An hour with… Dara Klein

Today I want bread and I want pickles, and mortadella.” Dara Klein is poring over her menu at Tiella, her east London restaurant, choosing what she’d eat on an overcast morning. “Pasta, polpette [meatballs]. I’m tired and I need a hug. Food should reflect that.”

Tired as she is, the Italian-born, New Zealand raised chef is happy and about to start week four at Tiella. “It’s like being stuck in a really nice tornado,” Klein says. She and her business partner-slash-childhood pal, Ry Jessup, are working out how to stay financially viable during a grim time for hospitality, and affordable and accessible for the neighbourhood. “I’d be lying if I said I am OK,” she sighs, then immediately perks up as she thinks of all that she’s achieved since opening: training staff, adapting the menu to optimise resources, putting in outdoor seating and herb gardens.

Tiella (Tiell-la in Klein’s lilt) is her first restaurant and London’s first hyped launch of 2026. It doesn’t have the backing of a larger restaurant group, but Klein and Jessup are both well regarded in the food community, so the anticipation was built, rather than bought. “I was definitely surprised by it,” she says. “And flattered and terrified. And if I’m totally honest, annoyed.” She steeled herself against a backlash (“People love to hate”), but felt galvanised in her focus. The restaurant opened to a flurry of social media posts showing giant chicken Milanese-style cutlets, and tria pasta (already tipped by Klein to be a signature) – and a fully booked reservations system.

Good food is in Klein’s DNA. Her grandmother and aunts ran a pastificio (fresh pasta shop) in Puglia. Then, in Wellington, her parents had a deli and then a beloved trattoria called Maria Pia’s. By her teens, Klein was recommending wines imported by her father to go with her mother’s cooking. But she saw the effects running a restaurant had on her parents’ relationship and her mother’s mental health, and swore that she’d never work in one. As soon as she could, she left home to go to university in Australia, but soon found a job waitressing for some extra cash. It was familiar, and an easy way to save money for travelling.

While Klein was 23, working front-of-house in a New York restaurant, she had a “life altering” manic episode, and was diagnosed with type one bipolar. She moved back to New Zealand, where her doctors and parents suggested she find some routine and get a nice office job; work nine to five, switch off at night. It did not help: “It was 10 times tougher. I sat at a computer all day and my mind was able to just go wild.” But she knew that in a kitchen, everything felt… clear. “You show up, you put the deliveries away, you prep hard, and then you have a little break and it’s service time.”

The only other career Klein had ever wanted was as an actor. After finishing her degree, she’d been accepted into a prestigious drama school in Australia – “I was devoted to it, until I wasn’t” – and she came to realise cheffing gave her that thrill of performance, while the structure and process (as well as regimented medication and therapy) calmed what she now calls “the naughty thoughties”.

She moved to the UK in 2019, to work in some of London’s most loved kitchens, before landing a kitchen residency at the Compton Arms in Islington – a pub known to be a talent incubator, somewhere chefs could hone a concept before setting up their own place. By the end of her time there, she had seven offers of investment.

None felt right. “So, at what could have been the peak of my career, I took a year off,” she says, before adding, “Kind of.” She spent six months writing a book (La Trattoria, to be published by Quadrille in July), while wondering how best to apply her craft. She considered client recipe development, or perhaps social media content around food (“It can appear really glamorous, but those creators are grafting and those channels are not built to support you”), and once again realised that the structure of restaurants worked for her. She could grow in a physical space, and shape it to her.

Tiella – all warm wood, guttering candles and carefully sourced, tastefully kitsch decor – is her love letter to her parents. While she was at the Compton, Klein read Unreasonable Hospitality by American restaurateur Will Guidara (a “guide to the essential lessons in service”). “The first time I read it, I hated it,” she says. “Every night, I was giving my everything – every ounce of my energy, what felt like my childhood and soul. And I would go home, depleted. And I don’t think that’s normal, but I remember reading it and thinking, ‘Ah, this is the cost of giving the general public experiences that they don’t expect.’” Customers were going home nourished in body and spirit, as they are from the new restaurant, and Klein still wonders: “How do we replenish ourselves?”

Klein and Jessup have decided they’ll move to a seven-day opening, to cut kitchen waste, give staff more flexibility in their rotas, and help Klein eventually step back into a “creative director” role. “I’m 36, and soon my body is going to tell me that I can’t be here all the time,” she says. She looks forward to training more chefs, and perhaps giving the right one a stake in the business.

Her forthcoming book is also part of her future-proofing. Some of her mother’s recipes appeared in The Silver Spoon, the definitive classic Italian cookbook, and Klein hopes La Trattoria will become loved in the same way. “The type of food I cook is very home-style, nurturing, and I think a lot of people still need to learn how to cook like that. I’d be lying if I said I don’t have ambitions to… Is the phrase, ‘household name’?” She laughs and calls herself cocky before shrugging. “I’d like to build a bit of a world. Empire dreams.”

Tiella.co.uk

Food image: Caitlin Isola