Anna Tataeva

We ended up in Africa by chance — we wanted to celebrate New Year’s in Australia, but the visa process took too long, and we bought tickets to Cape Town. There, also by chance, we discovered Liam Tomlin. Only later we learned that he is a very well-known chef. He used to run one of Australia’s best restaurants, he writes books, and for many years he was a judge for The 50 Best Restaurants. But back then, we knew nothing of this — it’s just that one of his restaurants was across the road from our hotel. We discovered the second one while traveling around the country. And we went to the third one deliberately — that’s how impressed we were by his food. It was a real adventure to bring Liam to Moscow — it was the start of the COVID pandemic, the borders were closing right before our eyes. Then, together with our chef Ilya, we went to South Africa, to prepare the menu for Cape. We agreed that Liam would give us two cooks and a manager for the opening, we worked on the menu together. And then came February 2022. Nobody wanted to come to Moscow anymore. Together with Nikita, we had to decide what to do and how to launch. The cuisine at Cape, the way it came together in the end, is an explosion of tastes and sensations in your mouth. That was what caught our attention when we first tried Liam’s cooking. His sauces may have 15-20 ingredients and he spends 12 hours prepping. Our chef Ilya studied in Cape Town how they do this. The result are the dishes that seem like one thing, then you start eating them — and the taste is something completely different, and then some other third taste catches up with you. It’s the kind of food you’ve never tried before. Moscow restaurant food is a bit bland in terms of taste. And we brought this intensity. The guests who come to us want to experience something interesting, to make some discovery. And they don’t come just for the food, but also for cocktails that are unlike anything else in Moscow. Everyone knows that we have the best cocktail menu at Patriarshy Ponds. It was created by Vitaly Tsay who came to us from Ilya Tyutenkov and his Leveldva. It took us a long time to find such head bartender, we would do five tastings a day until we finally met Vitaly. He is a perfectionist and that makes his life somewhat difficult. But because of that, he can do things that nobody else can. His cocktails have this wow effect: for example, you have a burning box, and a rose appears out of it. In one night, you can try five cocktails and they will all be very different, each with its remarkable taste and this wow effect. Of all our projects, Cape is the most creative, and we invest a lot of ourselves in the details. Whenever we travel, we bring back the plates, dishware, forks, spoons. We bring stuff from all over the world: the knives were brought from Cape Town, the napkins we bought in Mauritius. We always designate a day or two in all our vacations for this shopping, and even if Nikita may skip out in the end, I’ll be digging around to the last.