Masha Said Yes

Masha said yes.

We should have written this in May, when it happened. Instead we told Instagram, poured a lot of bubbly, and went back to work. So here it is properly, a few months late, which is about right for us.

It started with one khachapuri

We met on a first date at The Alma, here in Crystal Palace. It went well enough that there was a second, and on one of those early dates Masha cooked khachapuri.

She has told this story more times than I have, and her version is better, because her version is not about the bread. It is about watching someone eat it for the first time. She says she saw something in my face that night and thought: that look is worth building something around.

She was right, although neither of us imagined what it would cost in sleep.

Then everything happened at once

For anyone who has only met us since we opened, the order of events is genuinely absurd.

I checked on a whim whether khachapuri.co.uk was available. It was. I filmed myself asking statues in Hyde Park whether they liked cheese. Mridz at Etude Coffee became the first person to say yes to selling our food. Our friend Nick handed us the keys and the pizza oven at his Covent Garden bar and refused to take any rent - much of the panelling and half the furniture you are sitting on came from him too.

Then we found Crystal Palace, ran evening pop-ups out of a former vegan cafe, sold khachapuri from a chalet at a Christmas market while quietly negotiating a lease, bought the place on a Monday and opened it on the Friday.

Five days. On savings, loans, and people who backed us before there was anything to back.

We spent our first Christmas Day handing out free mini khachapuri to neighbours on their morning walk, with kids upstairs getting their hands in the dough.

And then May

I asked her in Crystal Palace park, down by the lake, at the rusty laptop stage.

It could not have been anywhere else. This is the neighbourhood where we met, where we live, and where we chose to put everything we had into a restaurant. The park is the heart of it, and on a quiet morning there is nowhere better in south London: the water still, families out on the grass, and that great rusting stage standing over it all the way it has for as long as anyone here can remember. Everyone who grows up in Crystal Palace knows that view.

So it was not only a question. It was a celebration of the place that gave us each other and then gave us this.

She said yes. We gave a free glass of bubbly to everyone who booked between the 11th and the 17th of May, because it did not feel like the sort of news you keep to yourself, and because it is quite hard to celebrate properly when you are both working every evening.

Building it together

People sometimes ask whether it is difficult, running a restaurant with the person you are marrying. The honest answer is that we have never done it the other way round, so we have nothing to compare it to.

What we can say is that this place is not a business we happen to both work at. Masha bakes upstairs. I am usually the one who has broken something on the website. Sandy greets everyone at the door and is, by some distance, the most popular member of staff.

The first thing we teach anyone who joins us is that a guest should feel like they have come round to a friend's house, not to a cafe. That is not a service standard we copied from somewhere. It is just how we live, and the restaurant came out of that rather than the other way around.

Thank you for the messages in May, and for the ones since. Come and see us. There will probably be more bubbly.