Wally's is Cardiff's great delicatessen, three generations of the Salamon family deep. Ignatz Salamon, a central-European émigré, started the family in food on Bridge Street in 1947; his son Wally opened the deli proper in the Royal Arcade in 1981; and Steven Salamon has run it since 1995, keeping the shelves as they should be — continental charcuterie and cheese, jars and tins from across Europe, the ingredients a good cook cannot find in a supermarket. Upstairs is the Kaffeehaus, a Viennese-style coffee house that gives the whole enterprise its central-European accent: coffee and cake in the middle of a Welsh capital. It is the sort of shop that quietly civilises a city — the reason you can cook properly in Cardiff — and its survival through three generations, in an age that has closed most delis like it, is worth marking. The Salamons kept faith with the counter; the city is richer for it.
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