The Wellington Duo Behind London’s Hottest New Restaurant Tiella
Tiella on Columbia Rd is the London hit with Wellington roots.
It’s only February, but undoubtedly the hottest restaurant opening of the year has already solidified itself in London.
Throwing open its doors on January 21, Tiella is a casarecce-style trattoria in a former pub on East London’s Colombia Rd. Early reviews have been glowing, claiming the restaurant is “firing on all cylinders” and a place “everyone is talking about”.
The restaurant has already featured in the New York Times’ Style Magazine, the Good Food Guide and on Time Out, where food and drink editor Leonie Cooper called it “exceptional” and “a triumph”.
And while the food may be Italian and the location may be English, the restaurant’s roots are firmly dug into New Zealand’s capital city.
Dara Klein and Ry Jessup were just 10 and 12 years old when they first met through their sisters, who were good friends.
Growing up in Wellington, they both entered the hospitality industry through family. Klein spent much of her childhood in her parents’ seminal restaurant Maria Pia’s, while Jessup’s aunty owned Ministry of Food, the cafe next to the Beehive that served hungry government workers (including Klein, when she worked for a stint in the office of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment).
It would take the pair moving to London for their careers in hospitality to really calcify. Jessup set up Homeslice, first as a food truck and then a bricks and mortar premises with a series of locations across London. Klein, meanwhile, took a job in the kitchen at Rubedo in Stoke Newington, where the two reconnected.
“I was working in the kitchen one day and my boss came in and said, ‘Dara, there’s someone here who knows you’. Next thing I know Ry is sticking his head into the kitchen.”
Klein went on to work in kitchens across London before branching out on her own in April 2024, opening the first iteration of Tiella as a residency at beloved Islington pub The Compton Arms. It was a huge success, running for 16 months. Serendipitously, Jessup was on the hunt for a new premise for a separate project. He’d had his eyes on the former historic pub at 109 Columbia Rd for years and, when the opportunity came up to take it on, he jumped at the chance to tour the space. The minute he walked in, he knew it wasn’t quite right for his needs but he felt it was “perfect for Dara”.
Klein had a similarly visceral reaction.
“The first time I looked at the site I was on a walk with a friend, and I saw it and I said immediately to my friend, ‘that’s my restaurant. I can feel it’.” It took a few months to iron out the details, but Klein says when she finally got inside she felt like she’d been “slapped around the face”.
“It was like, this is it.”
For both Klein and Jessup, the space felt incredibly reminiscent of Maria Pia’s.
“It’s incredibly warm. It’s got really good bones. The building where Maria Pia’s was is very old, and it felt a little bit like an old house. I don’t really know how to explain it; the two spaces just had the same soul,” Klein explains of the similarities.
The food, too, has overlaps. While originally growing up in a restaurant put her off ever taking on a career in hospitality, Klein inevitably came back to food after what she calls her “lost years”, jumping around jobs that didn’t bring her joy.
“I moved to Auckland, where my mum was living at the time, and I started cooking by holding a pop-up with her,” she says. “I got the bug instantly from that first event. But growing up in the restaurant made me incredibly hesitant to approach it as a career. My mum’s quite a formidable character, and I think that was one of the reasons I didn’t try to get into kitchens in New Zealand; I didn’t want to exist in her shadow, so to speak.”
While Klein has certainly carved out her own impressive path, it seems that Maria Pia’s and, more specifically, her Puglian heritage, has embedded itself into the bones of the food she cooks at Tiella.
In a 2004 NZ Herald review of Maria Pia’s, Ewan McDonald wrote: “Diners are sardined into what might have been a parlour, a bedroom of a heritage house to enjoy fresh pasta and delicate vegetables and gutsy meats, rustic Italian delights from Maria Pia de Razza-Klein’s kitchen.”
He could be writing about Tiella, with its menu of dishes like passatelli in brodo, noodles made from bread crumbs and parmesan languishing in a warming chicken broth enlivened with black pepper; ricotta di Romagna drizzled with fiery Calabrian chilli; or simple bulbous polpettes served with a mound of bread.
McDonald also rhapsodised about the wine selection curated by Dara’s father, Richard Klein.
“Forget labels or vintages,” he wrote. “There are grapes and styles here that you will not encounter outside the valley in which they were grown.”
Unsurprising, then, that he’s back helping to curate the wine list for Tiella.
“Dara, Ry and I were very much aligned on the concept of sourcing wines which are, to use the slow food maxim, ‘good, clean and fair’,” Richard says about his approach to putting together the wine list.
“This translates to sustainable farming, preferably by family-owned small winegrowers as opposed to large conglomerates, and wines of place and provenance made from lesser known, local grape varieties.”
He suggested a number of producers he imports into New Zealand, many of which Dara had already fallen in love with, including a Puglian wine that was poured at Maria Pia’s.
“I like to think that we’re carrying on what Mum and Dad started,” Klein says of the connection between Tiella and her parents’ restaurant.
“It’s not about a ‘concept’ but, rather, it comes from a place of nurturing your guests with honest food and heartfelt hospitality; what we refer to in New Zealand as manaakitanga,” Richard says of the similarities he sees between the two restaurants.
“Making people feel like they’re guests in your home rather than ‘customers’ in a business.
“But, above all, the similarity also comes from the fact that, like her mother, Dara has the ability to transform an understated dish such as pasta e fagioli [pasta and bean stew] made with seven or so ingredients into a transformative, nourishing meal that you simply fall in love with. That Dara carries on this family obsession – and is taking it to a whole new level – makes me feel, quite honestly, as proud a father as can be.”
Tiella, 109 Columbia Rd, London. Tiella.co.uk
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