Bulat Ibragimov was the master chef at Apartment 63 before he and his partners founded the Kama restaurant, which served modern Tatar cuisine. Then he moved to Moscow and headed the kitchen at Yuzhane. Upon returning to Kazan, he opened the Artel bistro.

I finally decided what I want out of life and who I am not that long ago, you know? I mean, before that I was in kind of a free fall or, you might say, free flying, with no clear destination.

My childhood was, well, you couldn't really say it was special. It was a pretty common childhood for a Soviet kid. I was born in 1990 in Kazan.

My whole family—except for my grandmother and my mother—had their doubts. But against all odds, and thanks to the doctors, I survived. I made it out.

I was the second child; I was born when my sister was three-and-a-half. There was a lot of jealousy there. We had just the right age difference for it, and my sister hated me for a long time. Well, it was a childish hatred and jealousy anyways.

I come from a family of doctors, regular, ordinary, simple doctors. My parents studied at the university in the 1980s, in the Soviet Union. It was really prestigious to be a doctor then.

We lived with my grandmother, my father's mother, in her apartment on Ibragimova Street. I grew up on Ibragimova Street. My grandfather worked in a helicopter factory, so they were given an apartment on Ibragimova.

I was a kid in the year 2000, Y2K. I was, what, like, ten-years-old? Of course, I remember that we had nothing in the 2000s; we were pretty poor. Well, not that there was nothing to eat ...

My mother has this superpower, she can surround our family with, like, a dome, so that nothing can get in. In a good way. Somehow my sister and I grew up in constant care. We didn't have an excess of anything, but we never wanted for anything either.

My mother and father always worked really hard, and my current work ethic probably comes from that.

I was left to myself at an early age. When I was still in kindergarten, my grandmother passed. She died of cancer. I didn't know what it was then, she just started to get sick and refused surgery. I later found out that she could've been saved. She was a doctor, too. One day she just was gone. That was hard, of course. I was a kid with a grandmother, and then she was gone. Then there were just four of us: mom, dad, me, and my sister.

I studied at the 122nd preparatory school. It was located in a different district: my mother and father always wanted something better for us—better than what they had—and they were trying to point us in the right direction. They sent us to one of the most prestigious schools at that time, a preparatory school with an in-depth English program. It had very good teachers and a great headmistress, Zhanetta Abramovna, a very cool woman. She was a wise leader, and the school prospered under her; she was loved very much by the parents and teachers. I mean, I was little, I didn't really understand anything, so to me she was just a big fat woman and the hall outside her office reeked because she smoked cigars.

For the most part, the other children that studied there had a higher social status than we did. Although there really wasn't that big of a difference between us.

School years for me were like, kind of an intermediate period. It's hard to explain, really ... It's just that I've separated my life into "before" and "after." School was "before," and I've stopped analyzing everything that was "before."

What divides the before and after?

The death of my father, I guess. And probably returning to Kazan.

How old were you then?

That was in 2019. My father passed in 2018.

As for school... Well, it was a good school. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think that school has that big of an impact on how you turn out, unless it's some private school at like the University of Bern, you know, or an Ivy League school, where you study with the children of senators.

But many kids that studied at that school have now moved abroad, some have achieved success or are achieving it now; it's that the age when you career is gaining traction. Well, that's what they say anyways.

Unfortunately, I don't keep in touch with many people from school. I mean, I have two very good friends; those strong connections remain. Those that weren't strong got lost completely. I don't talk to anyone from my class.

У меня были какие-то там вкусы в литературе… Я считал себя необычным человеком, типа неформалом, тогда это было расхожее слово, катался на скейте, слушал рок и так далее.

— А где в то время в Казани катались на скейте?

— На «плошке», на Площади Свободы, в Парке победы. Это было прикольно, конечно, мы собирались вечерами. На самом деле ни хрена не катались, а просто тусили. Общались, пиво пили. Вот. Это была социализация какая-то. То есть соцсети тогда только появились. «Соцсетью» была «плошка», где все друг друга знали. Разговаривали там, делились.

Был ЖЖ ещё. Вот, да. Я очень много сидел в жж, аське, я ещё помню MTV старый, вот про который снимал Дудь.

— Кого читал в ЖЖ?

— Читал в ЖЖ… Не помню… Ну, во-первых, я друзей читал. Потом уже там были известные какие-то чуваки. Сначала читал друзей, друг друга читали, жесть какую-то там. Свой какой-то пубертатный высер.

— Ну это важно, кстати.

— Ну да. Потом уже популярных блогеров читал. Я какое-то время увлекался фотографией. Был подписан на всех крутых фотографов. И не только фотографов. Рекламщиков, гламурных фотографов. На этого ещё, как его зовут... Короче, он снимал всю эту клюкву московскую, тусовочку кокаиновую. У него фамилия Зверков, а имя не помню. Ну, короче, знаменитый. Его читал и думал: «Вау, вот же люди живут интересно».

— В каком жанре ты снимал? Что снимал?

— Портреты, наверное, и нравилась репортажная съёмка, я тогда снимал на плёнку. У меня остались плёнки, я до сих пор там что-то иногда снимаю.

— В Казани сложно на плёнку снимать? Ну, с проявкой возиться?

— Я умею чёрно-белую пленку сам проявлять.

— А, ты дома проявляешь?

— Да, а цветную вот плёнку отправлять надо в Москву на проявку. Слушай, про фотографии можно вообще отдельно даже поговорить.

After school, I felt completely empty, because I had studied chemistry and biology for such a long time; I tried to take extracurricular classes in biology and chemistry, I even knew stuff, and the only thing I wanted to do was go to medical school.

Like your parents?

Yeah, like my dad. I saw my dad and wanted to be like him. My father worked all my life in emergency surgery at Municipal Hospital no. 12. Then he moved to no. 11, to elective surgery. Elective surgeons, well, among surgeons they're called "butchers"; they don't make any medical diagnoses, they just cut. It's a craft.

And that results in drinking a lot, right? And women ... And so on. There's a nastiness about emergency surgery, and it's written on a surgeon's face. In a good way. It's like, you know, Hemingway: you fight, and then you write. My father worked really hard, was on shift, and didn't get paid very much. In America, for example, a surgeon like that might get several hundred thousand dollars a year. Well, there are also disadvantages in the American health care system, but the doctors there have it good: they live in mansions and drive Cadillacs.

But my parents forbade me to go into medicine.

How did they explain that to you?

They said that I would live like them, you know, in poverty. At some point when I was still in high school, my mother started working in a private clinic. She had been the deputy chief medical officer at the same hospital my dad worked at, and then she went to work at a private clinic. And then the family had at least some money. It started coming in. And when my dad went into elective surgery, he probably got paid more.

And so my parents stopped me from being a doctor, arguing that it's also constant stress. My father was always stressed out. It was really hard sometimes. The family was tense in general. Dad would come home after a shift, angry, and he might yell. A lot of negative energy was accumulated, and it didn't go anywhere. Alcohol solved these problems.

And I was like, "okay, okay."

In 9th or 10th grade I tried to get into the Lobachevsky Lyceum. Study physics. I always had problems with exact sciences, and I probably still have problems with exact sciences. I was bad at physics.

So, you were banned from medicine. What did you want to study at the lyceum?

I don't know. I don't even remember. After 9th grade, my sister left to study at a physico-mathematics lyceum with an in-depth physics and mathematics and natural and exact sciences program. We had a humanities school. that's ... My sister was the star of the family, as they say.

You said she hated you as a child. What's your relationship like now?

Now we're friends. I mean, she moved to America to study when I was still in school. She fell in love, married an American, got a job, started studying again, and now she has an MBA. She studied at Rice University in Texas, in Houston. It's one of the top universities in the South.

My sister is very smart, very capable, and I was kind of ... I had had very complex mental alignment; I was kind of like a creative person, you know? I have these impulses in my brain, like, I'm the complete opposite of the kind of person who works in IT.

I have an uncle who's an oil geologist, my mother's older brother. And he achieved success. You can make you money in the oil industry, and my parents would've liked to get in on that. And they always saw some potential there—and there probably was—so they told me "You're going to Moscow to study at the oil institute."

So I did a crash course studying for the Unified State Exam in physics and mathematics with a tutor. I even passed it somehow.

But that was your parents' choice. Did you have any notion to rebel?

I rebelled later.

I didn't rebel at first, because I was like, cool, I'm going to study in Moscow. I wanted to leave Kazan, I understood that there's a lot of things out there, but there wasn't shit for me in Kazan. And I didn't want to stay here, like my classmates, be content with what I had. I wanted to achieve something in life, so I went to Moscow, the smell of freshness, like some European half-criminal landing on an island, what's it called, like New York, you know, like an Italian who can smell the freedom in America—that's how I was when I came to Moscow.

How long did you take in that first feeling of the city?

The first two years were probably like that.

I remember my first math class at university like it was yesterday.

First of all, there wasn't anything about that in the Unified State Exam. It wasn't in the school curriculum; it was only in advanced placement classes. Only in physico-mathematics lyceums. I never studied it. I knew I didn't understand anything at all.

What about other students?

Well, people were raising their hands, giving answers; they understood what a matrix is. In short, it was tough. Of course, I understood it later, but with difficulty.

And so I went to university. And not just any university, but the most prestigious school of the most prestigious department: oil production. All the top managers of many prestigious companies are oil engineers. Well, they used to be.

And then one day I found out that I my education was being paid for. I mean, I always thought I was learning for free. It turned out that my parents were just paying for me without telling me. It was unpleasant, sure. I found out pretty late, in the last years of school.

And studying there cost 120,000–130,000 rubles a year, you know? That's a lot.

For me that was an incredible amount of money at the time. And it's not spare change even now. And my rebellion was at the university. I did everything except study.

At first I honestly tried to study, but then I realized that I was bad at it, because it was just not what I was meant to be doing.

I mean, I was like an engineer who understood how things happened on a superficial level, emotionally, but I couldn't count it all out mathematically, and that's like being an artist without hands.

[I was] an engineer who didn't know mathematical approaches; didn't know mathematical analysis; and couldn't describe phenomenon, solve complex equations, or think analytically. I mean, I could think analytically, but not that way.

Could you say you understood it intuitively?

Yeah, yeah, intuitively is a good word. I was your average C student. My relatives kept saying, and my dad's friends, my mom's friends, they said, "Finish school, and then everything will work out." Because, thanks to my family connections I would be sent to a good company, you know, get a prestigious position. I'd prove myself. Because for the oil industry in Russia ... to be a "good engineer" you don't really need to know the math, you just have to be kind of unscrupulous.

So what happened after the shock of finding out that your parents were paying? Did anything change? Did it lead you to any decisions?

It was a tipping point, yeah. In the third year, classes for my major started. Before the 3rd year, it sucked, just stuff nobody needed. And then the classes for my major began, and I just sort of ghosted though it.

I did a lot of stuff extracurricular stuff at the university, organizing scientific conferences, all that stuff, lectures. It was called SPE, the Society of Petroleum Engineers.

I lived in a dorm, too, which was a very good experience for me. That is, I mean, I was right in the thick of it. There was a lot of drinking, waking up in other people's dorms, or in a completely different dormitory at like the Journalism Department of Moscow State University; those guys drank like fishes.

Did anyone from your dorm influence you?

Probably not. I guess I did my own thing there, too. I mean, I've always marched to my own drummer. I've always been a loner.

So no one inspired you at all? Maybe even like a specific trait in someone that you liked and took for yourself?

I've always looked to people who ... There were some people, yeah, I remember. There were people. There were a couple of students from senior year. A Chechen. He moved abroad to work a long time ago. There were people who studied very well, and you could say they were enlightened.

I also had a friend named Petr in my grade. He's very cool. We don't talk much right now. We live in different cities. There was a certain point when I didn't talk to anyone at all at university. I was in the middle of a crisis.

I was always drawn to people who were better than me, because at an early age, my father told me, he had boxed in his youth and, at one point, he told me something very important: "When I boxed, I always fought guys who were better than me." It helped a lot in life, on the one hand. On the other hand, it was as if some sort of complex was triggered in the back of my head when my father told me that.

I learned something from them. I remember the way they talked, trying to imitate them, and I liked it. Like, learning new words for myself, a new manner of speech.

There was a girl there who was already a European citizen, Sweden, I think. It's been a long time.

And I knew I could be better than I was. That helped a lot, too. When I realized that I can't learn shit (well, I don't know the theory of strength of materials very well and I'm pretty bad at analytical mechanics), I knew that I was not a complete failure, you know? It helped me, my work outside the university, it helped me understand that I could achieve something else.

By the way, after 2010, when I went to America to visit my sister—I worked there as a cook—the main theme of my life was based on cooking. I was always cooking something. I cooked a lot at college for the guys.

When I was a child, my mother's mom was a great cook. I always hung out with her in the kitchen, and my grandfather was always kicking me out of there.

From the period when you thought "I'm 17 and just an ethereal cloud of thoughts and emotions" until recently, when you realized who are you, tell us about the most difficult thoughts that you had during this period of self-determination?

To be honest, before my 3–4th year in college I definitely still wanted to go to medical school. I even bought books for the Unified State Exam. Well, I was more or less an adult, but I had a serious talk with my father and he talked me out of it, using fully formed arguments.

We talked like two grown men. Although I never felt like an adult.

My father explained why I shouldn't go to medical school now: I would have to study for seven more years. And then, seeing how he's not the chief surgeon of Tatarstan or Russia and I wanted to study at the Sechenov Institute and work in Pirogov Municipal Hospital no. 1, well, that's impossible unless you know someone, you know? You have to be someone's protege.

I knew for sure I didn't want to be an oil engineer: since I take after my father, I feel like I need to be able to bring something to my profession. The kind of people who are talented engineers, people with great minds who can solve difficult problems, it's a calling for them, you know? When Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Caribbean, all the best engineers were sent there to take care of it. I wanted to be one of those people out there, damnit ...

I knew I couldn't work like that, so I had to be honest with myself. I knew very early on that I couldn't fool myself.

You know what else left its mark on me?

My mom's probably going to read that. But it's a huge mistake to raise a child like, "You do everything wrong." This phrase, that I do everything wrong and that I need to do it differently, really ruined my self-esteem. And that continues.

Anyway, I knew I wanted to do something else. So, I began to study better. I understood what I needed to fix, and I grew up a little bit and became smarter. I started bringing up my GPA. Before that, I had almost been expelled from the university for failing. At the end of my 4th year I realized that I couldn't go to graduate school anywhere except at my university. But I did it. And I went to an experimental one. There was a list of majors I could choose from, but it wasn't very long, because I had a low GPA. I personally came to an agreement with the dean.

Hey! You communicated!

Yeah, by that time I could already communicate. And the most important thing that my work at The Society of Petroleum Engineers taught me is networking. It's pretty much the most useful skill I picked up at college. While everyone else pissed themselves at the thought of seeing the dean, I knew he was just a regular guy.

I walked in and he remembered me. He hated students who didn't study well, but he remembered me. Now I know he just didn't care.

I tell him that I don't want to pay to study anymore; I want to go for free. He's like, "What's your GPA?" I'm tell 3.7 or 3.4 [out of 5], low, I know. So, I propose that if get an A on the state exam and an A defending my diploma, they should let me study for free.

And he said, "Okay."

So I went to graduate school. It was strange. I went to this research institute where some old guy who had given up on life was giving a lecture. And there's a lot of cool research equipment and stuff, but no one knew how to use it, because, sonuvabitch, no one knew English and they couldn't read the instructions.

I took an academic vacation and came here to Kazan.

What were you feeling at the time?

"I had no emotions; I just ran away from Moscow, you know, from my own fears, from my own thoughts. I was 22, and I was just nothing, and I'm still nothing!

So I found work as a cook and my journey began, and it continues to this day. Naturally, I was expelled, and I didn't even go back for my diploma right away. I picked it up when I went back for a conference; I walked in to that college like a ghost. It was pretty funny: I felt like I was in a movie, where you watch your past life, you look at these people ... Everything was echoing, there was a low rumble in my ears.

I visited the teachers that I had gotten along with, my very cool scientific advisor, she's a great woman, very cool, Anna Molchanova. A wonderful person. She helped me with my degree, even though she knew I didn't need it. In a word, she was loyal.

She probably could feel that you were looking for something else.

Yeah. But on the other hand, she never denied that maybe I'd stay in the profession. I checked in with all those people, talked to them, and I felt better. I let it go completely. I totally let go of my history with the institute.

You went back for your diploma after you already felt a solid identity of your own, probably.

Yep, and what's interesting is that my diploma had already been archived, because, really, nobody needs it.

After that was Apartment 63.

Why don't I regret graduating? Now I know: I studied at a very serious university and was taught by very cool, serious teachers.

From the head of my department I learned honesty and a fundamental approach to everything.

I mean, he's a great scientist, a great oilman, who came up with borehole oil production in Russia. He's one of those teachers who, you know, who sweated during the lecture because he jumped around, skipped while he explained; he was waiting for his students to understand the subject. He had a creative approach that is fundamental to it, you know? And so you don't just read the material, learn it, and pass the exam. And I passed his exam with a decent grade. Even though I didn't solve the problem, sonuvabitch, I understood it! I think I got a B, which was pretty good. That was the beginning of my current approach to everything.

And when I started working in the kitchen, I immediately realized, although I can't say that I'm better than anyone else, but due to this fundamental approach I realized that I needed to learn the basics and go from there. I mean, I don't need to internalize it, because I wasn't a stupid person and I went to a great university.

It's like, you know, I have one example that's pretty specific: a great guy, a baker from San Francisco who used to work at Silicon Valley.

You mean, he looks at processes completely differently, not like someone from the industry?

Yeah, and it was the same thing with me. Not that I'm a Silicon Valley genius, but I just have a different approach than my colleagues. I still do. I've always approached cooking with a fundamental viewpoint; I questioned everything, and that was very different from my colleagues, who were like horses who have those things ...

Blinders.

Yeah, yeah; I didn't have blinders.

So, I worked as a cook, making a little money here in Kazan. I would come home and read until late at night or early in the morning, watch something. And since I had studied English well at school, I was able to take in a lot of information from Western sources. Then there wasn't much information in Russian at all at the time. There's more now, buy then there wasn't.

To put it bluntly, nobody I worked with knew the right recipe for making any of the sauces that make up classical, basic French cooking. There are four to five basic sauces. And I watched how they are prepared, how the chefs make them.

In short, there was this entire world in which I wanted to be initiated. I couldn't get enough; I took in as much as I could. I needed knowledge. I knew that I didn't know anything. From the very beginning I was playing catch-up, you know? I was 22, and I didn't really know a damn thing about cooking, so to catch up I read a lot, watched TV, but not with the goal of being a cook. You get a kind of physical satisfaction from taking it all in, but you already know that. I added a lot to the training, alongside the training itself.

And it's the same today. I'm still subscribed to all kinds of channels, podcasts, and more. And they're all in English of course. It all began to form this seed of professionalism in me, this honesty with myself that I've always had. I always tried to do everything honestly for myself and for everyone with whom I work, for those who eat the food that I cook.

It's interesting that your parents sent you to a school with in-depth study of English and to a university that taught your fundamental approaches, and how that all comes in handy after all these years.

Few people understand that. Very few people understand it. My mom doesn't understand why I watch those videos late at night or read. She's like "What, can't you just sleep?"

And I didn't study recipes, there's no need for that. I'm constantly inspired. I buy books, like, the biography of a chef, for example, and that's an incredible journey into someone's life. And you understand that, damnit; I can do that too, or I want to do that. There are things that I want to adopt.

I decided that there are some theses that I would like to follow, rules that I would like to follow.

Can you tell us?

Sure.

Can the latter be hard?

Well, yea, like, crush your ego. But I never really had an ego, you know? That's the catch. My ego was crushed as a child. And now that's my strength, because I don't need an ego now.

The advantage of a disadvantage.

On the one hand, yes. It is difficult. If I lived in Scandinavia or somewhere else in Europe maybe it would help me. In Russia, it probably holds me back ... Whatever. It's not important.

Always prioritize the quality of the ingredients you're working with. And choose the technique that least negatively affects your ingredients. And support local producers, local farmers, and local artisans. They don't have to be from Tatarstan, but at least Russian.

Is it all about the food? Or design as well?

Design as well. If you turn this plate over, it says Made in Suzdal. I'm much more interested in buying dishes from small manufacturers, paying them a little more, supporting them.

Also, work without cheating; nothing precooked, no bouillon cubes.

That probably makes it much more expensive, right?

On the contrary! For example, beef bones cost 25 rubles a kilogram for broth. Pennies. Broths are cooked from waste, waste in the good sense.

Many Russian chefs do it. But even more chefs don't do, you know?

It's very important to try to mentor, but that has only been possible for me now, after my second return to Kazan.

How did you put your first team together, and what did it feel like?

My first experience as a chef was at Sviter, and I didn't really select the team. They came themselves.

I put my first team together at Apartment 63. It came together, relatively speaking, by chance. But it was totally trial and error; then I began to understand what the members were capable of and what they weren't capable of.

The way I put together a team now and how I did it at Apartment 63 are completely different. People came to Apartment 63 through work ads, and now I have the privilege of picking out people myself. That's fortunate.

People come in and you literally just ask them a couple of questions. If they have a spark in their eyes, you should take them. And if they tell you they've had six or seven jobs over a year and a half and you can see they basically don't give a shit, they just need a decent schedule and pay, you know you they won't work out. But there are times when you'll have to take on those kinds of people, because the next day you just need someone in your kitchen, but you know they won't last long.

How did you put together the team for Artel?

First, I brought with me the sous-chef I worked with in Moscow. She [turns around] is incredibly talented, and there she is, by the way, standing right there. She's just brilliant all around. And you can pick out people who will definitely go farther than anyone else, because you were the same. You can see yourself in them. She's from Rostov, from the very elite Leo Wine & Kitchen restaurant, which is considered one of the best restaurants in Russia now. I poached her from there for Yuzhane, and we worked together in Moscow.

How did you decide to return to Kazan after working at Yuzhane in Moscow?

I didn't leave Moscow because it was bad. On the contrary, it was the highlight of my career. I announced that I was leaving Yuzhane and

We had met with Ruslan from Apartment 63 and made a deal.

Was it hard to turn it down?

Absolutely not.

Quite the opposite, it was great, like running up and jumping off a cliff into good, warm, deep water.

I realized that all the stars that I had worked with at Apartment 63 were now off doing their own thing independently, and that's great. I couldn't put them on my team, but I didn't need to anymore.

I had already decided that I want to reassemble a team and share my knowledge, approach, and philosophy with people who need it. Then we announced that we were recruiting.

One cook just came up to me in Moscow, a guy from Kazan, at a forum called Chef's Breakfast. He came up to me and said "Hey there, I want to work with you. My name is Marat." And I put him on the team. Before that he had worked with a very good chef, who became the best chef of Tatarstan according to WHERETOEAT. I know him, we keep in touch, he's a great guy. I worked with him, and now he's in St. Petersburg. He went further, his own way. He wanted something more.

How are you at letting employees go?

Very good; it's very easy to let them go. I don't fire them; they leave on their own. And I have developed the ability to see that a person has already grown and is ready to move on.

It's bound to happen. You don't lord over them, of course, but, one way or another, you influence their fate. The ability to influence someone's destiny is very energizing. You get positive energy from it.

If a person wants to leave, then there's no sense in getting them to stay, because they either become a living corpse that walks around and infects everyone or they lose all motivation to work. Cooks stand on their feet fifteen hours a day and there's not a lot of money until you become a head cook or sous-chef. Without motivation, without desire, you'll just burn out like a match. It's a lot of work and it takes a lot of energy.

Accordingly, you have to let off steam somewhere. Not with alcohol or drugs, as can be the case with some people. Take, for example, two or three writers, like Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, and Haruki Murakami, they all have very different approaches.

I think that constantly drinking and hitting rock bottom isn't very good for a writer, because writing takes a lot of effort, so you need to be healthy to share yoru energy with others. This can be done with a story or through your work, through food. You need to be constantly recharged, with good energy. And this energy is always there, in the kitchen, and you get it from the people you work with, and you understand that it's not in vain. And it's always encouraging.

I don't need to fly somewhere or travel for inspiration. I always have enough to keep from burning out, because I draw inspiration from everywhere, you know? I mean, I can burn out four times a week, by the evening be completely burned out, but I come home and I just read a story or listen to something; I'm very inspired by music, for example, as well. Or I talk to someone. I get inspiration from my family, from my son.

You were quoted in one interview as wanting to put Kazan on the gastronomic map of the country. What does that map look like for you?

When I was in Moscow, I met very cool people, including journalists.

Restaurant critics?

Well, there's no real restaurant criticism as such; it's more like PR people and journalists that hang out in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities. I mean, until recently only Moscow and St. Petersburg had any restaurants of interest. In the past few years, Yekaterinburg has put itself on the map, Nizhny Novgorod ...

Sochi?

Sochi, sure. And there are cool cities and restaurants in Siberia, as well as in Sakhalin. But there weren't any in Kazan, you know. In Kazan there was just an antiquated, old-fashioned restaurant elite, a few players on the market who were just there to do business with high margins and suck money out of people, to put it mildly.

At some point, a revolution took place in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and it happened while I was still at university. Cafe Ragu appeared. The Burger Brothers appeared ... There were several waves in Moscow.

Recently, journalists began traveling around the cities, they started writing, and they were writing about the characters [of the cities], you know? I realized that Tatarstan has its own character, in the broadest possible way.

First, Tatarstan is a huge agricultural region, maybe the third after the Kuban and Stavropol Krai.

Tatarstan has a food culture.

Because many of them had grandmothers and mothers who cooked using high-quality produce.

I knew for myself that I'm no worse than any of the great chefs in Moscow and St. Petersburg. That old cliché "work until your idols become your rivals"? I did that too.

And I realized that I no longer wanted to work in Moscow, because you have to make a lot of compromises.

I read about chefs who buy lamb from Normandy, and if they can't get that lamb, they don't cook the dish; they'll cook something else from the menu, but they won't cheat their customers. They won't give them a different lamb.

There was this one case. I found suppliers from Kalmykia, incredible lamb. Kalmykia is a steppe republic, with very strong winds; it's very cold, and the lamb lives in these harsh conditions. This severity and the living conditions make the meat incredible, delicious. The first time I tried it I was in shock. I had only read about such ingredients in stories about French, American, and English cooks. And, at one point, I ran out of this lamb in a restaurant. I realized that the next delivery will be only in four days. But something came up, and I had to cook it.

And I felt so ashamed ... For many chefs, it's just a little thing; like, people shouldn't care what they eat, what meat they get, what cheese they get.

I even got drunk with shame that evening. I realized that I can't do that; I felt terrible, just really heavy-hearted. And it's not bad that they work like that; Yuzhane is really a good restaurant. It's just how all restaurants work, not only in Russia, but around the world. It's the norm, it turns out. It was just another straw on the camel's back for me.

I realized that I wanted the correct approach to be part of my philosophy. Again, for many chefs, that's like finding utopia.

We buy great cheeses from great farmers, and if I don't have a particular cheese, then I won't serve another cheese in its place, you know?

Now it's hip to focus on [Russian] regions, because they're so original, right?

Tatarstan has its own distinct character, and we should show it off. So Artel has already put itself on the map of Russia now, you know? They know about us. Foreigners and visitors come here, and they like it. We have been mentioned several times by very influential and chic journalists, and we absolutely deserved it.

I'm not just bragging; I just shared my approach with my team. I'm not afraid of the words dream team, you know? People who have worked for thirty years in the best restaurants in the world, or, Kazan, Moscow. There was a kind of synergy here, and this is the philosophy that we repeated over and over again from the very beginning ... These are people are ... they're like my tools, my megaphone.

Tell me about your tattoos?

I had an existential crisis. The whole thing with Kama was so tragic. When Kama opened, I found out that my father had cancer. And when Kama was closed, my dad was gone. And it's like ... I just erased that part of my life from my memory, you know? For me, that period of time didn't even happen. It's very hard for me. I don't even want to think about it.

Let's not.

It's just that, I was in the middle of a crisis and I decided: I need to get tattoos. I like them. There's no special message there, you know? I'm a very open-minded person. I don't judge anyone for anything. I mean, as long as you're not violating the rights of someone else. I don't judge anyone for their sexual orientation, or whether they're completely covered with tattoos, or whatever. It doesn't matter to me at all.

My favorite joke about that is, a Jew, a Chinese guy, a Russian, and a Frenchman all walk into to a bar and nothing happens, because none of them acts like an asshole.

Great! So, you've returned to Kazan several times. You've probably been able to gauge the public here each time. How does your clientele compare now? Has it become more sophisticated?

Of course; I can even use my uncle as an example. He's an ex-oilman, and he visited Paris for the first time a very long time ago, when I was still a child. And he found a great restaurant in Paris, so for someone raised in the Soviet Union, a geologist ...

And now he orders tartare for himself, you know? He began to understand food.

The clientele is getting more and more sophisticated in Kazan. They understand that you can eat something besides the homemade cutlets your mom made; you can discover some great dishes for yourself.

And now a lot of people are coming in who had never been before, but they lived in Kazan this whole time. They just assumed that there's nowhere to eat in Kazan; I mean, they have money, they travel, but they just cook at home using high-quality ingredients.

They're like, sophisticates?

Well, they're foodies. They appreciate quality; they know what good food is. Now they eat at Artel, Setka, Branch, and at a few fast-food places. But it's still not a lot. Kazan is still at an embryonic level.

Have you had any clientele in Kazan who left unhappy?

I mean, there are people who like to eat meatballs with mashed potatoes, and that's their favorite food. When you bring them out something else, they don't understand it. But more often than not, as they say, at the end of the day, it's just food, so people who understand that, they appreciate it, even if they all they wanted was meatballs with mashed potatoes before that. Like, "oh, that's interesting, I've never had that. I tried it for the first time today." Or often people say that they want to come back again and again for high-quality food. But again, there are people who don't like the food at Artel. That's okay; there's nothing wrong with that. Some people don't like Quentin Tarantino's films. Not that I'm comparing myself with Tarantino; I just mean that people have different tastes.

Then let's compare Moscow and Kazan. Not only from the point of view of your job, but in general: what do you like and what annoys you?

I really like Moscow's spaciousness, well, its scope. I like the wide streets, avenues, you feel the strength there. I like Moscow in the same way that many people like Paris. It's very convenient to live there, because Moscow is made up of different districts, and each of them has a very developed infrastructure, you don't need to go to a store on the other side of the city.

Moscow has become very accessible. I still compare the Moscow of 2008 with that of today. In 2008, Moscow felt just like Kazan, but richer, just with Red Square and VDNH, nothing more. And then they redid Gorky Park, it was such a pleasant surprise. Moscow has become such a great European city.

When I moved there to work at Yuzhane, there was a moment when I decided that I wanted my son to grow up there. That changed after a while. And Kazan, for me ... you know, when my father died and Kama closed, I just ran away from here, ran away from all this. I was invited to work in Moscow and I agreed immediately.

It has very interesting options in terms of food, produce, and architecture. There are beautiful houses and streets.

Of course, there are a lot of the negatives that Petr Safiullin brought up in his interview. But despite all that, Kazan is still a beautiful city. It's definitely not a county town; it has always been a province. But it's not a race either: Seattle doesn't want to become New York, right?

I see this city in terms of nostalgia. Like, there's a kind of a sociogeographical romance to it. There's Gorki, Azino, the Moskovsky neighborhood, and I love it all, you know? I'm like a fish in water here. I know where you can go for the weekend, and there are still a lot of things that I have not explored. I can go fishing, and I have friends here.

Kazan for me is my environment; it's where I feel good. And I can do what I do here: raise my child the way I want to, live with my family in the way that I want to, do business the way I want to ... As long as I can bring people positive emotions, I'll be here.