More spectacle than food: Ave Mario reviewed

Ave Mario looks like Clown Town, a soft-play centre in Finchley with a ball pit so large you could drown in it and lie undiscovered for years. Apart from the crucifixes on the walls, of course, which are specific to Avo Maria. (I have yet to find a soft-play centre that looks like St Peter’s.)

We need joy now that Al ‘Boris’ Johnson, our human ball pit masquerading as someone who does not have narcissistic personality disorder, endures to fudge another day with his cabinet of ghouls and his stupid hair. I have always underestimated him as a hack: no more. Now I think he could edit the Daily Mail, and I have no higher praise for any hustler who ever learned to write his name than that.

So all I have for you this week – apart from suggesting you watch The Death of Stalin, which is not meaningful political activism, though it is funny – is to insist you go to Ave Mario because it looks like Clown Town and serves pizza as big as your face. Like all good restaurants, it tears you from reality and presents its own.

Ave Mario is in Covent Garden, so my first question is: how did it get here? How did it slip through the net? Usually, Covent Garden houses restaurants themed like sex workers (nonexistent joyful sex workers), flower maidens (Covent Garden is farmland in your head) or unhappy wives in cashmere shrouds eating salad leaves (the rest of it).

And yet here is a restaurant designed by children for children, and there are many more children to be pleased by it: at midday there is a queue outside waiting to be inspired by ‘an idyllic day in Florence, a « Church » version 2.0’.