What a lunch yesterday: pork belly ragu, calf’s liver, thirsty gulps of grappa. Nine of us sat greedily at a long table in Il Portico, a family-run Italian in Kensington that’s met its customers with paper-thin slices of prosciutto since 1967, but we were there in dour-ish circumstances. In the 55 years Portico has been going, it’s mostly been left alone. A week ago today it wasn’t, though: one of its windows was smashed in.
Bored vandals, maybe. Except that a few days before the restaurant had raised £18,500 for Lumos, an NGO helping children suffering in Ukraine. One guest was JK Rowling, who founded Lumos, so Il Portico’s owner, James Chiavarini, decided to thank her on Twitter. “It wasn’t a gender critical event,” says Chiavarini. “It was about raising money for Ukraine.” But Rowling has been at the centre of an unsavoury storm over trans rights, so his tweet was swiftly blitzed.
