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Da Maria, Notting Hill - Bidmead Bites
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Neither a fancy mini-plate affair or part of any kind of chain, Da Maria in Notting Hill offers up Italian food untouched by trends or franchises.
Proper, home-cooked Italian meals made by someone’s Nonna (called Maria, you’ll be surprised to hear) are served on red and white wipe-down table cloths, in a tiny narrow restaurant that seats about 25 people max.
The food is inexpensive (the most costly dish is a chicken Milanese at £13, with most main dishes between £6-£9) and the service is full of smiles, strong Italian accents and real Neapolitan spirit.
Main courses on offer include Neapolitan pizzas, pasta plates and bakes, with meaty options such a chicken cacciatore and meatballs with roast potatoes.
The lasagna, rich but rightfully so, was therefore the preferred dish; glorious, meaty oil oozed out of its layers and mixed into the bechamel sauce (no complaints about its presence here).
Reviews: Jay Rayner has a slice of Italy at Da Maria while Michael ...
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There are, indeed, larger sharing plates of delights such as bream stuffed with fennel and clams or Hereford short rib, but when excellent pasta is on offer, sometimes it’s good to stay simple, then round off with a humble bowl of homespun blackcurrant ripple ice cream.
Giles Coren lunches with the editor of the Times at Game Bird in the Stafford hotel in London.
Hats off to the elegant little Stafford hotel, more famous for its American bar and secluded location down a St James’s cul-de-sac than its restaurant, for hiring the young and relatively unheralded English chef James Durrant to have a crack at making something of the food.
Just a glance at his à la carte menu online – gala pie; roe deer tartare; whole Dover sole meunière; salt marsh lamb lobscouse; steak and ale steamed suet pudding – tells you he’s travelling in the right direction: forwards, with an eye on the past.
But I’ll be going back to the Stafford because anyone who can do this with a chicken and a potato (and about a kilo of butter) deserves to have his suet puddings, côte de boeuf, braised English rose veal, calves’ liver, egg and chips and oysters Rockefeller very closely looked at.
Critic Jay Rayner Declares Closure-Threatened Da Maria in Notting ...
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As our political class ploughs doggedly onwards in its quest to make Britain shit again, Grace Dent slogs out to Deptford, one of the resurgent corners of London where like-minded food enthusiasts — many of them, it should be noted, not long-term residents of the area — have conspired to transform “a postcode which works as a punchline” into “a less gritty, more ponderous place.”
The slow erasure of family-run places like this from the London landscape — cf. cherished Islington eel shack M. Manze — is the nasty, unspoken side effect of the market’s ceaseless clamour for nu-chainz like Franco Manca on every street corner; as Rayner recognises, a restaurant like this isn’t just “a nice thing,” a “quaint” reminder of what was once and never will be again.
Instead, Da Maria is a “vital resource” and “the kind of place that keeps a city like London both human and, more to the point, humane.”
Just like Da Maria itself, this review is about far more than the food; it’s about the use of a national platform to try and halt a specific case representative of a broader — and worsening — issue.
Da Maria isn’t just a restaurant, it’s an idea: that even in a city of London’s inhuman size and scale, “there is still a place for those on lower incomes.”
Petition · The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea : Save ...
The Trattoria Da Maria is a beloved family restaurant at the heart of life around Notting Hill Gate since 1980.
It’s a small, family-run Trattoria, successful against the odds in this area, thanks to hard work, innovation and food of a standard sufficient to make the coveted Observer Food Magazine’s, ‘OFM Favourite 50’ & have an outstanding review by acclaimed food critic Jay Rayner.
Out of nowhere, with no warning and last-minute notification while the family was away during August, an application was made to “demolish” the small area in which the restaurant functions to expand the cinema foyer.
This manoeuvre - fraught with procedural shortcomings - takes place in the charged atmosphere of the destruction of independent businesses in Notting Hill, and soul-searching about priorities in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea after the Grenfell Tower fire.
There is room – and custom - in Notting Hill Gate for the excellent cinema and this thriving, unique business, side-by-side as they've been for nearly four decades.
Da Maria: 'The kind of place that keeps London human' – restaurant ...
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Now comes the terrible news that it is under threat Da Maria, 87B Notting Hill Gate, London W11 3JZ (020 7792 4491).
Meal for two, including drinks and service: £30-£60 Da Maria on London’s Notting Hill Gate is not much to look at, literally.
In an age of the manicured and the conceptualised, of restaurants with themes and slates, of couscous served on trowels and prices that make you want to heave up paving stones to turn into missiles as you cluster at the barricades, a cheap democratic eatery like Da Maria is not just a nice thing.
They share a landlord, Imperial Resources Ltd, which has made a planning application to extend the cinema’s foyer, by knocking through into Da Maria and putting the restaurant out of business after 37 years.
“We are proud to serve the vibrant community of Notting Hill and value being neighbours to Da Maria trattoria,” a spokesperson for Picturehouse said.