Panella
The best restaurants aren’t always the loudest or the hardest to book. Sometimes they’re simply the ones that make you feel at home. That’s exactly what Panella does.
Tucked beneath Trellick Tower on Golborne Road, Panella is a family-run Sicilian restaurant bringing a little taste of Palermo to North Kensington. Husband-and-wife owners Giuseppe and Caterina Di Matteo are delightful people who I had the pleasure of speaking with last year. Spend any time with them and it becomes clear that they care deeply not only about the food they serve, but about the role a restaurant can play in the community around it.
The menu changes with the seasons and with whatever is freshest that day. There is beautifully made pasta, traditional Sicilian dishes and cannoli that are well worth saving room for. The cooking is generous without being fussy, rooted in the kind of food that feels as though it has been cooked for you rather than presented to you.
But much of Panella’s charm comes from everything that happens around the food. Giuseppe and Caterina ask questions, remember people and seem genuinely interested in who walks through the door. There’s an ease to the place that can be difficult to manufacture in a restaurant: the feeling that you are being welcomed rather than processed through a sitting. Like true Sicilians, they simply want you to leave full and with a smile on your face. That sense of hospitality extends well beyond Panella’s paying customers.
Giuseppe and Caterina are also closely involved with People’s Kitchen at the Goldfinger Factory, a community meal that brings people together around a shared table. The meals are offered on a donation basis, using produce from Queen’s Park Farmers’ Market, and are open to anyone who wants to come along. Cooking starts from 3pm, with people invited to get involved in preparing the meal before dinner is served from 6pm. It means the kitchen is not simply somewhere food appears from: it becomes part of the gathering itself. People cook, eat and spend time together, whether they have come to volunteer, meet others or simply have dinner.
There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about the idea. Food has always been one of the easiest ways of bringing people together, yet in a city like London it is surprisingly easy to eat surrounded by people without ever really meeting any of them. People’s Kitchen offers something different: a meal without the usual barriers around who a restaurant is for, or how much you are expected to spend once you sit down.
Restaurants are often judged by what appears on the plate: the cooking, the ingredients, the presentation, the latest dish worth travelling across London for. All of that matters, of course. Panella serves very good Sicilian food. But hospitality has never only been about feeding people. At its best, it is about making someone feel that there is a place for them at the table.
That might mean remembering a returning customer’s name. It might mean taking the time to talk to someone over dinner. And sometimes it means opening the kitchen to the neighbourhood and cooking a meal where what somebody can afford does not determine whether they are welcome. In a city increasingly full of restaurants competing to be noticed, Panella feels refreshingly uninterested in shouting for attention. It is simply getting on with the quieter work of feeding people, building relationships and being part of the place it calls home.
