Island, Kremlin, embankment and museum: the fourth Fine Chef’s in Kazan

Four evenings, four completely different places — and not one of them within the walls of an ordinary restaurant. The Fine Chef’s festival, which has spent several years introducing Kazan audiences to strong names in Russian gastronomy, goes fully outdoors in 2026 and unfolds in spaces where simply being there is already an event.

The last dinner will also be a first: the festival’s finale coincides with the opening of a new Fine Group project.

The program kicks off on July 31 — Chirem, the Tatar restaurant that has long led Kazan’s gastronomy scene, will step outside the Kazan Kremlin for the first time and set up on the island of the Old Kazan Waterworks. Chef Lenar Khurmatullin will present a menu with a distinct national character, in the format of a summer picnic on the water. A few days later, on August 5, the same team returns to the Kremlin, this time to a different part of it — the courtyard of the Presence Building. Lenar Khurmatullin is joined by Artem Atopshev, who runs the kitchen at Citadel, a Nizhny Novgorod project based in the historic Storage Tower of the local kremlin. Two chefs from two kremlin cities — that’s the logic of this evening.

On August 13 the festival moves to the Kremlin Embankment. Here Yegor Bulaev, chef of Kazan’s Avylym, meets Akbarkhon Kodirov, who runs the kitchen at Khabarovsk’s Amur. Their joint dinner is, quite literally, a conversation between two riverbanks — the Volga and the Amur, two kitchen traditions from opposite ends of the country. The final stop on the route — August 21 — is the most unexpected. The dinner will take place at the National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan and will simultaneously be the first event inside Le Petite La La, an intimate Russian-French bistro that Fine Group will open there at the end of summer. The project’s chef, Sultan Yunusov, will host the evening together with Renat Tsaritsansky, whom Muscovites know from Grace Bistro, Pomme Verte and the Mediterranean Evinos.

Over just three weeks — from July 31 to August 21 — the Fine Chef’s festival will move through an island, two Kremlin courtyards, an embankment and a historic museum. Six chefs, four dinners, not one repeated space. For Kazan, this isn’t just a gastronomic program — it’s a way to see the city itself anew.