With thanks to our Breakthrough Year Award Sponsor
From a family trattoria to one of London’s most talked-about openings, Dara Klein’s year has been defined by instinct, ambition and reflection, as she launches Tiella, publishes her first cookbook La Trattoria, and lays the foundations for the long, successful career that lies ahead for her.
Dara Klein, winner of CODE’s Women of the Year 2026 Breakthrough Year award, sponsored by San Pellegrino and Acqua Panna, has had a huge year. She was already a star on the rise following her near two-year residency at The Compton Arms in London, but in the last year, she’s made bigger moves, opening a bricks-and-mortar site for Tiella in Hackney in January, writing a cookbook La Trattoria, out in July, and co-authoring that headline-making open letter calling out sexism and inequality in the restaurant industry.
Yet, ironically, this born cook spent most of the last year outside of restaurant kitchens, working at home on La Trattoria. “I always wanted to be a writer from when I was six years old. I had this super romantic idea of getting up in the mornings, going for a walk in the park, doing my recipe testing, writing the book, and it’s kind of what the schedule looked like, but I wasn’t aware of how different it would feel cooking in my home versus the restaurant kitchen. It was really lonely. The best bit of restaurants – the part that I love the most – is all the people and the constant community-building.”
The process was emotional too, taking Klein back in time to growing up in her family’s trattoria in Wellington, New Zealand, and further back again to Emilia-Romagna where she was born to a Pugliese mother and New Jersey native father. The family uprooted to Wellington when Klein was six, where they opened first a rosticceria and, later, Maria Pia’s, their trattoria. “I started working when I was eight in my family’s business. I’m conscious of how sad it sounds, but it’s actually not sad, but I felt more comfortable in our restaurant than I ever did in my home because the home was always empty. Mum and dad were at work. It was just me, my sister and our dog at home. If you wanted to be around hubbub, you’d have to go to the restaurant.”
If you’d asked the younger Klein if she wanted a place of her own, the answer would have been a resounding “abso-f***ingly-lutely not”. Instead, she headed to university in Melbourne to study creative writing and cinema, then on to drama school at NIDA, the Aussie equivalent of RADA (“I hated it”). “I’ve always cooked,” says Klein. “But I never, ever entertained it as a career because I saw how it destroyed my mum and dad’s relationship. And I saw how much my mum struggled to balance motherhood, her mental health, and the job.”
“My mum is like sheer creative chaos. She moves at 300 million miles an hour but she is a magician. Still to this day, she’s the best cook I’ve ever met. An instinctive natural cook.” Some of Klein’s mother’s recipes are in the iconic Italian cookbook, The Silver Spoon, a copy of which now sits on the shelf at Tiella. A driver for Klein’s work now is sharing her mother’s legacy. “There’s so many aspects of this restaurant and of the book that are really personal. My mum formed my palate and we have the exact same hands, how we look, how we touch food. I have a really beautiful but really complicated relationship with her. It’s something that I’d love to write about more in the future.”
Klein only came to professional cooking later, after spending her early twenties toggling between auditions, waitressing, and office jobs. She made her start in London at Rubedo, then Brawn, Trullo, then Sager + Wilde, each job a stepping stone. A trip to Bologna, where her sister lives, spurred her to go it alone. “It was a come to Jesus moment. I was at one of my favourite trattorie, and I had scallopina limone, a chicken breast on this big white plate with a clear lemony sauce. It looks like a pearl. I was like I can’t cook anything else but simple Italian food.”
She returned home to find her friend Jenny Phung from Ling Ling’s had put in a word for her at The Compton Arms, then home to Four Legs. She was nervous but checked it out and concluded a bowl of pasta and a pint would probably go down pretty well. “I’m a bit witchy woo woo, and I go off gut feelings most of the time. I was like, this feels good.”
Tiella was at The Compton Arms for two hugely successful years until December 2024, during which time Klein was courted by seven potential investors. She chose Ry Jessup, co-founder of Home Slice and The Plimsoll, and a childhood friend from New Zealand. The pair opened Tiella in January 2026. “The first time I actually saw it, I stopped and I had this funny feeling. I was like, that’s my restaurant,” recalls Klein. “The first time we actually came inside the building, it was just this overwhelming feeling of ‘yep, this is the place’.”
It got a write-up in the New York Times the week it opened its doors, with rave reviews following in short order. Most reference her passatelli in brodo, her chicken milanese with apple and fennel, her bay pannacotta, her meatballs, and impeccable pasta. Tiella has opened along with a new wave of trattorias (Osteria Vibrato, Burro, Lupa etc). Why does Klein think Tiella has landed so successfully? “It’s got heart? It’s very authentic and it’s personal,” she says. “In larger society, it’s a really tough moment politically, economically, socially, culturally, and the idea of being welcomed by an Italian mum is probably quite comforting. But also, my food is good! I know how to cook!”
“We are paying really close attention to our craft and the same with the front of house as well. There is this part of me that sometimes feels – I don’t know if it’s just in my head – that I get painted with a brushstroke of, like, not particularly serious, but we really graft. I learned that in every kitchen I worked, including my mum’s, your craft is shaped by all the tiny habits you keep.”
Tiella is just the start. Next comes publicity for her book. Other ideas are percolating: a pub, a rosticceria, more books (not necessarily cookbooks), and a proper Italian bar: “Bar Tiella, it’s got a nice ring to it.” The resting actor in her would also love to do TV. “I’m ready!” she laughs. “It’s exciting to be able to communicate to a really large audience, live. I love to teach and I guess I haven’t necessarily tried to push the content side – I’d be smart to – because I don’t know if it feels natural to me. With short-form content, I’m always like, where’s the guts of the recipe? But I’d absolutely be lying if I said I don’t have dreams.”
The open letter from last February feels a long time ago but its impact will be part of Klein’s legacy too. It was “a huge team effort”, she says, but it was draining. “In general, being a woman, you’re sort of contending with those moments of feeling invisible and also super visible all the time […] I definitely self-silenced after that. And that was not nice, and now I’ve decided that this is my year of being as visible and as visibly myself as possible.”
She feels a duty of care to her younger self and the young men, women, trans, and queer people out there who want to be cooks. The solution, she believes, is to set up restaurants “where a whole heck of different people from different walks of life can feel really comfortable and feel really empowered and looked after.” And that’s exactly what she’s done.
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Dining and Cooking