It was only meant to be for a year. The restaurant was my husband Avi’s dream, not mine. As a time-poor novelist and mother of three, the very last thing I needed was another commitment to take me away from my desk. But I also knew that my comfortable London life as a freelance writer and stay-at-home mother was only possible because Avi was our family’s main bread winner. So when, in 2006, he was made redundant from his detested job in IT, I felt I owed it to him to help make his dream a reality.
It was the late Anthony Bourdain who declared that the desire to be a restaurateur was “a strange and terrible affliction”, but it was one which I, thankfully, had been spared. Don’t get me wrong: I liked restaurants as much as the next foodie and I could appreciate the provocative plainness and simplicity of Italian cuisine, which left the dishonest cook nowhere to hide. But I was also a child of the 70s and had been brought up in London by a restless Tuscan mother who not only didn’t cook, but who believed the very worst fate that could befall a woman was to be tied to the stove. As a result, we didn’t eat especially well when I was growing up and it was only when I moved to Rome in my 20s and met Avi that I started to understand the beauty and transcendence of sitting around a table.
“Why go to all that trouble just for family?” I used to think as I watched the food emerging from the tiny galley kitchen overlooking the courtyard. What could there be left to say after years of breaking bread among the same familiar faces? And yet meals at my future mother-in-law Ida’s house – even a simple midweek lunch – always felt like an event. The conversation never seemed to flag and there was a palpable moment of excitement as each dish was placed on the table: vincisgrassi, the lasagne of the Marche, which took an entire day to prepare; stock fish cooked in umido with tomatoes and potatoes; a bag of yellow Ravenna cherries from the market in a chipped majolica bowl.
The women of the family I married into spoke food as though it were a real language, showing their love for each other through the dishes they cooked. We wanted to channel something of that spirit in the restaurant we named after Avi’s mother, even though, ironically, she disliked – and even distrusted – food prepared outside the home. There were few things Ida Zanni couldn’t produce to restaurant standard, while her copy of Il Talismano Della Felicità (The Talisman of Happiness), the 1,000-page tome of recipes by Ada Boni which was given to all new brides, and which we now have, was well-thumbed and spattered with stains.
After the war, Ida was reunited with her fiancé, an émigré Jewish doctor, Bernardo Reichenbach, whom she hadn’t seen since 1939 when he had been deported back to Poland as a consequence of Mussolini’s racial laws. The couple eventually emigrated to Israel, where I like to imagine that, homesick for Italy, the tagliatelle she rolled every day on her kitchen table in Haifa were a link to the little hilltop town of Cupramontana she’d left behind. Nostalgia is hard-wired into our restaurant’s DNA: Avi, her son, was an exile twice over when we opened our doors in spring 2007.
We were piteously unprepared for what awaited us. The reality of serving 50 people in one evening, the knowledge that a single mistake – the wrong timings on a baked sea bass, a crema pasticcera that had split, a table waiting too long for their mains – would tarnish our reputation in the neighbourhood like a stain. London was a city where, I was told, 19 out of 20 food businesses folded in the first year; with no experience whatsoever in hospitality, we would have to learn on the job.
Bug-eyed with tiredness, home and family life began to feel like yet another arena of conflict. Cortisol and adrenaline pulsed through our veins as Avi and I barked instructions at each other about packed lunches and after-school clubs, while our three children, who until then had been the lights of our lives and the centre of our world, started to feel like yet another logistical problem that needed managing.
Yet, as the months passed, we all started to grow accustomed to this strange, people-filled new life. Ida began to feel like a second home to all of us and the children would often drop by for an early supper with their father. My mother, Ornella, looked after them for a few evenings a week, while to my surprise I discovered that in some ways running Ida was actually enriching my life as a writer. Being a restaurateur was like being a London cab driver: you never knew who would walk through your door. Looking around the candle-lit dining room, I would overhear snatches of conversation and my imagination would go into overdrive, trying to work out whether the couple in the corner were married or lovers, whether the quiet girl in a group knew that the others were talking over her, or if the man who insisted on ordering for his date was overcompensating for something.
In hindsight, Ida’s success came too early for us. We were full every night, which meant we rarely had a free moment to take stock or plan ahead, and sometimes when I saw groups of well-dressed diners ambling up Kilburn Lane towards our doors, I felt so overwhelmed I would mutter under my breath: “Don’t you lot have homes to go to?” We struggled with managing chefs, some of whom took advantage of our inexperience to run rings around us, which meant that when the 2008 recession struck, we found ourselves woefully unprepared. Almost overnight, it seemed, bookings fell off a cliff. People started to cut back on eating out, while the restaurants that continued to do well were those that offered customers real value for money. In contrast, Ida felt down-at-heel and unloved, and some nights we didn’t have a single booking. Haemorrhaging money just to cover our overheads, we started talking seriously about locking the door and posting the keys through the letterbox.
My involvement in Ida was only ever meant to have been for a year, yet when the recession struck, I was in too deep to walk away. It wasn’t just pride or stubbornness; I genuinely believed that there was something in our restaurant worth saving. We hadn’t always got things right and nobody could have foreseen a global downturn that decimated far more established restaurants than ours, but I had a feeling that if we paid off our debts and started over, with Avi back in the kitchen and me full-time as front of house, we could turn things around.
If ever we needed affirmation that we made the right decision, the 2020 pandemic showed us the true communality of a neighbourhood restaurant. Almost at once, we partnered up with a local charity and began producing hot meals for shielding and vulnerable residents, which were delivered by volunteers, many of whom were Ida customers. A pay-it-forward crowdfunder raised an astonishing £26,000 in 72 hours, which allowed us to keep going throughout all the various lockdowns, while our wonderful customers continued to drop by our Sunday markets and buy working-from-home lunches from our hole-in-the wall deli.
Ida at My Table was originally conceived as a cookbook, accompanied by charming vignettes about Ida’s life in Cupramontana. But I knew that there was another story to be told. A conventional cookbook could never do justice to the journey we’d been on as a family. Nor would it explain the strange liminal place I inhabited as a restaurateur who didn’t cook herself. Who lived in the shadow of a woman whose presence, like a hologram, was everywhere. “I didn’t come all the way to London to make grandma food,” one new chef grumbled when he was presented with a folder of Ida’s recipes.
Opening a restaurant may have taken me away from my desk, but it also filled our lives with colour and wonder. Our world became bigger, more outward-facing, while in a fast-paced capital city, we have somehow managed to put down roots. During the really hard times, our children begged us not to sell Ida; they grew up within those four walls and, while both the recession and the pandemic had been difficult for them, their energy and enthusiasm gave the restaurant a new lease of life. Today, all three are clear-eyed problem-solvers, nimble on their feet and sanguine about the twists and turns life can take. I wonder what their grandmother, Ida, would have made of it all. I hope she would have been glad.
Ida at My Table: A Story of Food, Family and Finding Home by Simonetta Wenkert is published by Bedford Square at £20, or £18 from guardianbookshop.com
