About Tugan
On the markets of Amsterdam since late 2023.
On the markets of Amsterdam since late 2023.
Before Tugan, I worked in medical equipment, real estate, venture capital, and FMCG — a decade in corporate roles that had nothing to do with food, and a growing itch to actually work with it.
In November 2023, I started from scratch. No prior restaurant or catering experience — I developed every recipe myself, by trial and error, testing on anyone patient enough to try. The feedback was good enough to keep going.
The first kitchen was my own, at home. Within two months it was obvious that wasn't going to hold — we rented our first commercial kitchen, and outgrew that one within four months too.
We haven't stopped since. We started with one recipe: a classic beef echpochmak. Today there are six or seven varieties of it, two kinds of kystybyi, chak-chak, and custom orders we build to fit whatever someone actually needs — and that's not where it ends. We still read every piece of feedback, and we still care, probably too much, about how it tastes.
At one point, our regular customers helped us raise the money for a delivery van — not because we asked for an investment, but because they'd been coming back long enough to want to see it work. That's stayed with us: food is a strange, good excuse for people to actually show up for each other.
There's a lot we still want to build. But quality, and the care that goes into it, comes first — everything else is secondary to that.
Everything is prepped by hand and frozen at our production kitchen in Amstelveen. At the market, we bake fresh, on site. For delivery, catering and wholesale, everything leaves frozen, with baking or reheating instructions included.