DakaDaka: a new restaurant forged in Georgia

The communal table at DakaDaka in central London stretches nearly the full length of the restaurant, and at a dinner last month it was being laid with one intriguing dish after another. For first-timers to Georgian cuisine, the combinations were often startling. Bite-sized pork sausages came studded with barberry and blue fenugreek, alongside a bracingly sour dipping sauce of plum. Kidney-bean hummus was spiked with Georgian chilli-crisp. For dessert, a soft-serve ice-cream made with red-wine saperavi grapes was sprinkled with sunflower seeds and just the right amount of sea salt.

DakaDaka is a new restaurant off Regent Street promising to tell “modern food tales of ancient Georgia” for a London audience. That’s Georgia the country by the Black Sea, not the southern US state. The Georgia at the intersection of Europe and Asia that has, over the centuries, absorbed culinary influences from its neighbours – Iran and Turkey to the south, the Slavic countries to the north – fusing them into a multifaceted food culture all its own.

Until recently, there have been relatively few Georgian restaurants in London, a city obsessed with finding the world’s great cuisines and milking them for all they’re worth. “There was nothing in central London for years,” says DakaDaka co-founder Giorgi Mindiashvili, who worked in the capital as a director at the hotel group Ennismore. “I always felt the city was missing out on Georgian cuisine – or a modern version of it.” Together with Mitz Vora, a chef who had been part of the opening team at the Palomar, he decided to do something about it. The pair spent a few years refining the concept and eventually found a site on Heddon Street, which had previously housed early incarnations of hit restaurants Manteca and Fallow. They doubled it in size, turning the previously unused basement into a wine bar and private dining room. The ground floor was refitted with an open kitchen including a wood-fired hearth and charcoal grill.

Mindiashvili’s wife, Katya Samsonadze, took charge of the interior design, offsetting grey walls and dark woodwork with flashes of ochre and red. All the textiles, light fittings and wood carvings were crafted in Georgia to Samsonadze’s specifications. She also came up with the restaurant’s name. “It is a slang term,” Mindiashvili explains. “It means a very strong emotion or a very big energy. It felt like the right name for the brand..”

To research the menu, Mindiashvili and Vora toured the country several times. “We went to places which are lesser known, even to Georgians. We visited villages and spoke with many home cooks, recording recipes. Based on that, we started to plan what would work in a London environment.” They tried to “keep the essence of what Georgian food tastes like” while lightening some of the dishes. From ghomi, a cornmeal porridge served with meaty braises, they removed the fresh sulguni cheese, which turns a hearty dish into a staggeringly rich one. “This way, you still get to try snacks and small plates and a few skewers, too,” says Mindiashvili.

They paid just as much attention to the wines, without which no Georgian meal is complete. To draw up the list, the team turned to star sommelier Honey Spencer of Sune in Hackney, who was so excited to work with Georgian wines that she took Mindiashvili and Vora’s call the day she was going into labour with her first child. “It was kind of a final frontier for me,” she says of the country, one of the oldest wine-making producers in the world, with more than 500 indigenous grape varieties found nowhere else. She later did a six-day tour with her baby son in tow, focusing on natural wines, and has now assembled around 165 bottles, the largest Georgian wine list in the country.

On Sundays, the plan is to join the tables for a supra-style brunch, a nod towards Georgian feasting traditions. There may not be toasting with glasses of chacha (grape brandy), as at a traditional supra, but the communal set-up should encourage a festive atmosphere, aided by boat-shaped khachapuris (flatbreads with melted cheese and egg yolk) and lamb chakapuli with sour plums and tarragon. If this opening proves successful, there might be more of them on the way. Mindiashvili envisions neighbourhood DakaDakas in Notting Hill and Hackney, adapting its formula from one area to the next. “I think London has the space,” he says, “and as it develops the taste for Georgian food, it will develop the desire for more restaurants like this.”

DakaDaka, 10 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BX (020 4630 6435; @dakadaka.london)