Touch Chef's Place & Bar

A chef's restaurant showcasing innovative Russian cuisine and a bar with a unique, handcrafted cocktail menu.

Located on Sadovnicheskaya embankment in the premium Balchug ViewPoint apartment complex, this restaurant breaks conventions and challenges expectations. Chef Nikita Kuzmenko creates a new Russian cuisine based on experimentation, while keeping it accessible. Ingredients sourced from fields, forests, gardens, and farms, including fruits, flowers, mushrooms, and leaves – everything that grows and flourishes in Russia – are carefully selected and stored in Touch's pantry. Grown by local farmers or hand-picked by the restaurant's chefs, these ingredients embody the concept of connection and direct sourcing. The restaurant's focus on fermentation techniques, from lacto-fermentation to koji, transforms ingredients, enhancing their umami flavors and contributing to the evolution of culinary traditions. A unique example is "bee salt," made from bee pollen inoculated with koji and baked with sea salt, resulting in a truly honeyed umami flavor. A variety of homemade kombuchas, vinegars, and garums (made from squid, bees, roasted chicken wings, and kombucha) are integral to the Touch experience. However, the core of each dish is built around just three ingredients, ensuring purity and harmony of flavor.

This revolutionary approach to cuisine allows the Touch team to create stunning and memorable flavor combinations. Dishes like beetroot glass with roasted pearl koji mousse, Borodinsky bread with raspberries, smoked Baltic herring forcemeat, sea urchin with a white mushroom "bottarga," raspberry "blood," and pearlotto veiled in a Commander squid flower, offer a journey of new experiences and vibrant emotions.

From 9:00 AM, Touch offers a breakfast menu featuring chicken broth with fregola pasta and a poached egg, an omelet with spicy crab and cashew cream, and risotto made with green buckwheat and a salsa of yellow tomatoes and roasted bell peppers. Nikita Kuzmenko doesn't shy away from innovation, even at breakfast, when most people tend to stick to the classics. His scrambled eggs feature chorizo and Parmesan mousse, his Benedict is served on an English muffin, and his cottage cheese pudding is accompanied by maple syrup, lavender cream, and honeysuckle ice cream.

From 12:00 PM, a lunch menu focuses on seasonal ingredients. Options include a unique salad with turkey pastrami, pear, and a honey-yogurt dressing, or a salad with sautéed oyster mushrooms, avocado, and honey quinoa. There's also a fish soup with three types of fish and caviar, and beef Stroganoff made with veal heart and smoked potato cream. This is just a glimpse of what Touch has to offer. In addition to the lunch menu, the restaurant's delivery service, or through Yandex Eats, offers a selection of signature dishes delivered directly to your home, including a lightly salted fish mousse with a vibrant cucumber glaze, a char tartare with sorrel and pine needle caviar, and venison fillet with black garlic and forest mushrooms.

To make your dinner feel just as special as dining at the restaurant, you can create your own cocktails. The head bartender at Touch Chef's Place & Bar, Vasily Zhelyov, has created a unique collection of pre-mixed ingredients that allow anyone to easily prepare a refreshing long drink or a warming strong cocktail at home. Options include the fruity and floral "Apple and Elderflower," the fresh berry "Sweet Pepper and Berries," the tart "Blackthorn and Lavender," and the refreshing "Citrus." Simply add wine or sparkling wine, vodka, white rum, or gin, or even just tonic water, and you'll have a restaurant-quality cocktail in your glass.