Tuğçe Durak is a curator, experience designer and chef based in Florence, exploring the intersection of food, travel and hospitality. She is the founder of The Table of Friends and Table of Friends Magazine. Its long tables have travelled from Sicily to Norway, by way of Amsterdam, Berlin, Athens and Turkey, gathering a community that now reaches across the world.
She began as a travel writer, trying to understand places through their people, their tables and their stories. That path widened into marketing, content creation and brand strategy for the hospitality world. Along the way she produced documentary projects for national television (TRT 2), wrote for national newspapers and magazines such as GQ and Cosmopolitan, worked as an inspector for a renowned culinary rating platform, hosted the travel programme Tuğçe Durak ile En İyi on GAİN, and worked with globally recognised brands, hotel groups and restaurants from the Mediterranean to Africa, among them the Michelin Guide and the national tourism boards of Greece, Italy and Türkiye.
Food was never just a subject for her. It was a language. She studied for a bachelor's degree in Culinary Arts and Gastronomy at the Scuola di Arte Culinaria Cordon Bleu in Florence, which gave her an insider's view of the kitchen and the discipline behind hospitality.
She works in English, Turkish and Italian.