IIt 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 mum was only possible because Avi was our family’s main breadwinner. So when he was fired from his hated job in IT in 2006, I felt that 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 that I, fortunately, was spared. Don’t get me wrong: I loved restaurants as much as the next foodie and I could appreciate the defiant simplicity and simplicity of Italian cooking, which left the unscrupulous cook nowhere to hide. But I was also a child of the 70s and was brought up in London by a restless Tuscan mother who not only didn’t cook but believed the very worst fate a woman could face was to be tied to the stove to become As a result, we didn’t eat particularly well when I was growing up and it wasn’t until I moved to Rome in my 20s and met Avi that I began to understand the beauty and transcendence of sitting around a table.
“Why does all that trouble just go to family?” I used to think as I watched the food emerge from the tiny galley kitchen overlooking the courtyard. What can be left to say after years of breaking bread between the same familiar faces? And yet meals at my soon-to-be 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 lasagna of the Marche, which took a whole 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 spoke food as if it were a real language and showed their love for each other through the dishes they cooked. We wanted to channel some of that spirit into the restaurant we named after Avi’s mother, even though she ironically disliked – and even distrusted – food prepared outside the home. There were few things that Ida Zanni could not produce to restaurant standard, while her copy of Il Talisman Della Felicità (The Talisman of Happiness), the 1,000 pages full of recipes by Ada Boni given to all new brides, and what we have now, were well thumbed and spattered with stains.
After the war, Ida was reunited with her fiancé, an émigré Jewish doctor, Bernardo Reichenbach, whom she had not seen since 1939, when he was deported back to Poland as a result 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 was a link to the small hill town of Cupramontana she left behind. Nostalgia is bound in our restaurant’s DNA: Avi, her son, was twice an exile when we opened our doors in the spring of 2007.
We were woefully unprepared for what awaited us. The reality of serving 50 people in one evening, knowing that a single mistake – the wrong timings on a baked sea bass, a crema pasticcera that broke, a table waiting too long for their mains – could ruin our reputation the neighborhood would hurt 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 will have to learn on the job.
Bug-eyed with fatigue, home and family life began to feel like 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 had until then been the lights of our lives and the center of our world, began to feel. like another logistical problem that had to be managed.
Still, as the months passed, we all began to get used to this strange, people-filled new life. Ida began to feel like a second home to all of us and the children often stopped by their father for an early dinner. My mother, Ornella, looked after them for a few evenings a week, while I discovered to my surprise that managing Ida in some ways enriched 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 candlelit dining room, I hear snippets of conversation and my imagination goes into overdrive, trying to work out if the couple in the corner are married or lovers, if the quiet girl in a group knows that the others are talking about her, or if the man who insisted on ordering for his date overcompensated for something.
In retrospect, Ida’s success came too soon for us. We were packed every night, which meant we rarely had a spare moment to stock up or plan ahead, and sometimes when I saw groups of well-dressed diners walking up Kilburn Lane to our doors, I felt so overwhelmed that I would mutter under my breath. : “Don’t you have many houses to check?” 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 hit, we found ourselves woefully unprepared. Almost overnight, it seemed, discussions 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 eerie and unloved, and some evenings we didn’t have a single discussion. Bleeding just to cover our overhead, we started seriously talking about locking the door and mailing the keys through the letter box.
My involvement with Ida was only ever meant to be for a year, but when the recession hit, I was in too deep to walk away. It wasn’t just pride or stubbornness; I sincerely believed that there was something in our restaurant worth saving. We didn’t always get things right and no one could have foreseen a global downturn that destroyed many more established restaurants than ours, but I had a feeling that if we paid off our debt and started over, with Avi back in the kitchen and me full-time as front of house, we were able to turn things around.
If we ever needed confirmation that we made the right decision, the 2020 pandemic showed us the true community of a neighborhood restaurant. Almost immediately we partnered with a local charity and began producing hot meals for shelter and vulnerable residents, delivered by volunteers, many of whom were Ida clients. A pay-it-forward crowdfunder raised an astonishing £26,000 in 72 hours, allowing us to carry on through all the various lockdowns, while our wonderful customers continue to pop into our Sunday Markets and lunches from the house for sale at our hole. -in-the-wall deli.
Ida at My Table was originally designed as a cookbook, accompanied by charming vignettes about Ida’s life in Cupramontana. But I knew there was another story to tell. A conventional cookbook could never do justice to the journey we were on as a family. Nor would it explain the strange liminal place I inhabited as a restaurateur who didn’t cook myself. 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 cook grandma’s food,” grumbled one new chef when he received a guide to Ida’s recipes.
Opening a restaurant may have taken me away from my desk, but it has also filled our lives with color and wonder. Our world grew larger, more outward-facing, while in a fast-paced capital we somehow managed to put down roots. During the very difficult times, our children begged us not to sell Ida; they grew up within those four walls and although both the recession and the pandemic were difficult for them, their energy and enthusiasm gave the restaurant a new lease of life. Today, all three are clear problem solvers, nimble on their feet and sensible about the twists and turns that life can take. I wonder what their grandmother, Ida, would have made of all this. I hope she would have been happy.
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
