Renato Sidoli:Renato Sidoli, who has died aged 86 at his home in the Italian town of Bardi, near Parma, was the founder of the Unicorn restaurant off Merrion Row in Dublin. When it opened in the early 1960s, Dublin had very few restaurants of note and the Unicorn rapidly found an eager market.
The Italian community in Dublin was not much bigger than 2,000, most of whom had come to Ireland from Lazio to open fish and chip shops. Sidoli, in contrast, was determined to provide authentic if homely Italian food and he is remembered as doing so with great panache and considerable charisma.
Sidoli and his wife Nina were eventually succeeded in the business by their son Tranquillo, who was known as "Lino", but it was Nina's sister Dom who continued to manage the restaurant until the Unicorn was sold to Jeff Stokes and Giorgio Casari in 1994.
"Miss Dom", as she was known, was very much the public face of the restaurant, whereas Renato and Nina operated more behind the scenes. It was Miss Dom who presided over the dining room during the era in which the Unicorn, thanks to its proximity to Leinster House, the Shelbourne Bar, Doheny & Nesbitt and Scruffy Murphy's, became a favourite eating place for a group of movers and shakers in the worlds of politics, law and journalism.
Renato Sidoli's regular contact with this group made him a very significant part of the Italian community and he was seen by many as an unofficial ambassador for his country. In time this was recognised by the Italian government, which honoured him with the title of Commendatore on his retirement.
The heydey of the restaurant he had created, in terms of it being a gathering place for a very particular group, was from the mid-1980s into the early 1990s. It was during this era that Saturday lunch there became an institution.
While Charles Haughey and his "golden circle" frequented Le Coq Hardi on Pembroke Road, a younger but highly influential inner circle would gather in the Horseshoe Bar on Friday evenings and meet again for lunch the next day in the Unicorn.
Regulars included former government press secretary and current Fianna Fáil director of elections PJ Mara, PD leader and Minister for Justice Michael McDowell, rising lawyers Adrian Hardiman and Gerry Danaher SC, former Fine Gael senator and current president of the Irish Human Rights Commission Maurice Manning, journalist Sam Smyth, music promoter Oliver Barry and economists SeáBarrett and Colm McCarthy.
According to PJ Mara, Miss Dom would always keep the window tables for this loose alliance of individuals whose lunches often concluded well after the rest of the population had consumed their evening meal. He describes Saturday lunch at the Unicorn as a hugely enjoyable "exchange and mart for scurrility and calumny".
On one occasion, shortly after some of the household staff at Áras an Uachtaráin had been let go by the incoming administration of president Mary Robinson, PJ Mara noticed some of the president's advisers sitting at a nearby table. He and his companions, including Hardiman - now a judge of the Supreme Court - started a chant of "two-four-six-eight, reinstate the Áras Eight" to the great amusement of the dining room.
By the late 1980s, Renato and Nina had begun to take a back seat in the running of the Unicorn, and instead spent more time in Italy, but Lino carried on the family tradition along with his aunt Dom.
By the time the restaurant was sold in 1994, the Saturday lunch tradition for the luminaries of law, politics and the media was starting to fade, but the establishment that Renato Sidoli founded continues to be a fashionable eating and meeting place.
Renato Sidoli: born 1921; died April 7th, 2007