The insurance company Aviva recently made an advert featuring a family-run Italian restaurant so idyllic, and so charming, it could never actually exist in real life.
Except this one does.
It’s called Ida (not Gino’s), and sits on a picturesque corner of Queen’s Park (which is rapidly becoming a site of restaurant pilgrimage thanks to openings like Don’t Tell Dad and Milk Beach). Run by husband-and-wife team Avi and Simonetta, alongside their three children, it’s been a stalwart of the neighbourhood’s dining scene since 2007 – and it just seems to be getting better and better.
The whole place runs on that same ineffable pixie dust that suffuses any great family-run restaurant: the place hums with warmth, kindness and genuine hospitality. You’ll be ushered to a table laid with a crisp white tablecloth, fresh flowers and candlelight, and attended to just the right amount.
Ida’s speciality is fresh pasta and gnocchi, which is crafted in-house every day and put into recipes handed down from Avi’s mother (the eponymous Ida). Get the pappardelle slathered in ragù Marchigiano (that is, from the Marche region). It’s prepared the traditional way with beef, pork, gizzards & chicken hearts, stewed all day in copious amounts of wine. In the evenings, the pasta-heavy menu expands slightly with tender seabass fillets & caponata; veal T-bone and steak (served, wonderfully, with roast potatoes). And to finish? A handsome slice of Torta della Nonna (a Tuscan classic of dense custard tart dusted with sugar and pine nuts), or a hefty pile of tiramisù that goes heavy on the cocoa powder.
Washing it all down is a reasonably priced Italian wine list, including a cheery Sangiovese that you can order by the litre carafe. Ida is also, we suspect, the only restaurant in London to serve Babycham (long due a revival, we reckon) – and to give it the dignity of the title of ‘aperitif’.
Like everything at Ida, it’s a toast to the pure, innocent joys of life, while the rest of the world rumbles on beyond the half-curtained windows.
NOTE: Ida is open for dinner Tues-Sat, and lunch on Sundays. You can find out more, and book a table, on the Ida website.
Ida | 222a Kilburn Lane, W10 4AT
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