Italy’s Meloni-themed restaurant opens near asylum-seeker camp in Albania

Rome: A restaurant dedicated to Giorgia Meloni has opened in the vicinity of a camp in Albania where the asylum claims of people who seek to enter the EU by sea will be processed as part of a controversial pact promoted by the Italian far-right prime minister.

Trattoria Meloni, a seafood restaurant in the northern port of Shëngjin, was opened by Gjergj Luca, a restaurant owner who is close to the Albanian prime minister, Edi Rama.

The restaurant is filled with 70 portraits of Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy, a party with neofascist origins, leads Italy’s ruling coalition. There is a smiling Meloni, a serious Meloni, an angry Meloni, and Meloni as a child, teenager and politician.

“When cuisine, art and politics come together, you can make beautiful things,” Luca said.

Meloni and Rama first hatched the migration plan, branded by human rights associations as illegal under international law but tacitly endorsed by the EU, last summer.

Meloni visited the site of the Shëngjin centre in June, before the restaurant opened. It is one of two centres expected to begin processing asylum claims in the coming weeks. Under the Italy-funded deal, men crossing the Mediterranean from north Africa and intercepted by the Italian coastguard will be taken to Albania.

The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, was criticised by human rights groups and his Labour party backbenchers after expressing “great interest” in the migration pact during a meeting with Meloni in Rome last week while vowing to send £4m to support her controversial crackdown on irregular migration.

Meloni once said Italy should repatriate migrants and then “sink the boats that rescued them”. In the past she has also called for a naval blockade of north Africa.

However, the centres have been largely welcomed by local people for creating jobs in an impoverished region of Albania.

Luca, the son of a famous Albanian actor and a former actor himself, said he was charmed by Meloni’s personality, calling her “extraordinary”.

He said he hopes she will come back to taste his food and admire her portraits, which adorn every inch of the restaurant’s walls.

The portraits were all painted by Helidon Haliti, a well-known Albanian artist.

Meloni is a “very interesting, strong character and, even if her political convictions aren’t my own, that hasn’t stopped me from doing a passionate job,” Haliti said.

“Did I need a permission to paint her portrait?” he added. “Did Andy Warhol need permission to paint Marilyn Monroe? In postmodernism, it’s allowed, and I think that with Meloni, I’ve succeeded.”

Meloni was also the key protagonist in a deal signed in July 2023 between the EU and Tunisia that meant paying the north African country millions of euros to stop migrant boats from leaving, as well as to invest in businesses and education, all with the aim of deterring migration.

The policy bore little fruit in the early stages, but now the deal, along with another – first struck by Italy in 2017 – that equips and trains the Libyan coastguard to stop people leaving, is credited with reducing inflows.

The deal with Libya essentially pushes people back to detention camps where they face torture and other abuses. Shocking abuse against migrants in Tunisia was reported by the Guardian last week.