Being a writer and opening a restaurant are total opposites…

But in the end, Simonetta Wenkert managed to combine her two vocations

It was only meant to be for a year. The restaurant was my husband Avi’s dream, not mine. As a time-poor novelist and mother of three, the very last thing I needed was another commitment to take me away from my desk. But I also knew that my comfortable London life as a freelance writer and stay-at-home mother was only possible because Avi was our family’s main bread winner. So when, in 2006, he was made redundant from his detested job in IT, I felt I owed it to him to help make his dream a reality.

It was the late Anthony Bourdain who declared that the desire to be a restaurateur was “a strange and terrible affliction”, but it was one which I, thankfully, had been spared. Don’t get me wrong: I liked restaurants as much as the next foodie and I could appreciate the provocative plainness and simplicity of Italian cuisine, which left the dishonest cook nowhere to hide. But I was also a child of the 70s and had been brought up in London by a restless Tuscan mother who not only didn’t cook, but who believed the very worst fate that could befall a woman was to be tied to the stove. As a result, we didn’t eat especially well when I was growing up and it was only when I moved to Rome in my 20s and met Avi that I started to understand the beauty and transcendence of sitting around a table.