Tamara and Natasha Surguladze: ‘In Georgia, a meal can last all day’

Receive free Food & Drink updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Food & Drink news every morning.

One of the great joys of Tamara and Natasha Surguladze’s childhood in Georgia would be the arrival of unexpected guests for dinner. It was the signal for the twin sisters to be spontaneously hospitable. “Immediately, we’d get out the cutlery and start laying the table,” says Tamara. “Our mum would be like this,” says Natasha – and she widens her eyes in horror. “But that’s what we loved. We wanted people to stay and eat. Hosting is a big part of Georgian culture and guests are the most important people. We loved it when we had meals that lasted all day.”

The duo behind women’s ready-to-wear and homeware brand Tata Naka still share an instinct for home entertaining. At their house in London, they host a calendar of festive meals, including Christmas Day, Christian Orthodox New Year and Pancake Tuesday, with more spontaneous, wittily themed lavish dinners, lunches, cocktail parties and barbecues sprinkled in thrice monthly for no real reason other than a love of eating with friends around a (highly decorative) table. “We’re obsessed,” says Natasha. A trip to Switzerland inspired an Alpine dinner, replete with cow-embroidered linens, while a Valentine’s Day Murder and Cocktails Tea Party was inspired by Agatha Christie. “We had all this silverware from the ’30s we’d collected at flea markets, and vintage cocktail glasses. We all played games,” says Tamara. They began making homewares with their own handpainted designs in 2018, and have just launched a tableware collection. “Fun is the main thing. We want something fun and exciting and colourful.”

When work is stressful, hosting a big dinner is what we do to distract ourselves

For the first summer lunch of 2023, they decided to stimulate appetites for the high season. “We go to Italy every year, so we wanted a sort of preview of that,” says Natasha. They enjoy breaking their own rules, so a Brazilian lemonade and rum aperitivo kicked things off, alongside salami and the Provençal pissaladière of onions and anchovies. “For us, seafood equals summer, so we had seafood marinated in garlic on the barbecue and pasta with clams.” Dessert was ricotta panna cotta and New Orleans-style beignets. 

“When work is stressful, hosting a big dinner is what we do to distract ourselves,” says Tamara. “It relaxes us to throw ourselves into something else.” They rarely order in, but one Chinese New Year permitted a Chinese takeaway. “We did the opposite of what is expected,” says Tamara. “We had the most lush and beautiful table settings and silverware crockery, the table piled high, very formal.” Natasha interrupts: “Even if it were girlfriends coming over, we’d make a big effort. It’s never a casual dinner.”