An Insider’s Look at Love Supreme, Paddington*
I walked into Love Supreme and the first person I saw was Bosko. He was in the kitchen near the entrance. It was my first shift working there.
“Hey hey, Fraser is here! Woo woo woo!”
He was clapping madly. The phone rang and he answered.
“Hey hey, Fraser is here! Love Supreme wooohoo!”
(I don’t know why he was telling the person on the other end that I was there)
Bosko was wearing a blue t-shirt that tightly gripped his small potbelly. On the front read the words, “Love Supreme, Emotional Pizza for One and All,” which wrapped around a picture of an artichoke heart.
That night I delivered pizzas around Paddington on an electric bicycle. When I returned from each delivery he was pacing across the floor and kitchen, clapping for no particular reason, occasionally letting out a loud, “Wwwwoohoooo!”
I thought he belonged in a videogame. The man seemed more Super Mario than Mediterranean immigrant. Yet he was the restaurant’s founder and owner, and this was his heart and soul. He was Love Supreme’s gregarious chef who pioneered her pizzas. They had names like ‘LSD’ and ‘Tito’, named after Yugolsavia’s first president and revolutionary, Josip Broz Tito.
“What does the LSD pizza mean, Bosko?” I asked.
“Love Supreme Delight,” he replied, smiling.
I’m not sure how much cooking Bosko did that night. Then again, he didn’t need to. He was the lifeblood of the place and every customer was an opportunity to entertain and amuse.
“New delivery driver here, Fraser!” Pointing me out to a group of people at a table. He was smiling madly at me, “Verks for Urban Walkabout, came in, asked for job, now he’s here!” The confused customers could only smile. Why was he telling them this? I stood there awkwardly for a few moments. No one said anything.
“Oh.. what excitement!” Bosko said, smiling, breaking the silence.
Meanwhile, jazz music filled the room, coming from the speakers in the roof. It seemed fitting; Bosko was the embodiment of jazz. Passionate. Excited. Sweating. He was the Holy Idiot, whom everyone seemed to admire.
I looked around the dimly lit restaurant. There were boxes of ‘Organic Wild Rocket’ and ‘Biodynamic Pears’ neatly stacked on top of each other. On a bench was a red rotary dial telephone that wasn’t plugged into anything. At the back of the restaurant were bags of ‘Australian Stoneground Organic Flour’ that lay on top of an old weighing scale. My attention came to rest at a picture of a man staring intensely. Above him read the words, “A Love Supreme/John Coltrane”.
It was the final piece of the puzzle, the moment where all the chaos came neatly came together for me in this strange and lovely place.
Pay a visit to Love Supreme and check it out for yourself (180 Oxford Street, Paddington).
The modest Czech also paid a poignant tribute to her late coach Jana Novotna, the former Wimbledon champion, who died of cancer in 2017, saying she thinks of her every time she steps on court and wonders what she would have to say after the match:
"I guess she would just tell me that she's very proud. That's what I think she would do. She would just tell me 'Just enjoy, keep going'.
“It doesn't matter if you win or lose, you just have to do your best every single time you step on court, just focus on tennis, just play.
"She would just be jumping and screaming. That's how I remember her. That's actually what she was doing when I played ITFs. So I guess maybe it would be even bigger right now."
By reaching the French Open semi-final, Krejčíková matched her late coach, who made it to the last four at Roland Garros in 1990 and again in 1996.
Long hailed as a doubles specialist, Barbora
is now making a splash in the French Open singles, the third Czech player in as many years to reach the semi-finals in Paris.
She is just another modest star in a long line of young Czech women who have made the semi-finals or better at
in the past decade.
Petra Kvitova reached that stage in 2012 and last year, Karolina Pliskova in 2017, while Lucie Safarova lost the 2015 final and Marketa Vondrousova finished runner-up in 2019.
"The background and the supply in Czech women's tennis is really very, very good," says Vladislav Savrda, a former player and coach and now manager of the Prague-based CLTK tennis club.
The Czech Republic, which has won six out of the last nine
Cups, now has 10 players in the WTA top 100.
"They are good examples that naturally make parents take their daughters to tennis schools. They prefer tennis to figure skating or gymnastics," Savrda told AFP.
"Football and ice hockey are big phenomena in the Czech Republic, but of course they don't interest the girls so much," he added.
