Ristorante Sole Mio

..all birthdays and celebrations were marked with a ritualised visit to the Sole Mio. Every member of our family had their favourite dish, the food was always amazing, and we were always greeted like old friends, the super-friendly waiters carting my rapidly growing little brother off to see the pizzas being made. New Year’s Eves were spent here with a giant 20-strong party of us and our neighbours, all lined up on a long table along the length of the restaurant. Seeing the lemon and orange sorbets served in the skin’s original fruit prompted our next-door neighbour Edie, aged five, to remark the she wasn’t getting the blackcurrant sorbet because “it must be tiny!” I lusted constantly after the knickerbocker glories, which were usually vetoed by my parents as “too big and too silly”, and I made do with a little aluminium dish of chocolate ice cream, watching other kids’ knickerbocker glories cross the floor laden with cream and fruit and, if you were lucky and it was your birthday, sparklers.

The mere smell of the place – oregano, garlic, and baking pizza dough – has been ingrained in my memory for years, and could set me salivating if I even thought about it. Yesterday afternoon, fate tipped my boy and I out into Huddersfield, with hours to kill before the train home. As we wandered past Sainsbury’s, wondering where we should go to celebrate one year since our first offline meeting, that scent drifted into my nostrils, and I insisted on a blast from the past. It smelled exactly the same, and though it had been done up, and the chairs reupholstered, it retained the old Sole Mio feeling and I went a bit wibbly and nostalgic. Sadly, my old fave, tagliatelle alla paesana, contains ham, and I don’t do meat no more, but it was still on the almost-unchanged menu, and my ravioli was delicious, as were Headapollo’s meatballs, fnarr fnarr. We had great coffee, half a litre of wine, and a dessert each, and the bill came to a very reasonable £35. And I got to have my knickerbocker glory! In your face, Mum and Dad!