At the table Sweet dreams are cooked like these

Sometimes dreaming seems a rather melancholy thing, to be thinking of another time, another place.

- DAVID ELLIS

It doesn’t say much for the here and now. Last year Brits spent 16.4 billion minutes — about 31,000 years — on Rightmove, presumably all looking up the same Cornish cottages and crumbling manor houses. Fresh starts. We long for them.

James Chiavarini knows all about fresh starts. He runs Il Portico, a Kensington Italian that’s 58 this year and always busy: generations of monied neighbours treat it as their local, popping in for celebrations — anniversaries, birthdays, divorces — and in times of distress, like when Waitrose is shut or the kids are back from boarding school. In 2021, five doors down, Chiavarini opened a wine bar, Pino. Critics loved it; no one else went. It didn’t make a year. It was reborn as a charity pizza project that couldn't last forever. In late 2023, it began again as La Palombe, a brasserie. “Come in,” he said, so I did. “What did you think?” he said. “I'll ring you,” I said, picking bits of game from my teeth and apologising to my mother for taking her out. And then I manfully avoided Chiavarini’s calls for months.