The Brits are rightly renowned for their love of queuing, be it for buses, Wimbledon or the January sales, but when Padella set up their no-bookings pasta joint this spring, they knew they were taking a punt. After all, who in their right mind queues for a bowl of spag bol?
Quite a lot of us, as it turns out, though it wasn’t exactly the smoothest of openings. Jordan Frieda winces: “The bank almost pulled out in the last week of the build.” That, combined with a few other hiccups, convinced him they were doomed, “but on that first morning, we were having a team meeting when the queue started forming. By the time we’d finished, the numbers outside scared the crap out of us.”
But while diners are willing to stand in line for a plate of pappardelle with eight-hour Dexter ragù, we’re nowhere near as evangelical about pasta as 39-year-old Frieda and his business partner, chef Tim Siadatan, 33.
“A great plate of pasta is the most important thing in both our lives,” Frieda says. “If there’s something not right, I take it personally.”
Siadatan is equally effusive, having had his own epiphany in 2002 as one of the original graduates from Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen: “Pete Begg from the River Cafe trained us,” he says, “so at 19 I got one-on-one pasta tuition from the best.” He shakes his head: “Looking back, that’s mental.”
The pair came up with the idea for a handmade pasta bar eight years ago, but the timing was all wrong. “It seems odd now,” Frieda says, “but there weren’t many single-item restaurants at the time. Investors wouldn’t touch us.”
So they put pasta on the back-burner and in 2010 opened a more traditional venue in Trullo, a neighbourhood north London Italian that, Frieda says, has essentially been “a six-year learning curve”. Not that they actually turned their backs on their true love, Siadatan admits with a shifty smile: he used it to build up a pasta portfolio. “When we started thinking seriously about Padella again, I had 300 recipes from Trullo’s back catalogue up my sleeve.”
Pasta aside, accessibility was always the next most important element in the masterplan. “Other than the odd trattoria, the only places you could get truly great pasta in the UK were the River Cafe and Locanda Locatelli,” Frieda says. “And who can afford that more than once in a blue moon?”
This explains Padella’s pricing: their pici cacio e pepe, one of 2016’s most Instagrammed restaurant dishes, costs all of six quid; Siadatan’s favourite, the £5.50 taglierini with slow-cooked tomato sauce, started life at Trullo: “It’s my chicken soup,” he sighs.
Cheap doesn’t mean you cut corners, though. “You’ve got to have a relentless attention to detail, or customers will soon suss you out,” says Siadatan, whose brigade also makes bread and ice cream on site every day.
But, deep down, it’s all about the Italian carbs: “The most gratifying thing,” Frieda says, “is we now know other people get pasta just like we do.” Well, maybe not quite. But almost.
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