Gorynych

At Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, 1, is Gorynych — a project by Boris Zarkov and Vladimir Mukhin, where everything is organized around live heat: ovens, josper grills, smokers and a wood-fired bakery, all on one open kitchen. At the center of the room is a large pizza oven that's never allowed to cool — it stays heated to 300°C around the clock. That's what gave the restaurant its name (Gorynych, after the fire-breathing dragon of Russian folklore). Chef Alexey Bekasov builds the menu around that heat: Neapolitan pizza, dry-aged steaks, grilled dishes — everything passes through fire in one form or another.

Our guide's team finds the borscht and the bread here to be the best in the city, and that's not an empty compliment.

Opposite the open kitchen is a bakery with a wood-fired oven and stone millstones for grinding grain. Six kinds of sourdough bread are baked here every day, from a starter that's already 17 years old — Vladimir Mukhin once brought it from the Spaso-Prilutsky Monastery in Vologda. The loaves are sold to take away, and people really do come by just for them, not for dinner. The borscht on the menu stands as one of the main reasons to come back — thick, full-flavored, with no concessions to trends.

The interior was done by Natalia Belonogova, a Moscow designer who works mostly with concrete and rough textures. At Gorynych that's felt literally: concrete surfaces sit alongside hand-finished dark wood, the windows are framed with carved trim, and the walls are decorated with murals inspired by Bilibin. On the back wall of the open kitchen is a large photo panorama. The room is spacious but not cold: the light is warm, the materials are heavy, and the textures read even from a distance. Large panoramic windows look out onto the boulevards — the view of Rozhdestvensky becomes part of the evening, especially as it grows dark outside.

The menu is built around techniques rather than a single cuisine: Neapolitan pizza from the blazing oven, dry-aged steaks off the josper, smokehouse dishes — each item tied to a specific heat source. During dinner the open kitchen works as a spectacle in its own right: you can watch the heat move, the bread come out, the meat finish on the grate. It's not decoration — it's a working process that guests watch in real time.

Our undercover guests rated it 8 out of 10 for dinner — for the density of flavors, confident work with fire, and bread worth coming back for on its own. Gorynych stopped being a place you need to discover long ago — it's become part of the Moscow restaurant landscape, a place people still return to for specific dishes.