MMy intense interest in restaurants can be traced back to my childhood when I coolly set up my own little place in my father’s Victorian outdoor toilet (quite a hip place now, I think). A short-lived but highly memorable place – no doubt there will be old sibling jokes at my funeral about how I misspelled ‘Lettuge’ – everything on the menu was drawn in felt tip pen and then cut out by hand. Service was quick, orange juice was free and the atmosphere in the kitchen was like something out of a fairy tale. The bear. Woe betide the customer who dared to laugh when he received a portion of peas that consisted of only three tiny slices of bright green paper. What did he expect? I had no sous-chef and no decent scissors.
Something stuck in my little brain in that freezing cold laundry room and has never left me. What works and what doesn’t? Why does one restaurant succeed and another fail? (Paper vegetables aren’t half the story.) Walking around town, wherever I happen to be, I’m always struck by how much passion it takes to survive in the restaurant business—and yet how often that passion seems to have either been lost or led owners in entirely the wrong direction. So many paradoxes, so many confusions. From the outside, quick fixes are obvious, even to the lay eye. Shorten your menu! Paint over that maroon wall immediately. But it’s also undoubtedly true that some very bad restaurants are full, and some very good ones are heartbreakingly empty.
No wonder, then, that I immediately came across Simonetta Wenkert’s memoirs. Ida at my tableas if it were on The Key to All Myths. I’ve been waiting to read something like this: a book that tells, without any macho nonsense, 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 neighborhood restaurant on an unpromising arterial road in a somewhat remote corner of west London (you call it Queen’s Park, I call it West Kilburn).
Neither had any experience in hospitality, nor were they rich (plus, I must say, they had three rather young children). But it was their dream, and together they made it a reality. They named it Ida after Avi’s Italian grandmother, whose home cooking is partly the inspiration for the menu. Seventeen years later, it’s still going strong—a place loved by its owners as much as it is by locals and regulars. (As Wenkert notes, that’s not always the same—though both are much more the lifeblood of the restaurant than, say, Prince Harry and Meghan, who ate there for a period before heading off to Montecito for the chicken Caesar salads.)
Ida at my table is compelling, not least because, as I mentioned here last month, it includes recipes. (How tempting am I to make Clara-Rosa’s Amalfi limoncello? The answer is: very tempting.) On one level, it’s about love and family and stoicism. Simonetta and Avi go through so much: the 2008 financial crisis makes them sell their house to keep going; the pandemic sees them converting Ida into a small deli and cafe; the battle for staff continues. But the really interesting thing for me is the way Wenkert captures the strange alchemy of a neighborhood restaurant: achieving a certain balance. Everything has to be right, but not—how shall I say?—too right. A successful local restaurant, she knows only too well, has to be perfect, but in a slightly offbeat, almost homespun way. In Ida’s case, the pasta should definitely be al dente, but just as important are the charming pictures on the walls (bought from a surplus section at Portobello Market) and the fact that the tables are always covered with freshly laundered cloths.
It’s cliché – and terribly saccharine – to talk about a hug in this context, but I think that’s what loyal customers are looking for: warmth, reliability, the feeling that this is their place, not the best place (although Ida, people tell me, is excellent). The truly good neighborhood restaurant is a rare creation; it’s also, in a world of Instagram and boastful critics, an unsung hero. If you’re lucky enough to have one, don’t take it for granted. Eat there tonight, not next week.
