The last corner café in Cape Town's city bowl

Lin Sampson shoots the breeze with Panayiotis Tournas, 81, proprietor of Topolino café - a grumpy survivor from another world

Everyone in the Cape Town CBD knows Topolino (Italian for Mickey Mouse). It’s the last real corner shop standing against the swell of supermarkets and swish restaurants.

There is little sign of the famous Greek philoksonia (hospitality) in Topolino.

“Not gnow, other day,” says Panayiotis (aka Peter) Tournas, 80, who seldom feels conciliatory towards his customers. He has a slightly menacing presence, disobliging and exuding a silent dislike.

He seldom smiles and there are fissures of irritation and exhaustion in his eyes.

But when he goes to the Greek Orthodox Church in his black suit and white, collarless shirt, he is the smooth playboy of his Athenian days - the one in the black and white photograph on the wall,  leaning nonchalantly against the Acropolis. His hair is swished back in a cushioned pompadour highlighted with a star filter.

He points to it and says ‘ghandsome’ with the harrumphing elephant sound of the Greek Xi.

The shelves are filled with grim crockery, small plastic dolls, penknives, a large gold putto, balls of coloured string, a torch, a doll dressed as an Evzon soldier, a komboloi (a set of worry beads), numerous Greek Orthodox crucifixes, bottles of olives and some fish soaking in water.

If you ever feel like bingeing on pilchards and orange Fanta this is your signature shop. In the window of the shop a blue-and-white Greek flag flutters.

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Panayiotis speaks exclusively in the present tense, using mainly monosyllables, which he repeats for emphasis. In the manner of Athenian taxi drivers he remembers the minutiae of every single financial transaction he has ever undertaken.

“One nine seventy-one,” he says, “I come here. Greece, no work, marches.” He immediately got work as a welder. “R10 a week.” He drove down to Cape Town with two friends. “Petrol R2.50 each person. Hotel R10.

“One nineteen seven one I buy this building. R20 000. Rates now R2 000. Electricity R2 000.

“Everybody leaving here, everyone, everyone.”

He is talking about all the small shops that have been wiped out by supermarkets, a prevailing theme and partly responsible for his strikingly bad mood. When I tell him that people think he is grumpy, he is pleased and trumpets the word: gurumy.

Another source of great delight to Panayiotis is that he is never load shedded which he believe is divine intervention.  “On this side light, other side dark,” he murmurs with joy.

But Panayiotis is a kind man. The only customer while I am there is a woman with two firecrackers in her hair wearing a pink slip and a fur coat. “Bokkie,” she says, “Just two Marlboro Lights, can I pay tomorrow?”

The ancient till is covered in small slips of money owed. “I won’t ever get any of it back,” he says, sadly.

When asked why he doesn’t sell the shop and retire, he has one word.

“Daughter.”

In that one word lies the future of this building in the heart of Kloof Street - worth a lot of money. Maybe someone will swing it back to the old days when it was the queen of the street.

Although it might now be an elderly shop, it was once a swish restaurant/bar with frothy milk shakes, a chrome soda fountain and formica tables. There were balls of coloured ice cream as smooth as gossamer, swiveling bar stools, a large mirror and different sized ice cream scoops. In those days the word Topolino was a slinky landmark that conflated the simple exterior buildings around it into flaming sophistication. “Steak big piece and chips, 40 cents,” says Panayiotis.

As a child in the sixties, the writer Herman Lategan lived in an old boarding house opposite . “The Topolino forms a vital part of my memories. Friday nights were special. All the sexy boys in black leather jackets came on motor bikes. They would take their helmets off and comb their hair with Brylcreem. There was a snooker table and a jukebox and the women wore short skirts and blew smoke rings.”

Ah, Topolino!