Monika Linton: Spanish intuition

One of the country's most successful Spanish food importers is deeply rooted in south London. Shannon Denny heads to Tulse Hill to meet the brains behind Brindisa

If you - like so many others - have a thing for Borough Market, then be sure to thank Tulse Hill's Monika Linton. Brindisa, the Spanish food company that she founded 21 years ago, is a cornerstone of the revitalised market, and today the Brindisa empire encompasses three restaurants, a shop and a wholesale business supplying 370 retailers and 680 restaurants across the country.

It all began with a few parcels of cheese crossing the Channel. After graduating with a Spanish degree from UCL, Monika moved to Catalonia, returning to London three later years to start a teaching career. "My brother - simultaneously as I moved back here -decided he couldn't bear the City of London and he went out to Barcelona. So we kind of swapped cities. He took some British products over there - Stilton and smoked salmon - and started meeting people in the food trade in Spain. He found some producers and he started sending parcels back saying, 'Why don't we send stuff the other way?'"

While one of their grandfathers had been a trader, dealing in everything from silk in Germany to rice in Africa, the other had been a bank manager. Combining innate entrepreneurial and business sense with exceptional Spanish fluency, Monika and her brother first thought they'd develop a business importing Spanish wine. "We found it very hard; I couldn't make any in-roads in the wine trade. Because he was selling Stilton in Spain, he met cheese shops who said, 'This is a great Spanish cheese. Why don't you send it over there?' So he collected up a Spanish selection of cheese that he brought over to me, and we ate our way through them and thought, 'Let's the dump the wine and move on to this amazing box of cheese!'"

In days when shipping was exorbitant, Monika found she needed to increase the size of her imports in order to be economical, and so the range quickly expanded. "To get cheese off the ground I had to really find other things to build up the shipments with, so I got olive oils and so on. That then added volume and it made my offer to the customers more interesting." Once items with a longer shelf life had become fixtures in the Brindisa stock list, Monika added charcuterie. Today it's in the area of these cured meats that Brindisa is a leader.

Monika set up the company's distribution centre in Borough Market in the early 1990s, back in the era when it was still a wholesale centre and not yet a retail Mecca for epicures. Around the same time Neal's Yard Cheeses relocated from Covent Garden. Taking a page out of the successful cheesemonger's book, "We opened up our warehouses to the public as a way to retail and get closer to the market", Monika explains. They enlisted Turnips, another market wholesaler. "The three of us opened our warehouses once a quarter, and so you got this kind of buzz going, and this clientele," she remembers. "Our little warehouse days were the first foodie retail there."

Henrietta Green brought her Food Lover's Fair to Borough in 1998. "That kind of gave everyone the idea: we could make this market bigger. That's when Neal's Yard and us, and some of the early instigators and the trustees who own the market started working on this initiative, and it's grown to what it is today."

Monika's team launched Brindisa Tapas at the edge of the market in 2004, and upgraded from a stall to a retail shop as well. Eventually Brindisa's distribution facilities burst at the seams, and today the warehouse is in Balham. For some time, a shop in Exmouth Market was Brindisa's only presence north of the river, but all that changed in 2008, with the launch of new restaurants Tierra Brindisa in Soho and Casa Brindisa in South Kensington.

While serendipity initially brought her to south London - she rented a room from friends, first in Battersea, then in Stockwell - it's the steady supply green of spaces and facilities that keep her living happily near Brockwell Park with her yoga instructor husband and kids.

"We do like where we live - it's just a really nice street because everyone has front gardens with trees," she smiles. "We've also got the Herne Hill Velodrome, two or three tennis clubs, swimming pools, Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Horniman. I think it's amazing. For London living it's just unbelievable." And the best bit? "It's seeing the trees round Brockwell Park. You can see the seasons so well. I just love that."

Her enthusiasm for her chosen home is such that I can't detect any yearning in this hispanophile to live in Spain. But then I suppose she's imported some of the very best bits of that sunny place to Britain - for which we can all be thankful.

www.brindisa.com

Love Brindisa

Brindisa at Borough
Floral Hall
Stoney Street SE1
020 7407 1036

Tapas Brindisa
18-20 Southwark Street SE1 1TJ
020 7357 8880

Tierra Brindisa
46 Broadwick Street W1F 7AF
020 7534 1690

Casa Brindisa
7-9 Exhibition Road SW7 2HQ
020 7590 0008

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