Syrovarnya
Restaurant
Kovensky Lane, 5
A joint project by Novikov Group and Pinskiy&Co in St. Petersburg — a restaurant with Italian cuisine and a working cheese dairy inside. Chef Alexander Karyukin — a WorldSkills champion and a contestant on "Battle of the Chefs" — builds the menu around farm ingredients and house-made cheeses.
"Syrovarnya" on Kovensky Lane, 5, is a joint project by Novikov Group and Pinskiy&Co in St. Petersburg. The concept is built around a working cheese dairy right inside the restaurant: young cheeses appear daily, while aged ones mature further on the ripening shelves. Burrata and halloumi are just two examples from an ever-changing lineup that feeds directly into the menu.
Our restaurant guide's team finds the in-house cheese dairy here isn't decoration but a genuinely functioning production line, one whose flavor comes through in every dish.
The kitchen is led by chef Alexander Karyukin — a man with a dense professional history: the restaurants L'olivo, Roma and Brunello, the Champagne bar Abrau-Durso, and culinary projects for the FIFA World Cup and Formula 1. He's known to a broad audience from the TV shows "Young Knives" and "Battle of the Chefs," and within the professional community as a winner of the international WorldSkills competition. At "Syrovarnya," Karyukin follows the logic of an Italian trattoria: clear dishes, quality ingredients, no excess.
The menu rests on a few pillars. Pizza is baked in a wood-fired oven, with a crispy rim and real heat. Pasta is exclusively handmade. Farm-raised chickens are slow-cooked in the same oven. Desserts are made in the restaurant's own pastry workshop and displayed in a case — you choose with your eyes. Cheeses from the dairy are worked into dishes across the whole menu, not set aside on a separate page just for show.
The interior was designed by bureau Sundukovy Sisters, in the aesthetic of a warm country house: an open kitchen, light tones, natural wood. The summer terrace opens onto the quiet Kovensky Lane, amid planted verbena, petunia, mint and hydrangea. It's one of the few restaurant courtyards in the city center where the greenery isn't for show but genuinely alive and varied.
"Syrovarnya" on Kovensky serves breakfast — a rarity for a restaurant of this caliber in this part of St. Petersburg. Italian cuisine with a rustic accent here means not simplification but a certain honesty: the ingredient is visible, its origin is clear, and the process is literally in plain sight.
