Ida At My Table (eBook)

Fifth Avenue

‘Do you like the kitchen, Papà?’ asked Fiammetta, our ten-year-old, anxiously, as Avi surveyed the narrow-tiled space at the rear of the room. Of our three children, she seemed most to understand what was at stake. Empty juice cartons and crisp packets littered the rickety laminate worktop, while ugly brown smears of tile adhesive were left on the walls where the previous owners had ripped out shelves and appliances.

‘I think I’ll like it better after we’ve cleaned it,’ he replied, smiling, as he pinched her cheek.

The day we got the keys, we brought the children to Fifth Avenue to see the restaurant. But they were not impressed.

‘It smells disgusting,’ said Isotta, our eldest daughter, aged twelve, wrinkling her nose fastidiously as she stepped over the mountain of letters and promotional leaflets that had been pushed through the letterbox.

It was only three o’clock, but outside on Kilburn Lane, it was already getting dark. A man shuffled dismally past in his pyjamas; a bus clanked noisily over a pothole and we all jumped.

Isotta was right: the restaurant reeked of desolation and failure. The walls were painted orange, a colour I recall being briefly fashionable in 1999, while the radiators were picked out in bright turquoise. Seashells and mirrors were glued onto the walls, with garlands of flowers stencilled, rather heartbreakingly, over the doorways. Like us, the previous owners had been a couple with a young family; they’d started off as a Lebanese cafe, then after a few months, an ‘All Day English Breakfast’ sign had appeared ominously (and somewhat confusingly) beside the ‘Halal’ stickers in the window. After less than a year in business, they shut down and, according to local gossip, did a runner without paying the rent.

I knew that for months the new kitchen had existed in Avi’s mind, measured and costed down to the last detail. Looking around the empty restaurant, I pictured it filled with smiling customers enjoying our food; a natural meeting place for local people and their friends. Avi would turn his perfectionism to his advantage; people would come from far and wide to try his hand-rolled pasta. The restaurant would succeed because the alternative was too dreadful to contemplate.

‘What’s that beautiful bird, Mummy?’ asked five-year-old Livio, pointing towards the bus shelter across the road. My heart lurched and I paused with the key in the lock. I knew what the bird was, without turning around. For months I had been scanning the skies for such a sign; today of all days, the keys of the restaurant finally in our hand, the bird had found us.

‘It’s a magpie,’ announced Isotta, blithely.

Slowly, I removed the key and, taking a deep breath, turned to face our bad-luck bird. ‘Actually,’ I said, giddy with relief, ‘it’s two magpies.’

It was my mother who spotted the empty shop from the top deck of the number 6 bus.

The rent was £17,000 per annum, and, crucially, the premises came with a hard to obtain A3 restaurant licence. Aside from that, 167 Fifth Avenue didn’t have much else going for it. Flanked on one side by Kilburn Lane, an unlovely arterial road running right through the Brent–Westminster boundary, and on the other by the Avenues, an area of small dwellings adjacent to the notorious Mozart Estate, there was no high street, and no passing trade, unless you included the comings and goings from the crack house run by a police informer called Bunny, which operated with seeming impunity from a maisonette across the road.

The little purple corner shop was one of the few remaining commercial premises in the Queen’s Park Estate, a conservation area built by the Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company in 1876. Acquiring the lease on a shop so close to home would allow us to find our feet as restaurateurs in an area where we had lived for almost fifteen years, where we had put down proper roots, and where we were on friendly terms with many of our neighbours. Even though the location wasn’t ideal, surely the fact that we were familiar faces in the neighbourhood had to count for something?

But, on the day we were due to sign the contract, the owner suddenly pulled out. No longer interested in finding a tenant for the shop, he had decided to put the entire building on the market. The estate agent must have told him how invested we were in Fifth Avenue, planting the idea in his mind that if he pushed us hard enough, it would be an opportunity once and for all to offload a sub-par property that had proved difficult to let. Avi, sensing – rightly, as it turned out – that we were being played, wanted to walk away. It was only my own obduracy, an almost mystical conviction that this little shop was destined to be ours, that convinced him we should try and raise the funds to buy it.

Now I ask myself, who in their right minds would do that? Borrow half a million pounds in the belief that their nascent business (a business that neither they nor their partner knew the first thing about) was contingent upon acquiring an abandoned corner shop on the edge of an estate? To be fair, we’d gone through the motions of looking at other premises, but after a few desultory viewings – one in Stoke Newington, a couple in Maida Vale, one on the Grand Union Canal – we kept returning to Fifth Avenue. And because, in any case, the entire madcap scheme was predicated on a kind of magical thinking, taking on all that debt didn’t seem any more risky than believing we had a chance of succeeding as restaurateurs in a city where nineteen out of twenty food businesses folded in their first year.

It took our financial advisor half a year to help us raise the cash: a further advance of £240,000 on our domestic mortgage, and another £280,000 in the form of a commercial loan. Deadlines came and went, while the ‘Sold – subject to contract’ sign mocked me each time I passed the shop. ‘Have you got the restaurant yet?’ the children would ask us hopefully each time we were informed that yet another ‘loose end’ needed to be tied up.

Then, on 18 December 2006, after an entirely predicted eleventh-hour price hike by the vendor (followed almost at once by the agent’s shady offer to make up some of the shortfall himself, thus confirming our suspicions that the two of them had been in cahoots all along), we drove to our solicitor’s office in Richmond to sign the papers, and 167 Fifth Avenue was finally ours.

Avi and I hadn’t been idle during this time. Various builders had come to quote us for the work on the shop, and we had spent every evening making lists and poring over the Nisbets catalogue, the restaurateur’s bible, circling the kitchen equipment we had been told we needed, all the accoutrements of the strange new life we were about to enter.

One of those builders, a dapper Iranian man called Victor, who wore Italian suits with the label still stitched on the sleeve and a diamond stud in his ear, took us to an industrial estate in Neasden which he promised us would be 50 per cent cheaper than anything in the Nisbets catalogue. We met up with him in the midst of a downpour in the car park of a McDonald’s in Wembley, and followed his Porsche Boxster through a series of backstreets until we reached the estate. Picking his way through the mud and puddles in his nubuck snaffle loafers, Victor led us into a hangar piled to the rafters with reconditioned kitchen equipment.

‘Where does all this stuff come from?’ I asked, looking around me at a caterers’ graveyard of dented stockpots, modular wire shelves stacked with utensils, deep-fat fryers, extractors, food processors, glassware, and row after row of rectangular stainless-steel containers with lids that we learned were called gastronorms.

‘Bad businesses,’ shrugged Victor.

Some of the equipment looked almost new, and I wondered how long it had taken those restaurateurs to concede that it was Game Over. Had they been amateurs like us, or had they just been really unlucky? Standing in that freezing hangar, listening to raindrops clattering like pebbles onto the corrugated-tin roof, I was overcome by tiredness.

I want to return to my world, I remember thinking, pierced by a sudden longing for the children, for afternoons at my desk, for conversations with people who cared about books. But that life no longer existed. The shop was ours, and for each day we were closed, we were paying £100 in interest alone.

Of all the things that used to keep me awake in the months leading up to our opening, the most obvious – would we make a success of it? – was never on the list. Instead, I used to dream about masked men rampaging through the dining room, snatching wallets and jewellery off our customers in the manner of New York ‘wildings’, or nightmares about handing over my children to strangers at train stations (obviously displaced guilt about no longer being a stay-at-home mother). Feel the fear and do it anyway, I would mutter each time the panic threatened to engulf me.

We always knew we’d open a restaurant. Apparently, Avi had talked about it since he was a small boy, but it wasn’t until he was made redundant from his detested job in IT that we knew our time had come. Then, with stunning serendipity, a pretty Grade II-listed corner shop came up for rent just one street away from our house in Queen’s...