There is no finer feast

James Chiavarini likes to know exactly where the game served at his family restaurant in London comes from — so he shoots it himself

- A.Sydenham

Perhaps unusually for a Londoner, I can trace my family back to the 16th century. For about 500 years, my ancestors lived in the same northern Italian village with a quiet existence of hill farming, foraging and market hunting. Their life was mostly outdoor, simple and frugal.

My childhood growing up in suburbia was a polar opposite. My immigrant parents worked hard and were aspirational, cherishing formal schooling, cricket matches and professional development as a suitable way upwards for a young man in a new country.

My father was particularly keen to impress upon my young and ungrateful mind how blessed I was to have the opportunities of modern education. His childhood, in contrast, seem to consist of climbing trees barefoot for wild honey, breeding doves to sell to the infirm, and roaming the Apennines for wild hares with his doting hound. Call me spoilt, but I always felt a pinch of envy when he would regale me with tales of his teenage years wild and free.

However idyllic a childhood he may have had, this was no future for a growing man to support a family in difficult times. World War II had left Italy wretched, pitiful and poor, so at the tender age of 17 my teary-eyed dad entrusted his dog to his father, kissed his mother and stepped on a bus to trade the green hills of his valley for the iron sky of the big smoke.

After a somewhat rocky start, he quickly forged a path for himself with old-fashioned grit and elbow grease.

Within a few years he had joined a rough shooting syndicate and opened a restaurant in Kensington dedicated to his childhood. Soon Tuscan hare stew and pheasant breasts “a la Sofia Loren” were flying out of the kitchen.