Sorry to tell you, but this daddy has issues

Parenting is not a threshold over which I have yet crossed, but friends tell me good cop/bad cop is still the preferred routine.

- DAVID ELLIS

Children worldwide recognise this instinctively in their guardians, knowing there is the tyrant who insists on vegetables and maths and bedtime, and then the other one, "the fun one". In our house, my father was eventually banned from taking my sister and me to the supermarket unsupervised, lest we again return home yet again with almost nothing but Wagon Wheels (our choice) and Hamlets (his).

It looks like things at home were different for Daniel Land, the Coco di Mama co-founder who is behind this.

It is, the website says, "inspired by mischievous siblings who knew... that the best memories always started with 'Don't Tell Dad." Land and his late sister Lesley would utter the phrase to each other and, movingly, the restaurant is a tribute from him to her. This is the sort of detail that hardens my throat and makes me blink too much.

So Land won't tell dad, but he's told everyone else. Videos of the place are totting up views by the thousand on Tik Tok and last week, this paper declared it the hottest table in town, because it is: people want to go. Or they are being told they want to go, which is not quite the same.