Nikolai KatsembaCommunity profile

A year ago, I moved to Moscow. I started with Pan-Asian cuisine, then moved on to European, French, Italian, and molecular gastronomy. I've worked with French chefs, Italian chefs, top chefs, and top restaurants. My interest in cooking began in St. Petersburg, when I worked at Jerome. That's when I started to understand what quality really means.

After the Bouergios Bohemians restaurant, I started to discover new things and became interested in chefs and their restaurants. This further fueled my passion for cooking. In St. Petersburg, I also worked at Probka, a restaurant owned by Aram Mnatsakanov. But my last project was Mr. Pinky. Working with Chef Igor Alikov, I gained a tremendous amount of experience in fermentation techniques, and we experimented with ingredients and presentation. We created some truly amazing dishes.

I've only been in Moscow for a year, and I've been searching for a good and suitable place to work, but I haven't found it yet. I've always loved learning and discovering new things, but I haven't quite found the fulfillment I was looking for. I've worked in startups, Michelin-starred restaurants, and more traditional establishments. I'm no longer interested in positions below sous chef. That's when I came across the interesting project, Ginstitute. Here, I can both showcase my skills and enjoy the process. I can show people both classic dishes and create something truly unique. For example, we might offer scallop liver, a dessert made with lychee, Riesling, and foie gras, or candies with pickled lemon. The menu will feature elements of fermentation, product charring, and similar techniques.

The menu's direction is intended to be unusual, which is what many people enjoy. Today's generation needs to be surprised with something new. Simply offering pasta, sushi, or pies won't cut it anymore. Yes, those dishes can be delicious, and I can find ingredients for them at my grandmother's or mother's, or simply eat them at any establishment. But people crave something they've never tried before, a new combination of flavors. That's what will be created in the kitchen at Ginstitute.

I come from a small town with a population of only 40,000 people. There, the options were simple: either you drank, or you ended up in jail. But this is not about that, it's about me and my passion for cooking.

From a young age, I loved to cook. It might sound cliché. In elementary school, when my mother went to work the night shift and my older brother was at summer camp, I would take her "labor" textbook. It contained classic recipes: pancakes, cheese pancakes, crepes, pies with various fillings, and so on. My mother had connections, and our refrigerator was full of dairy products: milk, sour cream, cottage cheese, and so on. When she was at work, a young chef would awaken in me, and I would cook almost everything that was in the textbook. I would eat half of it, and leave the other half for my mother. She would come home from work, and there would be a pile of cheese pancakes, a huge pie with jam, or a mountain of crepes.

My mother raised my brother and me alone, and since he started school until the 11th grade, I decided to ease the financial burden on my mother and finished school after the 9th grade. I went to a regular high school for three years. At first, school was interesting, but then I started to lose interest, I got involved with a bad crowd, as often happens – parties and all that. In the third year, I almost stopped attending classes, I had only one notebook for all subjects. I even have a story about how I got three failing grades in cooking in 10 minutes. The most interesting thing is that my classmate wrote my diploma for me, I didn't even study, but I passed it with a 5. But alas, I didn't get a 5, because my grades were slightly lower in the quarter, and to avoid standing out, I was given a 4. The funniest thing is that I just kept talking non-stop about what came to my mind during the exam, and they realized that I understood and was interested. I didn't realize then how fascinating it was.

After returning from the army, I didn't know where I would go or what I would do. I was an 19-year-old guy, and all I had in my head were parties. One of my old acquaintances, whom I am grateful to, suggested that I go from my small town to Ivanovo – the largest city in the region. I got excited, the offer was to work with Pan-Asian cuisine, to cook sushi, wok, etc. Of course, I wanted to, because there was an internship through Moscow, and I thought we would be partying in Moscow. But it turned out to be not so smooth. I moved to Ivanovo from my hometown, started working, everything was interesting and fun, but my main goal was to earn money. At 19, I started working in the kitchen, at 20 I became a senior cook, at 21 – a sous chef, at 24 – my first experience as a head chef. Life has taken me on a journey, and the coronavirus hit me hard. I lived and worked in Ivanovo, Sochi, Crimea, Nizhny Novgorod, and St. Petersburg.