Before there was a bakery, there was a dinner.
There's a kind of food that only ever came from someone's kitchen.
The cake your grandmother carried over wrapped in a tea towel. The pastries an aunt always brought, still warm. The little parcels of something your mum's friend tucked into your hand at the door. Food that arrived because someone made it for you — never because you bought it.
That food is harder to find now. The people who made it that way are not, mostly, still making it. The recipes that took two days don't fit easily into modern weekday kitchens. The grandmothers who knew the trick have, quietly, stopped teaching.
Tatik's started at a dinner like that.
Aisha's grandmother had brought the food over — honey cake, gata, piroshki, borek, the same things she had been making since Aisha was small enough to sit on the kitchen bench and watch.
We ate slowly. We talked. We went back for more. And somewhere between the savouries and the cake, one of us said it out loud: is anyone in Melbourne selling this?
Nobody was.
So we started.
From a kitchen table to Moray Street.
First on Instagram, without a website. Six hundred people followed before we'd taken a single order.
Then a few catering jobs we hadn't planned for — the Armenian Film Festival asked us to feed 200 guests; Cardwell Cellars asked us to cater an Armenian wine tasting. People who'd never heard of Armenia tasted our food for the first time on those nights. Many of them are still customers.
By the time we'd outgrown the home kitchen, we needed a real space. We found 84 Moray Street — a quiet street in Southbank, a big front window, light all morning. The plan was to use it as a commercial kitchen only. But the window was too good. We thought — if we put a coffee machine in here, people could walk in, have a slice, and decide for themselves.
That's how the café came to be.
"This new Melbourne bakery has cheesy flatbreads and 12-layer honey cakes." — Broadsheet
The recipes haven't changed.
We make the food the way it was always made.
Twelve thin layers in the honey cake, rested two days. Gata shaped by hand. Piroshki filled one at a time. Borek pastry folded fresh every morning. Nothing here is rushed, because the food we're trying to make isn't the rushed kind.
Small and big at the same time.
Small, because it's a handful of people in a kitchen in Southbank, making food the way it was made before kitchens got busy.
Big, because we think this food deserves a real place in Melbourne — at people's tables, at their celebrations, in the moments that matter.
So we're going to keep making it. Slowly. Properly.
Come in, or have it delivered.
Bench seating along the wall, a few tables outside, a kitchen at the back where everything in the cabinet was made that morning.
If you can't come in, we deliver across Melbourne. Hosting something? We'll box it up and bring it to you.