Dino’s Restaurant, 1-3 Pelham Street, Borough od Kensington and Chelsea, London SW7, 2005 • Huge Italian caff that featured in the movie Repulsion. It used to dominate South Kensington, and was so ubiquitous I never photographed it properly. By 2015 it had become the boringly tasteful Muriel’s Kitchen.
Shopfront Elegy 
I was just talking about it on the Art Cinema club on FB. Yes it was lovely in the old days, not so long ago. I was thrilled to see it in the film.
aaah, the fondly remembered, much missed, Dino’s. Yes, it seemed to be there for all eternity. When I was a wee lad, my late father, (who knew the owner, I think, being Italian), used to take me there for lunch or a tea after a trip to the nearby Natural History Museum & my dinosaur ‘fix’, which I had back in those days in the late 60’s & early 70’s. Other times it would be the Science Museum. Dino’s… that classic, curved frontage & the jauntily spaced period lettering bearing it’s name, beckoning all & sundry in. And a decent bowl of spaghetti with parmesan they did, too. Yes, I remember Dino’s 15 minutes of fame in ‘Repulsion’, with Michael Pratt, (later to find fame as Jeff Randall, partner to the late Marty Hopkirk, in one of my favourite tv series, ‘Randall & Hopkirk’), as a lecherous roadside workmen – the scene filmed in unforgettable blazing sunlight. In fact, I bought the blu-ray of the film earlier this year JUST because Dino’s was in it(!)
I shed a private little tear when Dino’s went, as I waved ‘goodbye’ to yet another slice of my lost youth. Now it’s the featureless imposter, ‘Muriel’s Kitchen’, (give me a break), posing as a faux, long time, family run establishment, kicking against the brand name chains. Nope, not buying that one. But even that’s going to go, I think, as I study London Underground’s plans to totally redevelop the station frontage & neighbouring Pelham Road.
All gone now… the good old days – never to return again.
Thanks for your marvellous comment. You really conjure up an era! I was based round there in the mid-1980s but never went in. Agree totally about places like Muriel’s Kitchen…
Yes the Dinos Iris Murdoch and John Bailey went to was the one in South Kensington where Muriel’s opened afterwards. Dinos was a remarkable cafe which we always went to when in London to visit the museums. It had charm, and strange subterranean toilets that shook when the trains went through underneath. My mum Dad brother and me went there from the 1960s onwards. Dad and mum stopped going there in their 70s but I went to the bitter end…