London Place 4: Taormina

There's a restaurant in Bayswater called the Taormina. It's on Craven Terrace, a quiet street just north of Hyde Park, near Paddington. It's an Italian restaurant which opened in 1960. My father started going there with his friends when he first came to live in that big old London in the 1960s.

He first took us there in, I think, 1985. Until then our restaurant of choice on our Sunday father expeditions had been Chiswick McDonalds (Big Mac, Medium Fries, Strawberry Milkshake, same then as now).

The first time he took us to the Taormina I was a bit scared of the big Italian menu of fancy mysterious foods and would only order chips. They were good chips, and by the end, I was stealing the food off my sisters' plates, and we'd be coming to the Taormina again.

We went to the Taormina, a lot, for a long time. I was last there in, I reckon, 2013. I took Juliette there. Or maybe I was last there on one of the occasions a few family members went there to commemorate my dad's birthday.

Each time, I'd have had whitebait for starter, pollo sorpresa (fancy chicken kiev), and then who knows, something wild and varied for my pudding cos I'm not a a creature of ritual, no way.

I didn't have whitebait and pollo sorpresa every single one of the 50+ times I went to the Taormina. Not every time. But most times.

I'd start with a load of white bread and butter, make the same jokes to my vegetarian sisters about the whitebait eyes looking at them, and then gorge on the huge piece of breadcrumbed chicken, rice, chips, vegetables. Breathing heavily.

One time, early on, when I was still endearing enough, I guess, I'd have made that common child's joke of being full in one section of my stomach, but the section for pudding still had space in it. It must have made people laugh. My dad told the story well, embellished it. Told it for years, in my presence, to many different people. Consequently, having heard it so many times, if I seek to recall what his voice sounded like, pickled, affectionate, in his element, it's to that story I return.

It would be him, driving us in from Ealing in his Citroen Pallas, and the four of us, or sometimes three, or sometimes two, or often there'd be friends of his too, pub guys, rugby guys, old friends and locals, full of bonhomie. Sometimes extended family too, cousins, aunts, uncles, Jane, his partner,

We were all there on his 70th birthday in November 2009, which was his last birthday, not entirely inevitably at that point, but as he spoke emotionally about reaching 70 which was a year more than his own father had managed, it didn't seem unlikely.

It was a great restaurant. The decor never changed. A spinning wheel in the window. Friendly. The same waiters for years and years. The price hardly changed for years and years either. I cannot remember one time being disappointed, hurried, made to wait too long.

Table near the street ... old familiar place ... meet you anytime you want ...