‘A reliable, old-school Italian’ — Jay Rayner reviews Da Mario, Kensington

Restaurant choices often answer a simple question. It could be: where am I going to take that friend with the good gossip? How about Andrew Edmunds in Soho, where the guttering candlelight projects intimacy and the food is reliable without being distracting. Or, where can I take generations of the family, from toddlers up? An old stager of a Greek Cypriot place like Lemonia in Primrose Hill where they like children and respect seniority? Or perhaps: where can I find serious old-school French? Why, Otto’s on the Gray’s Inn Road of course, where they’ll set fire to your dinner tableside, squeeze the lifeblood out of a duck and then hose you down with Bordeaux’s finest.

Da Mario is the answer to another restaurant question, one that has long troubled many people: where the hell can we go to...
[Short citation of 8% of the original article]