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

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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 eat before attending a show at the Royal Albert Hall? With the 2025 Proms programme set to be announced next week, this is now a matter of pressing concern.

Above our table is a chocolate-box painting of Mario with a red-frocked Diana, who is admiring his pizza. That is not a euphemism

It would be hyperbole to describe the nation’s grandest concert hall as sitting abandoned in a restaurant desert. Scan a digital map, and you will find the occasional crossed red knife and fork. There is Ognisko Polskie, or the Polish Hearth Club, but that’s already so many people’s answer that, for show nights, you must plan a long way ahead. There are a few places around South Kensington station but that’s a miserable 15-minute walk away. Generally, I’ve gone to Mandarin Kitchen on Queensway for lobster noodles, and then cabbed it over, but that’s a silly solution.

It turned out the answer was hiding in plain sight. Da Mario, on a Gloucester Road corner just nine minutes’ walk from the Royal Albert Hall, is hardly obscure, particularly for those with a taste for royal trivia. But in a feverish restaurant city, full of young things doing diverting things with hand-tooled pastas and modish ingredients, it’s the kind of reliable old-school Italian that can too easily be overlooked. It first opened in the mid-1960s as an early branch of Pizza Express. Mario Molino was a founder, with Peter Boizot, of the venerable high-street chain but, in 1966, the restaurant became his own place. He still served pizzas, but also a wider Italian menu, only with no mention of “secondi” because, after antipasti and pasta, the British found that bewildering.

Right now, the Italianate building is scaffolded, so they have festooned it in twinkly fairy lights, like it’s a Gloucester Road lighthouse. But you can still read the legend “Princess Diana” on the steps. She used to sneak in here from Kensington Palace for pizza with the kids, a fact they have referenced. Rather a lot. On the wall above our table is a chocolate-box painting of Mario with a red-frocked Diana, who is admiring his pizza. That is not a euphemism. On the other wall are photographs of Diana on a 1987 trip to Saudi Arabia and with a horse.

Much of the cream-coloured ground-floor dining room is thrillingly kitsch. Over the weirdly ornate ham chiller cabinet is a religious icon corner: Buddha, a Thai goddess and Jesus, which covers various votive bases. There’s a Poundshop Eden Project of faux foliage around the windows and a large photographic collage of the great cultural stars we have loved and lost: Prince, Hendrix, Hepburn, Einstein, the usual. There’s a huge hanging chandelier, and ceiling fans that beat away the heat. It’s swooningly mad and, for being so, utterly delightful.

Because most importantly the food is exactly what you want it to be. A heap of silk-scarf-thin fennel salami, the pink of a baby’s bottom, is served at room temperature so the fat melts immediately on the tongue. A cast-iron dish is filled with a melanzane alla parmigiana in which stringy mozzarella seems to have been gene-spliced into melting aubergine to create one spoonable whole. Thumb-thick prawns arrive in a bubbling bath of garlic- and chilli-spiked oil. I glance at the waiter who, before I can request it, says, “you need bread”. Slabs of warm, springy focaccia are delivered. A regular comes to collect a pizza. She’s given a thimble of limoncello while she waits. Two Italian lads arrive after us, order a tricolore salad, a pizza, a rigatoni da Mario and a pappardelle ragù, and have wolfed it all down before we’ve finished our mains. They have spoken not a word of English.

Our pasta dishes, none of which cross the £20 mark, are perfect examples of themselves. The strands are slippery, but still have bite because this is what they do, all day, every day. There is a spaghettini vongole, generous with sweet clams in the shell which leave behind a buttery broth just begging for any remaining bread. The spaghetti aglio comes with thin, translucent slices of garlic, like someone has been at the cloves with the Goodfellas prison razor blades. Nothing here is diverting or surprising or new, which is exactly how we want it. Accordingly, there is a tiramisu for dessert, which is so light it can practically be inhaled.

Downstairs is a larger, quieter basement dining room. Upstairs, all is noise and chatter, including from the waiters who tell me they have no idea why there are photographs of various Saudi Arabian kings on the walls because they never ate here. But Diana did. Have you seen the painting of her with Mario behind you? Yes, of course. Mario Molino died over a decade ago and the restaurant is now run by his son Marco, who probably believes that nothing here is broken and nothing needs fixing. It is a living landmark from London’s first postwar restaurant wave, one that has endured because what it does, it does very well. As it happens, it’s also a nine-minute walk from the Royal Albert Hall. Though I won’t need a Proms ticket to justify my return.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@ft.com

Read Jay Rayner every weekend on FT Edit. Free for 30 days, then just £4.99 a month. Email Jay at jay.rayner@ft.com

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