If you have a favourite neighbourhood restaurant, give it some love | Rachel Cooke
If you have a favourite neighbourhood restaurant, give it some love | Rachel Cooke
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What makes the perfect local restaurant? London’s Trullo, about to celebrate its 15th birthday, shows us the way. One of the great blessings of my life is that I live only a 10-minute walk from one of the best local restaurants in London (perhaps the best Italian restaurant). Admittedly, its reputation, ongoing greatness and – here’s the real marvel – fairly priced menu mean it’s sometimes tricky to bag a table, even if you’re a faithful, polite and grateful (grovelling) local like me; if one mark of an ideal neighbourhood restaurant has to do with spontaneity, then I suppose in this sense, it’s not entirely perfect.
![[Rachel Cooke]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2020/02/20/Rachel_Cooke,_L.png?width=180&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
But still, its existence seems like a kind of miracle to me, even as it prepares to celebrate its 15th birthday. The luck of it! Just to walk by it on the scurry from the station to my door induces a rising sense of happiness. I’m talking, if you’ve haven’t guessed, about Trullo, which opened its doors in June 2010 on Highbury Corner in Islington, the brainchild of chef Tim Siadatan and his business partner, Jordan Frieda. At the time the site was, to my eyes, desperately unpromising – none of the restaurants that preceded its arrival ever quite worked – and its spaces on the rather awkward side (the two dining rooms are far from perfect rectangles even now).
Thanks to this, I presumed it was doomed right until the moment I first ate there, at which point I began to feel anxious that its very wondrousness was the thing that would condemn it. How could a place so absolutely right possibly survive in a city that has a way of brutally clubbing such loveliness to death? And even if it did, wouldn’t standards soon slip? To truly love a restaurant, after all, is to live with the knowledge that it will one day break your heart. But so far, so good.
