Stasha Toncev was seven when she first started cooking.
Unbeknownst to her parents, whenever her house was empty, she’d prepare meals for the kids in her neighbourhood, hosting little parties and clearing up before the adults got home.
Her strategy of secrecy resulted in a number of questionable, pickle-heavy dishes before she was eventually found out, her parents putting a stop to her stoveside adventures. Unperturbed, she carried on experimenting in the kitchen at every opportunity, becoming a teen who spent her pocket money not on lipstick, like her peers, but on gourmet oils, honeys and local produce.
“I’ve always been obsessed with food – but I never enjoyed cooking just for myself. I always had to have an audience,” she says now, gesturing around the 21grams restaurant floor and laughing.
“When I came to Dubai from Serbia 13 years ago, I was working in high-end hotels and restaurants – but really, I became a bit of a mother to the Serbian community. I was that girl who cooked for everyone on every occasion. And after a while, people started saying I should do something with that. I still didn’t get it, though, for a while. I hadn’t really ever seen my love of hosting as a special talent. For me it was just innate, a part of who I was. I was feeding my own soul while feeding others.”
Gradually, Toncev realised that she wasn’t drawing the same satisfaction from her paid work as she was from her informal hosting. “I wasn’t enjoying it,” she says, simply. “I could see that it could be done differently. The industry was not meeting the needs of employees, everything was always being done to meet the satisfaction of the guests. But it’s wrong to forget that there’s a very important link between a business and its customers, and that’s the team.
“So that was one thing that was bothering me. But I was also annoyed that no one knew about Balkan cuisine. I was not able to bring the beauty of our cuisine to people just through explaining it or showing the pictures. That’s when I saw my niche, the opportunity to add value – to my culture and to Dubai’s dining scene.”
Solving problems comes naturally
In a stroke of serendipity, the owner of a soon-to-open boutique hotel in Umm Suqeim came to Toncev with a problem – he had a tiny restaurant space but nothing to go in it. She wracked her brains trying to think of someone. And then she decided to give it a go herself. The first 21grams was born.
“We opened with 25 chairs, no celebrity chefs or owners, completely unknown,” she grins. “At that time, people were asking us ‘what is a Balkan?’. For many people, it could have been anything – a fruit or a vegetable rather than a region in Europe. Talk about underrepresented cuisine.
“It honestly felt like we were more likely to fail than to succeed. But I really wanted to do things differently, to create an exceptional dining experience that also gave that feeling that it was all about family and values, about sharing rather than just serving food. I really believed Balkan cuisine and hospitality had so much potential – it just needed a little bit of magic to turn that Cinderella story around. And now, even if I say it myself, I think we’ve done a fantastic job.”
Indeed, five years on, Toncev and 21grams have come a long way. Now housed in a chic, bright, 80-cover restaurant on the top floor of Umm Suqeim’s Meyan Mall, there’s a certain poetry to the fact the venue’s huge windows offer a direct view to the hotel where it all started. Yet growth has not come without its challenges, and the move to bigger premises almost sounded a death knell for the business when a ruthless developer disappeared with all of Toncev’s hard-earned renovation cash.
“The problem when something like this happens is not just that you’re starting from scratch. It’s that you’re starting not from zero but from a big fat minus,” she says now, clearly shaken by the experience. “That happened to me after four years of hard work. We’d already started something, we’d built it up, and suddenly it’s all in danger. That’s a very difficult proposition for a business to move forward.
“But this was the moment when we got help from our community. It felt like things coming to fruition in a way, having worked to build and give back, we saw it come back to us. It was truly beautiful.”
Serving the community
Today, and as a result, Toncev is more focused than ever on ensuring that 21grams is a truly community-minded venue, with a focus on supporting staff, fellow restaurateurs and the small business community.
“Dubai is a place with a very high cost of living. We need people in service industries to be paid better,” she says. “We need change across so many areas to make it easier – especially now if the city is going to promote itself as a major culinary destination.
“But what I love about Dubai is its openness to doing things better. There’s always a plan. There’s always a strategy. It’s just a matter of time and patience to get there. But in the meantime, I feel it’s my calling to be a voice for so many small businesses and restaurants.
“I think we have a reputation that is somehow bigger than our establishment. People would think we’re a big team and that there’s a company or a holding or a group supporting us. People would never expect that this is just a little family business. But that’s what we are. And I want to see more like us in the future.
“People say we’re in an age of homegrown restaurants now, they talk about these great places they recognise as having been born here, they appreciate it. But we need to put it into perspective. There are 13,000 restaurants in this market and if I ask people to name their favourite homegrown restaurants, you’ll be lucky if the list goes to 20. So it’s not enough. We need to do more to make the market welcoming to people who have unique ideas but have different resources than big companies.
“I really pay tribute to people who started restaurants seven or eight years ago. They really started what we’re seeing now. They really had to fight against the current and it was not easy. And I guess we were part of that early stage too. Now, it might feel like it’s well-established, but the homegrown scene is still a baby. It was very difficult to be one of the first. Now we need to support all of those still to come.”