Closer

The space is conceived as a restaurant where the room, the kitchen, the wine, the light and the furnishings all speak the same language. Alexey Penyuk and Anastasia Artemyeva of APAA Studio are behind the architecture: they built a calm, almost gallery-like interior with no showy luxury. The dining room has plenty of breathing room, the Tauride Garden is visible through the large windows, and a separate room for private dinners is sized for a small group and runs as its own scenario within the project.

Our restaurant guide's team finds open fire the semantic center of both the kitchen and the whole space here.

Maria Dementieva — brand chef and co-founder of Closer and Saro — builds the menu not around a specific country but around heat, smoke and different ways of cooking over fire. The kitchen uses two ovens: an Italian wood-fired one and a Spanish charcoal one. So the central idea reads without explanation: ingredients pass through fire, gain a deeper flavor, and become part of the restaurant's overall image rather than just separate menu items.

The wine list here isn't conceived as an accompaniment to dinner but as a library. Head sommelier Angelina Gaivoronskaya (Saro) builds a selection where rare bottles, proper storage and the mood of a specific evening all matter. The bar side is organized differently but with the same care: Elena Latypova, head bartender at Giallo, blends Japanese and European motifs — from the citrus freshness of yuzu to denser, more perfumed notes in sake-based drinks.

The private room is built for intimate events and looks more like a collector's closed sitting room than a standard banquet hall. Inside: a Carlo Scarpa table, Mario Bellini armchairs, a Cini Boeri leather sofa, a sound system built on Technics and Dali, and vintage lighting by Joe Colombo and Bruno Gatta. These details aren't listed for status — they set the scale at which dinner turns into a private evening with its own rhythm.

The project has thought through even the elements that usually stay in the background at restaurants. Natalia Moskvina's studio Not For Sale made the team's clothing from dense nettle fabric, plus relaxed-cut cotton trousers; it doesn't clash with the interior and doesn't read as a uniform in the usual sense. The visual identity was developed by Alexandra Akhramenko and Evgeny Elgin of The sense: the graphics nod to 1970s punk but stay composed and precise.

Our secret guests gave the dinner 8 out of 10 — for the coherence of the idea and the attention to how the evening unfolds, from the first look at the room to the last glass at the table. Closer matters not for a single striking detail, but because the concept runs through the whole space: the oven, the tableware, the wine, the music, the light, the private room, and the team's work.