3
DARIO MORETTI
This was always Dario’s favourite time of the day. First thing in the morning. When the icicles of the dawn frost were still sparkling in the air and the restaurant was completely empty. Just him and his coffee. Time to breathe. Time to reflect. Although, he was beginning to think that was overrated today. Sometimes too much reflection wasn’t good for the soul.
Mug of the finest Italian caffeine in hand, he leaned against the doorway between the office and the main dining area of the restaurant, his gaze scanning the room. Gino’s Trattoria, home of – according to his father, Gino, and yet to be disproved – the best food in Glasgow’s Merchant City area, had been founded by his dad in the seventies.
Like several other young men in his village near Cassino in Italy, Gino had come over to Glasgow when he was fourteen to work for the summer in his uncle’s ice cream shop. The week before he was due to board his return flight, two months of wages in hand, he’d met a young girl called Alicia, his first love, and Gino never went home. He’d gone to work in a family friend’s restaurant, sleeping in a makeshift bed in a tiny room behind the kitchen, and he’d learned every aspect of the businessby watching, studying, practising until he could do it all. Years later, by then married to Alicia and dad to four-year-old Dario, he’d inherited his uncle’s old shop and his hard graft and good business sense had transformed it into a thriving restaurant that became one of the legendary eating establishments in this area of the city.
This restaurant had been his dad’s world. Still was. Gino was seventy-nine now, and although he’d handed the running of the restaurant over to Dario several years ago, Gino still showed up and worked four nights a week. Dario knew it kept him going, especially since Mum had passed away a few years back. How many times had the old man said that the day he stopped serving customers in this restaurant would be the day he gave up on life?
Dario had always thought it was like looking at a premonition of his own future. He was twenty-five years younger than his dad, and he’d worked in this restaurant since he was fourteen. It had never even been up for discussion, always just expected by everyone that he would follow in his father’s shuffling footsteps, just as his own son, Matty, planned to follow in Dario’s.
Now, that was no longer an option. The rock his family had always stood on was about to break up into pieces and he was the only one who knew what was coming.
‘Are you daydreaming or doing some of that meditation bollocks? Only I need you to move yerself so I can get this place hoovered before His Lordship arrives. He can spot a speck of dirt from fifty yards away.’ Dario hadn’t even heard Sonya, the cleaning equivalent of a whirling dervish, come in the back door or creep up behind him.
All pondering of his problems screeched to a halt, as an irrepressible grin crossed his face. He loved that she’d push him out of the way to get the place cleaned to his dad’s standards. Or His Lordship, as she always called him, with just a hint of irreverence.
Sonya had been with them for decades, and she was the chain-smoking, straight-talking, sweary antidote to any kind of deep or spiritual reflection, believing that action and motion were the answer to all of life’s woes. She’d almost worn a track in the restaurant carpet with the Dyson when she’d left her husband in the nineties. Last summer, Dario had come in to find her scrubbing the kitchen tiles at 6a.m. Turned out her grandson, Ollie, had gone off to university the night before and she was beside herself with both pride and separation anxiety. Now she was here an hour early and desperate to get to work, so she must have something on her mind. Dario didn’t like to pry, but no doubt it would all come out at some point in the day. Sonya’s ability to keep a secret was up there with her ability to sit still for five minutes.
‘I’m just standing here contemplating how you’re my very favourite person to see at this time in the morning,’ he joked. Actually, there might be some truth in that.
‘Aye, right, Big Pierce…’ she shot back, using the nickname she’d had for him for years, because she swore he was the absolute double of her favourite 007. ‘Don’t try all that smooth talking with me.’ Her tone was stroppy, but there was a twinkle in her eye. ‘You know I’m immune to smarmy shite, but I can be bribed with tea, so if you can flick a kettle on, I’ll forgive you.’
With that, she pulled open the door of the cleaning cupboard and disappeared inside.
Dario took the hint and headed back down the corridor behind him. The swing doors into the kitchen were on his left, and on his right, the staffroom. He pushed open that door, to the small space with two medium-sized sofas and a compact dining table for four. Right next to the table was a small beverage bar area, and there, he flicked on the kettle, then pulled a mug from the wall cupboard above it. He loaded the cup up with a teabag, some milk and Sonya’s standard three sugars, before backingout and shouting, ‘Kettle is on. Be ready in a couple of minutes,’ into the depths of the restaurant. She’d no doubt have something to say about him putting the milk and sugar in before the hot water. They’d been arguing about that for decades.
‘Jesus, you’ve got a voice like a foghorn,’ came the response. A mild insult was Sonya-speak for ‘thank you’, so he retreated into his office, content that he’d done at least one good thing this morning, but fully aware that no amount of teabags could solve the rest of his problems. Especially when he heard, ‘And you’d better not have put the milk and sugar in first, ya reprobate,’ just as he closed the office door.
He’d just sat down on the battered old leather chair behind his desk when his mobile phone rang, and the screen flashed up Jailbreak. It was an old joke, a name given to Brodie, a friend since school. When Dario had gone into the family business, Brodie had gone off to university, and was now a high-flying corporate lawyer, who had a roster of multimillion-pound clients, but still took care of anything in the legal realm for the Moretti family business, in return for unlimited free food and affection. It had always been a given that, in the unlikely event of Dario being arrested, Brodie would be his one permitted phone call. Thankfully, he’d never had to call him from the slammer. Yet. Although, right now, that phone call would probably be preferable to the one he was about to have.
‘Hey, pal,’ Dario answered wearily, leaning back in his chair.
‘Morning. Mate. How. Are. You. Doing?’ There was a deep intake of breath and then a swift exhalation in between every word.
‘Are you on the treadmill? Seriously? New Year’s Eve and you’re up at this time and exercising? There’s something far wrong with you.’
The punctuated breaths came right back at him.
‘Some. Of. Us. Need. To. Work. At. It. Pal. Don’t. All. Have. The. Metabolism. Of. A. Fricking. Racehorse.’ It had always been an amused bone of contention that Dario’s exercise regime consisted of a weekly game of five-a-side football and the occasional gym session, yet he still had a body that hadn’t changed too much since his thirties. He put it down to good genes, quality pasta and a job that kept him moving all day.
Dario sighed. ‘Yeah, but it’s all I’ve got going for me right now, so hold the jealousy.’
A few deep breaths on the other end of the line, then Brodie came back with, ‘You know why I’m calling. The deadline for accepting the deal is midnight tonight, then it disappears. We have to give them an answer. The Fieldow lawyers are breathing down my neck.’
Dario felt every muscle in his stomach clench. No need for sit-ups or crunchies here. The Fieldow Financial Group, a top Glasgow-based accountancy firm, were working on behalf of an American corporation who wanted to purchase the building that he was sitting in now, the one that his father had inherited from his uncle and then converted from an ice-cream parlour to a restaurant when he was barely out of his twenties. Back then, this wasn’t a particularly salubrious part of the city centre, but Gino must have had the patron saint of good investments on his side, because in the eighties, the Merchant City had undergone a gentrification that had brought in high-end, designer shops, expensive apartments, trendy bars, and popular clubs, and with all that came people with money to spend, who were looking for great food. In its heyday, Gino’s was steady Monday to Thursday, then packed every single night of the weekend, a party that never seemed to slow down. Until it did.
The pandemic in 2020 and the next couple of years of slow recovery had almost crushed them. Their loyalty-fuelled determination to keep on all the staff at full salary haddecimated the restaurant’s capital reserves. Even when the furlough payments had kicked in, they’d still topped up all their employees’ salaries, so they got exactly the same income as before. Afterwards, they’d kept everyone in a job, even when there were barely any diners to feed. On the other side of the income and outgoings scale, their costs had rocketed. Ingredients were so much more expensive and electricity, gas, water, and rates all soared. Decades of savings and profits were soon gone.
Dario had hung in there, positive that 2023 and 2024 would turn things around, but their income and footfall had never returned to pre-pandemic levels. There were a million reasons why. The health-obsessed, carb-avoiding younger crowd that socialised in this part of the city had deserted them for Nando’s and Wagamama, while a massive sector of their invaluable after-office customers still worked from home. Many of their older regulars just didn’t seem to travel into the city any more, their social patterns forever changed by the lockdowns. Gino’s had thrived on the selling point of great-quality, family-style Italian food at a budget-friendly price, but that just wasn’t a viable proposition in this high-cost, prime location now. He’d contemplated raising prices, changing direction, going more upmarket, relaunching with a new brand, increasing advertising, running promotions… There was nothing he hadn’t considered. But the reality was that any price increases would risk alienating their current clientele, and any re-brand would require investment capital that they didn’t have.
And all this had happened on Dario’s watch.
In the beginning, he hadn’t felt able to share the extent of it with his dad, because Gino was grieving the loss of his wife of fifty years. Dario had finally broken it all down for him the year before, but the old man had brushed him off. ‘You’ll find away through this, son, you always do. That’s why I gave you my restaurant. Speak to your brothers and work something out.’
Dario knew that was pointless. His middle brother, Bruno, had left Glasgow years ago, moved to Indonesia to run a fabulous restaurant on a five-star hotel resort. He was well paid, but he had a family to support so he wasn’t exactly flush. Meanwhile, his other brother, Carlo, almost eighteen years younger than Dario and forever considered the baby of the family, even though he was now in his thirties, had opened his own café in 2021. He’d made the smart move of choosing a location just outside the city centre, but near Glasgow Central Hospital, which brought it a steady footfall. Although it was thriving, it was a new business that wasn’t sitting with extra cash to spare, so Dario knew that would be a dead end. Since that last conversation with his dad, every time he’d tried to return to the topic, he’d got the same reaction. I don’t want to hear it. You go sort it out. You’ll fix it somehow.
