Every year, when we open the double doors at Ida for the first time, I can’t help but think of Penelope Fitzgerald’s wonderful description of the end of a Russian winter, in her novel, The Beginning of Spring.
“All morning the yardman had been removing the putty from the inner glass, piece by piece, flake by flake. Blashl, frantic at his long disappearance, howled at intervals, but the yardman worked slowly. When all the putty was off, without a scratch from the chisel, he called, lord of the moment, for the scrapings to be brushed away. The space between the outer and inner windows was black with dead flies. They, too, must be removed, and the sills washed down with soft soap. Then with a shout from the triumphant shoe-cleaning boy at the top of the house to Ben, still in the hall, the outer windows, some terribly stuck, were shaken and rattled till they opened wide. Throughout the winter the house had been deaf, turned inwards, able to listen only to itself. Now the sounds of Moscow broke in, the bells and voices, the cabs and taxis which had gone by all winter unheard like ghosts of themselves, and with the noise came the spring wind, fresher than it felt in the street, blowing in uninterrupted from the northern regions where the frost still lay.”
Penelope Fitzgerald “The Beginning of Spring“
When we first moved into the area almost thirty years ago, 167 Fifth Avenue was still a greengrocer’s shop. Everything about this old photo delights me: the giant sacks of potatoes - so many of them! -stacked up on wooden pallets, the “BAKED BEANS” sign in the window, the crossed arms with the rolled up sleeves. The fact that the owner, Neil, is wearing a shirt and tie. There is a wistful, sepia-tinged cast to the image; the houses across the road still have their original mullioned windows, while a retro-looking car with a low-slung boot can be glimpsed heading in the direction of Queens Park.
Twenty years later, Avi and I look equally proprietorial standing outside the exact same stoop. So who is the true custodian of 167 Fifth Avenue? The answer, of course, is nobody - we are all passing through.
I find it low-key unsettling knowing that every day Neil would have inserted his key into the same lock that we do, filled up his kettle from the same tap, flicked up the circuit breaker above the door each time the lights tripped. Like us, he would have stood in the doorway on a rainy winter’s evening, listening to the pneumatic hiss of the bus’s brakes and the gritty clunk-clunk of the loose paving stone outside the restaurant that wobbles every time someone walks on it. He would have bent down to pick up the same utility bills from the mat, though he would have been appalled to learn how much we are paying for gas and electricity in 2025.
Would this photo be less disquieting if it belonged to a distant, rather than more recent, past? The answer is probably yes. Unlike Ida, Neil’s greengrocer’s shop looks as though it has always been there on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Kilburn Lane, and I wonder whether our decision to replicate the original colours of the shop was an unconscious attempt to validate our presence on that site. Today, twenty years on, I think I find the image haunting because it suggests a life not lived - an alternate reality where we never opened a restaurant in an empty corner shop and residents of the Queens Park continued to buy potatoes and baked beans from a premises which was built to serve the community around it.
In honour of Neil, we took a piece of the old sign that we found up in the attic and had it scanned at a specialist paint shop so that we could replicate the exact shade of green when it came to decorating the exterior. We even chose the similar colours for the shadow writing of our sign, though we went for a different, more Italian, font called “Pinocchio.”
Like the windows in The Beginning of Spring, our double doors remain sealed throughout the winter and are ceremoniously opened up on the first really hot day of the year. Since the mini heatwave of last week, the weather has plummeted by a good ten degrees, but, in the hope that the barometer will soon rise again, I’m going to share my sister in law, Clara’s, recipe for a no-cook sugo which is ideal for the warmer months.
This was recently included in a beautiful book called Brunch in London, published by a global charity called OnePlate, and featuring recipes, among others, from Jamie Oliver, Angela Hartnett, Anna Jones, Melissa Hemsley, Diana Henry, Philip Khoury, Claire Ptak, Rick Stein, Ella Mills, Yotam Ottolenghi and Heston Blumenthal. At Ida, we have never served brunch, but honoured to in such great company, I came up with a dish which we don’t actually serve at the restaurant, but could, at a pinch, work for either brunch or a light lunch.
The “sauce” is more of a blitzed smoothie, emulsified with plenty of garlic and oil, and is shockingly tasty when used to dress freshly-cooked pasta. And, of course, it can be prepared in advance, but I wouldn’t recommend keeping it longer than half a day in the fridge, as the tomatoes will start to oxidise, and it will lose its almost “pressé” taste.
Clara’s Pasta Estiva (Serves 4)
Ingredients
400-500g of short pasta. (Rigatoni, Paccheri, Penne, or similar, as long as they are rigati, i.e. ridged, and not smooth)
Four handfuls of the reddest, juiciest vine cherry tomatoes you can find. (Unless you are lucky enough to grow the pleated “Cuore di Bue”, or Oxheart, variety which Clara uses, or are able to get hold of any other tomatoes in season which actually taste and smell of something!)
Three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
One clove peeled garlic
One quarter of a small peeled red onion
Approx 100g grated Parmesan or Pecorino, plus extra for the table
Handful of basil.
Half a red chilli, deseeded
Pinch of salt
Method
Heat the water in the largest pot you own.
Once it boils, add enough salt so that it tastes like seawater, or even saltier, and drop the pasta into it.
Place all the other ingredients, including the pinch of salt, into a blender or juicer or similar, and whizz until you have a shiny, smoothie-like sauce, the colour of watermelon flesh
When the pasta is the right side of al dente, drain it and tip it into a large salad bowl.
Quickly stir the sauce into it, and serve immediately with torn basil and extra Parmesan on top.
