Christian

The first thing that catches the eye at the entrance is two-meter floor lamps shaped like people, their heads topped with tricorn-hat lampshades. The tables have silhouettes of plates drawn on them with cutlery on either side, and dishes are served on roughly finished handmade ceramics from Portugal. The glasses resemble goblets, their rims seemingly perched with playful little flies. All of this sits alongside the monumental facade of the Hotel Ukraina visible through the window — the contrast turns out almost theatrical: Soviet scale outside, the warm irony of an Italian home inside.

In the view of our restaurant guide's team, this is a decent place with an established history — it was once loved more strongly, but time has rearranged its priorities.

Behind the counter and the open stove works Christian Lorenzini — a chef who started as a teenager in his father's Tuscan restaurant and dreamed of one day building his own space on his own terms. At his Christian, he builds the menu on family recipes spanning several generations of the Lorenzini family, but serves them with humor and lightness rather than museum-like seriousness. The list of dishes changes every week and is written in chalk on a board — guests can ask to add or remove something, and on the paper menu they're allowed to cross out and write in their own options by hand.

The bar counter sits next to the cooks' work area, so the cooking process is visible from anywhere in the room. The atmosphere here is pointedly informal, "for regulars": no stiffness, but plenty of live interaction between guests and the kitchen team. The restaurant is located on the ground floor of a residential building near Kutuzovsky Prospekt, next to a wing of the Hotel Ukraina, and thanks to this neighborhood it feels like a small Italian story within a larger Moscow route.