‘We said we’d never be so stupid as to open our own restaurant’

I knew that Ravneet Gill and Mattie Taiano’s new restaurant was not quite finished but had no idea it was a hard hat situation. At 92 Station Road, Chingford, electrics hang from the ceiling like vines. Workmen slalom through the kitchen with refrigerator units boxed up on trolleys. Gill and Taiano are swabbing the steel worktops with a pack of industrial-strength Big Wipes. They might be too busy to do this interview: “Is it OK if we keep on doing this while we talk?” They have a faraway look in their eyes: the marker of mild but sustained panic. When we meet, Gina is due to open in a few weeks.

There is currently no heat, and no gas, and no sign of hot food in the place that will soon be a top-notch family-run chophouse run by Junior Bake Off’s pastry whizz Gill and Taiano, a chef who has worked in many of London’s finest restaurants. Instead of hot food, Taiano knocks out a colourful raw salad on the one area of the worktop without a tool on it and hands me a piece of asparagus shaved as thin as paper: “Bit grassy?” he says, scanning my face. It is just as grassy as raw asparagus should be. The premises were in worse shape than they thought when they took them on: the extractor fan fed straight into a cupboard. If they don’t open on time that could mean losing money, but Taiano looks dazed. “The thing is, there’s not much you can do, is there …”

Their wedding, an intimate celebration followed by a big Indian one, was featured in Vogue in 2024. But opening a restaurant without financial backers, with a one-year-old baby when you’ve said that running a restaurant is the one thing you’d never do, “Well, we’ve got to be careful because this is divorce territory, isn’t it?” says Taiano, deadpan. “Well, I mean, it could be, right?” They are one of those couples so well matched, they coast along on a kind of constant ribbing.

“Both me and Mattie said we would never be so stupid as to open our own restaurant, because it would be like having a baby, and we didn’t think we wanted a baby either,” says Rav. “Now we have a baby and a restaurant. It wasn’t really a conscious decision. It’s hitting me more now that it’s maybe a bit of a difficult setup, and what the fuck am I going to do?”

Gill is a favourite judge on Junior Bake Off, replacing Prue Leith in 2021, and was also, among many other things, pastry chef at the much loved St John in Clerkenwell, where puddings are an important part of the menu for those less keen on eating bone marrow with a spoon. (“I always give credit to St John as the restaurant that made me,” she said in an Instagram post celebrating the restaurant’s 30th anniversary last year.) Since February she has taken the extraordinary decision to document the entire process of setting up their own place on their Substack, Club Gina – the first post was titled “The worst year ever to open a restaurant”. “Why do so many high street restaurants sit empty?” she asks. “Why is it so hard to get small businesses off the ground?”

The couple were “historically on and off”, Gill told me earlier, polishing a large Thermomix. They met working in Herne Hill’s acclaimed neighbourhood restaurant Llewelyn’s, and at first they didn’t get on; one day Gill noticed Taiano had unfollowed her on Instagram. Then they fell for each other, eating out together after their shifts. Over the years, as their relationship deepened, their restaurant dreams became impossible to ignore. Gill is from a traditional Indian family in Gants Hill; Taiano was born in Finchley Central and is half Italian, half Jewish – it was all Sunday pasta, braised veal and ossobuco growing up. “Both our cultures are all about food,” he says. “Growing up for me was always set around the dinner table. The idea behind opening a restaurant is really a sort of extension of our home …”

During lockdown the couple were “off”, explains Gill, but became close again when Taiano’s beloved mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer: he lost her after two months. Gina is named in her honour, its logo based on her signature. Among many other dishes inspired by her, it’ll serve her recipe for tomato sauce, and “Gina’s pasta”, the recipe for which appears on their Substack.

“Gina’s home had an open-door policy,” recalls Gill. “I had never been anywhere like it. Anybody could come and you’d be fed, and you wouldn’t just be fed something shitty. There’d be a big block of parmesan from Neal’s Yard on the table, and fancy bread from Borough Market, and really funny art everywhere, quirky antique bits. The home was so warm and so inviting. A big part of creating Gina is about honouring that ethos of welcoming people in, no matter who they were or what problems they had. Mattie had all sorts of friends and she never judged – I come from a strict Indian house where that would have been so different.”

Gill knew Chingford but was determined never to live here. In her mind it was a place for nights out from Gants Hill as a teenager: dinner in one of these Station Road restaurants, then dancing at the Essex House VIP club and lounge. Keen to get out of her family home after lockdown, she went to look at “loads of shit flats” before her estate agent sent her one that “looked like a palace. And now I accept that I live in Chingford.”

The palace, which now houses a family of three, is a one-bedroom flat built into an old bank. Taiano and Gill must eat dinner in silence when their baby, Donnie, is sleeping. He woke at 5am today, but then again the electricians were in the restaurant till 4.30am, so all this feels manageable. “Having a kid, it makes it a lot less daunting,” says Taiano. “You feel like you can do anything after having a baby. It’s exhausting to a level I couldn’t imagine. More tiring than the restaurant.” They look so young, with such young skin. The only way you can tell they’re exhausted is Taiano’s habit of periodically digging his fingers into his eyes.

For many months, the couple had jogged down the high street to Epping Forest fantasising about owning a restaurant: “Wouldn’t it be nice to just finish work, go somewhere on the High Street, have roast chicken and bearnaise and chips …” They poked their heads into possible venues, noting down numbers to call, getting really amped up – then by the time they got back from their run, they’d have talked themselves out of it. It is hard to tell what triggered them finally to jump. A curious sign that this was Gill’s calling is that for years she had stockpiled all the equipment necessary to set up a restaurant – all the blenders, the silicone trays. She ended up giving them all away a couple of years ago – then set about buying them back.