Sofija Mehta x L’Officiel Ibiza

From the refugee camps of Bavaria to her home in Ibiza,
the founder of Island Hospitality has learned that family and love are everything. 

01.12.2024 by Maya Boyd. Photography by Harley Maya.

‘I was born in Serbia in 1987 to a Serbian mother and an Albanian father, just prior to the war that caused the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. My father was a military officer and therefore considered a person of interest, so we had to flee the country when I was only two. We were the lucky ones - some of my father’s colleagues did not get that chance. My father kept his plans secret even from my mother – it wasn’t until we arrived at a refugee camp in Bavaria that she understood that we were never going home. For the first year we stayed completely hidden – my mother, father, sister and I. Nobody, not even my maternal grandmother, knew where we were. In the refugee camp there were 12 of us in one room. My earliest memory is of how the hallways were always crammed with people. It’s strange looking back, because although we had nothing and we were refugees, I never remember feeling anything but love. I was surrounded by my family and that was all the security I needed. I knew right from those early years that being at the heart of a loving family is all it takes for my world to feel complete. 

My mother had been a professional basketball player for the Serbian national team and when we were in the camp, she used her sporting discipline to bring structure and balance to our lives. One day she was playing basketball on the asphalt court in the refugee camp when she was approached by a coach from the Bavarian Second League. He struck up a conversation – my mother speaking in broken German - and asked if she would consider coming and playing for his team in Bavaria. That coach was a godsend for our family as he not only helped my mother get into the team but took us out of the camp and welcomed us into his own home with his family to live with them. I went from sharing a room with 12 other people to living in a beautiful house with a huge garden, where his wife cooked family meals while my sister and I played on the lawn beneath the trees. It was nothing less than a miracle for our family and it was then that I got a real sense of how generous humanity can be.

In the meantime, my father’s brother had moved to Hamburg and later we joined him. We lived in Wilhelmsburg, which was full of migrant familes like ours. My parents had arrived in Germany with two kids, two suitcases, no other possessions or money and neither spoke a word of German. While they waited for their citizenship papers, there weren’t many jobs for non-German speaking migrants. My parents felt lost but desperate to rebuild the life that they had been forced to leave behind, so the whole family took up any jobs we could find - we cleaned offices, we delivered newspapers, we stacked shelves. 

My uncle had a little nightclub in Wilhelmsburg with the most beautiful field that ran down to the water’s edge. All the tourist day boats used to pass by as they went in and out of the harbour and my father thought, why not use the space to create a beer garden? Within a few years, it had become the most loved beer garden in all of Hamburg and we couldn’t keep up. As the business grew, I realised the power of great hospitality. I was 16 or 17 and I was working in the beer garden every day after school, no days off. My father is a military man and he ran a tight ship. I didn’t get a salary but I had an apartment and a car and I was with my family every day. It was tough in summer when all my friends were at beaches and house parties but I knew I was working for the security of my family, and that was enough for me. It still is. After school, I took a gap year and travelled through Australia. It was my first real taste of freedom.

I went on to study Economics and French Linguistics at the University of Hamburg. While I was completing the last semester of my Master’s degree, I decided to open my first restaurant – a wine bistro in Hamburg. Shortly after I opened a second location and just like that my entrepreneurial journey had started. All the lessons I had learned working in the beer garden were put to use, but the learning curve was still steep. 

In October 2014 I decided to join some friends on a 48-hour visit to Ibiza. I had no idea those two days would change the course of my life. They say sometimes people wait for a lifetime for something to happen and sometimes a lifetime happens in a few hours. It was in those few hours that I met a man that would change my life forever. After spending two hours deep in conversation at a party, my now-husband turned to me and told me that he knew I was going to be the mother of his children. I was shocked, but I had never felt a deeper connection with anyone in my life. Here we are today, married for nine years with a family of three children and living in our beloved island home.

I feel very blessed. I am a child of the war and I have lived through incredibly tough times and faced hardship, but I have also known absolute peace. I see the beauty in both, because the difficult times are when we learn to test our own resilience. There is always light in the darkness and for me that light has always been the unity and strength of family. Now more than ever, with three children of my own, I am able to show them the value of a peaceful home and a grateful heart. The world has a plan for us all, we just need to have faith.’