Once, for a business dinner that I had been preparing for weeks, I spent more time choosing my dress than my colleague did choosing the restaurant. It was my first meeting with a client from Milan. I chose a simple black dress, one of those you buy once and wear for years, because I wanted Tirana to look as serious as my presentation. The restaurant had plastic flowers on the table, a neon “Love” sign on the wall, and a playlist that switched from reggaeton to a remix we had listened to three times that day. Talking about budgets and deadlines while sitting under a fluorescent “Love” was somewhat comical. My dress and the restaurant spoke two different languages ??and had nothing in common. The Milanese immediately understood my awkwardness, but, as a polite person, he pretended not to notice.
That evening I realized something that later became almost an obsession: in Tirana we dress up to go out, but we rarely go to places that take the same care as us when it comes to clothing. Some places look like twin sisters: the same burrata, the same pink lighting for the next “Instagram” photo, the same menu that promises “fusion” and causes confusion. And so began my marathon of finding places that offered more than a chair and a menu. I wanted the space, the plates, the glasses, and the music to be chosen by the same eye that chooses the clothes.
The first time I felt this harmony was in Milan, at 10 Corso Como, Carla Sozzani's concept store, where fashion, books, photography and a courtyard café were so beautifully fused together. I went in for a pair of shoes and left four hours later, with a book I hadn't planned to buy, with a coffee taste I still remember today and without shoes. There I realized that the concept of style was completely different from the one we are used to.
When I learned that ZABÒ, a name I had previously associated with clothing collections with character, had opened a restaurant, I went in with a bit of skepticism. We've seen many fashion brands that put an espresso machine next to the cash register and call it "lifestyle" or something "different" from the crowd. But ZABÒ Garden does not belong to this category. "At ZABÒ, you don't go with the idea of ??dressing up, enjoying yourself or visiting the environment. You go there and experience it all together," they define it.
Garden has the rhythm of a city on a day off. Breakfast starts quietly, with coffee and brunch, at those hours when Tirana has not yet decided how it will continue the day. For a city where coffee is not drunk, but “made”, and where a “come for a coffee” can last until lunch, a place that respects this slowness is almost a gesture of love. At lunch, the place starts to fill up and the tables start to be laid slowly; the plates are meant to be shared, the wine is opened and the conversation takes on a different rhythm. I like tables where food passes from one to the other, where phrases like “try this” intervene between two sentences and no one has a problem. In the evening, the lights come on, the music turns up the volume and cocktails start to come out of the bar. Dinner invites you, without saying it out loud, to stay a little longer. Then a little longer.
Just a few steps further, the atmosphere changes. H?N by ZABÒ is the inner chapter of this house: quieter, more elegant, more restrained, where sushi, dinner and attention to every detail of the service take all the attention. It is the space that comes to mind for a more intimate evening, when you want to dedicate time to the person in front of you. “Garden and H?N are two different energies of the same house,” says Ajris Leka, founder of ZABÒ.
I won't list the menu for you. Describing a dish by counting the ingredients is as pointless as describing a dress by counting the stitches. What matters here is the logic behind it, the same one that their fashion store follows. "Just as at ZABÒ Designer we bring clothes with character, in the kitchen we start from selections," says Ajris.
The product and its origin, the wine, a technically constructed cocktail or a small ritual at the table obey the same rule: every detail must have a reason why it is there. In a time when many kitchens are built for the phone camera, this almost sounds like rebellion. Virginia Woolf wrote that you cannot think, love or sleep well if you have not eaten well. ZABÒ seems to add another truth to this list: style is not enough to wear, you must also take it somewhere.
The best way to understand ZABÒ is to not plan anything and let it take you with it. You go to pick up an order at ZABÒ Designer and stay for coffee. You go for brunch and, without realizing it, continue with an aperitif. Or you start with dinner and end the night with music and a cocktail that you didn't plan. This is the true luxury of the place: you don't need to change the address every time your mood changes.
Today, when I choose a dress for a dinner party, I still choose it carefully. It's just that I no longer expect the dress to do all the work. I like to go and feel like the place has been prepared for me too.
And if the client from Milan ever returns to Tirana, this time I will make the reservation. :)
