved in.

While he’s handing me my change, I thought about asking Alfonso just how long they’ve been there on Drake Street watching the town change around them, you know, be a real journalist, get the facts, total coverage. The moment passes. I wonder what stopped me asking to myself, then sitting back down a while watching him and his dad talking in the world’s smallest kitchen, it dawns on me that that’s not what I’m here for, this isn’t about how old somewhere is, or how many staff they have, that isn’t what makes it feel like this.

There’s so more to history than age: it’s the memories on the walls, those checked tables I could recognise anywhere, it’s the fact that you know you have to ask for pepper because some idiot keeps nicking it and it’s the people round you. When it comes to mixed bags, this place is like the one you keep under the sink; these guys are a bag for life that’s holding us all in, no matter where we’ve come from. I’ve seen the full scope of this town walk through the doors of this café and never once seen a soul be treated better or worse than anyone else, maybe that’s the real beauty of the place - that and the gravy.

In a world that’s getting faster and less personal, where everywhere wants something, San Remo asks you for nothing, not a single thing. No reviews, hashtags, no Facebook check ins, it exists just as it always has and I hope always will.

It is a moment in time, a little piece of us all - and long may it continue.