The Princess and the Pitta

Truly the people’s café.

It was a frigid, grey January morning in 1989 when Abdul Basit made the chance celebrity sighting that would change his life. The story of how it happened has been repeated so many times in the years since that it’s become a legend in itself. He was preparing to begin another unremarkable day, getting ready to launch his new business, an unassuming little café tucked away in that part of west London where Notting Hill meets Bayswater Road. And then he saw her: the People’s Princess, making her way up the half-mile long private road towards her Kensington Palace.

The exact details vary over four decades of retelling; sometimes the Princess is with a young William and Harry. Sometimes she’s alone. Sometimes she’s flanked by personal protection officers. The outcome is always the same: the Notting Hill storefront that was set to be Café Abdul became Café Diana, and the legend grows from there.

Café Diana supposedly became one of the late Princess’s regular haunts, and decades after her death tourists still come from all over the world to visit it. Over the years the walls became plastered with framed pictures of Diana, the menu reinvented in her honour (in her lifetime there was a ‘di-licious’ Diana Special Chicken Tikka, today a section of the menu is named ‘Diana’s salads’ and another ‘Diana’s specials’, featuring fish and chips, jacket potatoes and lamb koftas). You can have an ‘American brownie’ or ‘cans’. You can have ‘soups’, or, that notable favourite of Diana, Princess of Wales: ‘plain jacket potato’.

On the café’s Instagram account, as much a tribute to Diana’s archival fashion as it is an advertisement for the café, breathless fanatics share their love for Lady Di. ‘I was in your café, on September of the last year’ one comment reads. ‘Speechless. A magic, special, wonderful world, where our princess is alive everyday.’ One employee, Fouad, told a newspaper a few years ago that Americans were ‘completely mad’ about Diana. That they came in and cried. ‘It’s been 20 years,’ he said. But even he wasn’t immune to the Dianamania that still thrives in west London: ‘For me, sometimes I think she’s still alive,’ said Fouad. ‘I see her more than my family.’

‘Let me explain to you,’ Abdul says, when I finally get him on the phone to ask about the café’s odd magical appeal. Abdul is a man who’s hard to track down. When I call, he’s always nebulously busy, or at ‘meetings’. He tells me to call back, and when I do the connection is bad. He wants me to do my research first. He wants to know if this is for an article or a film. He wants to know how long I’ve been a journalist.

‘Which magazine, newspaper?’ He wants to know.

‘The scent? The scent of? Are you magazine?’ Yes.

‘Wonderful where are you based?’ Soho.

‘A UK Magazine? Wonderful.’

When we’ve overcome both our accents and when he is convinced of my credentials, in his most recent version of the origin story, Abdul tells me he saw Diana taking her two sons to school (Prince Harry, it should be noted, would have been just three years old at the time of recollection). ‘It was a good omen for me,’ he says. ‘After opening I saw her later, looking at the sign and smiling. She was telling her two boys “look it’s my name” She came surprisingly to say hello. She asked me, why call it Café Diana? I told her, it’s because I’m very fond of you and your work. She was very pleased but at the same time became red.’ A photo, framed several times on the walls of the café, pays tribute to this moment. In it, Diana stands with Abdul by the tills, holding a bunch of flowers and smiling in a bemused way.

Tinged with nostalgia, Abdul’s story of the Café Owner and the Princess now takes on elements that are increasingly fantastical. Diana came to the shop regularly, he says, calling it ‘very nice’ and ‘very smart’. She told Abdul her children loved pitta bread. Paparazzi camped outside, and Diana joked that they shouldn’t be served. She came between once a week and once a month, between 1989 and 1997, to take coffee. She queued. She insisted on always paying, to support the café. Any time she was taking Princes William and Harry to get a haircut she’d pop in. Once, Harry had a goldfish. ‘Before she died, she came,’ Abdul says, suddenly solemn. ‘Two weeks before. She had a lengthy visit for half an hour. That’s the longest time. She had a coffee and a croissant and she told me she doesn’t want to divorce. I escort her to the car in front of the shop. I say you don’t have bodyguard? She says no. Then she show me the tennis racquet in the back of the car. She said “Abdul, this is my weapon.”’

After moving to London from Baghdad as a student in 1977, Abdul Basit dedicated his life in England to a very English pastime: loving the royal family. He remembers Diana’s wedding with great fondness. He stayed up all night as rolling news reported her death in Paris (‘I’d never experienced anything like that. It was very hard. It took me a few months to come to reality.’). He claims to have gone to her funeral, hearing the clapping inside and outside the Abbey after Charles Spencer made his eulogy (this is also recreated in The Crown), and spotting George Michael in the pews. Afterwards, hundreds laid flowers outside his café, or called him from all around the world; India, Pakistan, Turkey, Israel, America, Hollywood. ‘They give condolences and say we remember you,’ says Abdul now. Even today he’s a great fan of the present Carolean era. ‘I respect the royal family, always,’ he says. ‘The royal family have enough on their plate, in the limelight. When you see stories about their life it’s very difficult. You wouldn’t be in their shoes, you know?’

You get the impression that nobody loved Princess Diana more than Abdul and his dedicated customers. Except perhaps for me. Like all Irish women, I love Princess Diana. Princess Diana is the background on my phone. I have a framed Princess Diana photograph in my bedroom, which my boyfriend understandably dislikes. I read Tina Brown on Diana. I watched every episode of The Crown. One of my earliest memories is sitting under the kitchen table in my grandmother’s house during her funeral, weeping. I hate King Charles more than is normal, even for a republican. I have a collection of archival Diana newspapers, which I paid far too much money for in a Greenwich junk shop. When Abdul asks ‘did you do any research on Diana?’ I feel more offended than is normal. Which is to say, I have obviously been to Café Diana several times. It’s an experience, a pilgrimage. It is, like all elements of Diana superfandom, relatively macabre.

When you are a beautiful and phenomenally rich and kind woman – and also a literal princess – who dies before the age of 40, all aspects of your life will be romanticised. Abdul Basit is not the only person profiting from the continued golden hue with which your business will be imbued thanks to that vague title: ‘favourite haunt of Diana, Princess of Wales.’ Superfans know that she was supposedly a fan of pizza at Da Mario, in Kensington. That her favourite restaurant was Knightsbridge’s San Lorenzo. That her infamous lunch meeting with Camilla took place at the aptly named Ménage à Trois. Even that her final dinner at L’Espadon, Ritz-Carlton, consisted of Dover sole, vegetable tempura and an asparagus omelette. It’s this desire to understand Diana’s life, her source of ineffable chic, that drives people – people like me – to spend hundreds of pounds on Rowing Blazers jumpers that were supposedly her favourite, or to visit west London greasy spoons where she supposedly downed countless cappuccinos.

But while Diana’s star has not faded, the Notting Hill caff that bears her name has not been so lucky. Flanked by shisha bars, cocktail caviar joints and – inevitably – a Zizzi, Café Diana is a relic in more ways than one. Slap bang in the middle of Wellington Terrace, the street the Princess’s Café lives on has a west London postcode, but none of the glitz that implies to your average tourist. Next to that private road where Basit first spotted Di is the Russian Embassy, an imposing, slate grey building that’s frequently covered in angry graffiti or wet paint. Just a few doors down from Diana-themed jacket potatoes are crudely assembled Navalny shrines and – always – a lone protestor, screaming into the ether about Putin’s various war crimes. Beyond that, where the palace meets Hyde Park, is Millionaires’ Row – Kensington Palace Gardens – the most expensive street in London, where, for the past 160 years, heirs and heiresses have hidden themselves away. Recent residents of the street include Roman Abramovich, Tamara Ecclestone and the Sultan of Brunei. It’s a location where grottiness meets glamour; where pitta breads are served next to palaces.

On the Thursday afternoon I last visited, it was empty. The staff were suspicious when I asked if I could talk to them about the place. I picked at my fattoush salad and watched a young family rush in so that the mother, in a Diana-inspired sky blue blazer and black velvet court heels, could take a selfie in front of the wall of Dianas, before leaving again without ordering any food. The waiter disappears. When I tried to pay, he briefly offered my salad as a freebie, but like the Princess, I insisted. I walked towards Paddington, ignoring the elderly man with a megaphone who shouts at traffic that we have forgotten about Ukraine.

In 2019 Café Diana was awarded the dubious honour of a one-star food hygiene rating (as of 2024, it’s back to four stars). On Tripadvisor, amongst the excited selfies under signed photos of the people’s princess, faded by decades of sunlight, are disgruntled reviews from customers who complain about the service (‘the waitress inexplicably told me about a wound she had on her hand!’), the cleanliness (‘a lone ant crawled across the table’) and the prices (‘a shocking rip-off’). ‘It looks like the owners are more than happy to cash-in on the Diana story, but don’t want to invest any money in new seats,’ laments one.

That owner is not Abdul Basit. Last year, after 35 years working in his Diana dream house, the 68-year-old sold the café to new proprietors. ‘Sold off,’ he says. ‘Very hard. But the area has been transformed. Recession, it’s bad. I’m putting the shop after her death as a tribute to her. I don’t want people to not remember her. Most important for me to keep her name, you know?’

Do you miss it, I ask? ‘Yes of course.’ says Abdul gravely. ‘But this is the reality. I miss her every day.’ No, no no, I say, do you miss the café? ‘Oh yeah,’ he agrees, with less conviction this time. ‘Of course. But I go there from time to time and do the small jobs for them. I give them advice.’

And he talks to the press of course, even though he doesn’t seem to like it very much. It’s fitting that the café that bears her name seems to have the same attitude to the media as the Princess did herself. Diana courted the press, but kept them at arm’s length. She needed them, they needed her, but it was a toxic relationship. A mutually beneficial one at times, but toxic. Abdul wants you to know that Diana, Princess of Wales, loved pitta bread. But he doesn’t want you to actually review the pitta bread. He wants to tell you the magical story of the café, but he also wants his well-deserved retirement.

And what if, in his absence, the new owners decide to change Café Diana, undoing 36 years of magic? Abdul isn’t worried. ‘I mean, they can’t find a better name than that.’