My intense interest in restaurants may be traced all the way back to childhood, when I coolly set up my own little place in the Victorian outside loo at my dad’s (somewhat of a hipster location, I think now). A short-lived but highly memorable establishment – at my funeral, there will doubtless be ye olde sibling jokes about how I misspelled lettuce – everything on the menu had been drawn by me in felt tip, and then cut out by hand. Service was brisk, orange squash was complimentary, and the atmosphere in the kitchen was straight out of The Bear. Woe betide the customer who dared to laugh on receiving a serving of peas that comprised just three tiny discs of lime green paper. What did they expect? I had no sous-chef and no decent scissors.
Something stuck in my small brain in that freezing cold washhouse, and it has never left me. What works, and what doesn’t? Why will one restaurant succeed and another fail? (Paper veg isn’t the half of it.) On city walks, wherever I happen to be, it strikes me again and again how much passion it takes to survive in hospitality – and yet, how often such passion seems either to have gone awol, or to have sent owners in the wrong direction entirely. So many paradoxes, so many confusions. From the outside, quick fixes are obvious, even to the amateur eye. Shorten your menu! Paint over that maroon wall immediately. But it’s also indubitably the case that some very bad restaurants are packed, and some very good ones heartbreakingly empty.
No wonder, then, that I jumped on Simonetta Wenkert’s memoir, Ida at My Table, as if on The Key to All Mythologies. I’ve been waiting to read something like it: a book that speaks, minus any macho nonsense, about the experience of running a small restaurant, through good times and bad. In 2007, Wenkert, a writer, and her husband, Avi, an IT engineer, opened a small, neighbourhood restaurant on an unpromising arterial road in a slightly obscure corner of west London (you call it Queen’s Park, I call it west Kilburn).
Neither of them had any experience of hospitality, and nor were they rich (they also, I should say, had three youngish children). But it was their dream, and together they made it a reality, naming it Ida after Avi’s Italian grandmother, whose home cooking is in part the inspiration for its menu. Seventeen years later, it’s still going strong – a place as beloved by its owners as it is by locals and regulars. (As Wenkert notes, these are not always the same thing – though both are much more its lifeblood than, say, Prince Harry and Meghan, who went through a phase of eating there before they departed for the chicken caesar salads of Montecito.)
Ida at My Table is captivating, not least because, as I mentioned here last month, it comes with recipes. (How tempted am I to make Clara-Rosa’s Amalfi limoncello? The answer is: very tempted.) On one level, it’s about love and family and stoicism. Simonetta and Avi go through so much: the financial crisis of 2008 brings them to sell their house to keep going; the pandemic has them repurposing Ida as a miniature deli and coffee shop; the struggle to find and keep staff is ongoing. But its real interest for me lies in the way Wenkert captures the strange alchemy of a neighbourhood restaurant: the achievement of a certain balance. Everything must be right, but not – how to put this? – too right. A successful local restaurant, as she knows all too well, needs to be perfect, but in a slightly wonky, almost homespun way. In the case of Ida, the pasta should certainly be al dente, but just as important are the endearing pictures on the walls (bought in a job lot at Portobello Market); the fact that its tables are always covered with freshly laundered cloths.
It’s a cliche – and horribly saccharine to boot – to write of an embrace in this context, but this is, I think, what loyal customers are looking for: warmth, reliability, the feeling that this is their place, as opposed to the best place (though Ida, people tell me, is excellent). The truly good neighbourhood restaurant is a rare creation; it’s also, in a world of Instagram and blow-hard critics, an unsung hero. If you’re lucky enough to have one, don’t take it for granted. Eat there tonight, not next week.