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Bushe
In November 2018 Oleg Lega said Bushe would open no more outlets in St Petersburg beyond the 40 it had: the size at which, he said, a chain stops being alive and becomes industrial. Most of the market planned to keep growing. Bushe kept its raspberry vensel, its shared tables and its single owner, through the loss years and back into profit.
From Razyezzhaya Street to Otradnoye
Forty Bushe outlets in its city, then a second production site
On 7 November 2018 Oleg Lega (Олег Лега) told RBC Petersburg that Bushe (Буше) would expand no further in St Petersburg: “There is a number at which a chain stops being alive and becomes industrial. We have reached that edge.” Most market participants, RBC reported, would keep growing; only Bushe declined. It then had 40 outlets there; by June 2019 it had 36.
That very raspberry vensel
What could a chain lose by turning industrial? At Bushe there were three things to lose: a pastry, a table and a word.
The pastry is a raspberry vensel. In 2015 the trade title FoodService reported it as the best-seller among Bushe’s puff pastries. When a new Bushe opened in the district of the Petersburg food writer Maria Kuznetsova, the metro carried the company’s advertisement: “That very raspberry vensel”. Writing in T—Zh in November 2025, she captioned a picture of it: “My favourite raspberry vensel. To me it seems as much a part of Petersburg as the rivers and canals, or Nevsky Prospekt.” That is one writer’s view, in a piece that lists nine chains and ranks none.
The table was Lega’s bet on the city. “I saw a communal table in Montepulciano when I was travelling in Italy,” he told FoodService in 2015. “The café had three long tables, and by the end of dinner complete strangers were talking and embracing. We smile at one another too little, and value the personal in ourselves too little. And we began putting communal tables in our cafés.” He went on: “when foreigners come in, they sit straight down at the shared table. Russians are still wary, but we believe our compatriots will get used to it and come to take extra pleasure in the company.”
On its site the company lists short films and city events, united, it says, by the idea that they should develop the city. The word is on the same site: “To be alive in every moment”, which the company calls its paradigm.
One shop on Razyezzhaya Street
All of it began as a single shop. The 1998 crisis drove Lega’s Swiss partners out of Russia before any outlet existed, and he went on without them. The first Bushe opened on 10 February 1999 at 13 Razyezzhaya Street as a bakery-patisserie. The present company dates from 2003; registry cards show Lega holding all of it since 27 January that year.
Fifteen years in, the format changed. In 2014 Bushe added a full fast-casual menu and specialty-grade, freshly roasted coffee; in 2015 it added kitchens and recast the format as slow food bakery and coffee.
Then the appetite showed. In May 2017 RBC Petersburg reported plans to take the chain, then 32 outlets in St Petersburg, into Europe. That October it opened its first Moscow café, on Lubyanka. A month later it began making its own soft cheese, in a workshop with a stated capacity of 3.7 tonnes a year. In April 2018 a coffee and wine bar, Kofe Lab (Кофе Lab), opened above a Bushe café, on an announced investment of €300,000. By the autumn of 2018 it had added a city, a product and a bar, with 40 outlets at home. It was then that its founder said the brand had gone far enough.
The edge
The rest of the market was going the other way. RBC Petersburg’s ranking of the city’s bakeries expected most of them to keep growing the next year, and Lega could have grown with them. He declined, as sole owner. That day the brand had 41 outlets, 40 in St Petersburg and one in Moscow.
The stop reached only Bushe, and only in St Petersburg. The same article said one more Bushe and five bakeries of his second format, Teplogo khleba i pod odeyalo (Теплого хлеба и под одеяло), would open in Moscow. Roman Pevzner, Bushe’s commercial director, estimated that St Petersburg could hold up to 80 of those mini-bakeries, and by June 2019 nine were open in the city. Bushe itself then had 36 there. In 2021 a Bushe with an open kitchen opened at Nevsky Centre, Nevsky Prospekt 112.
In January 2019, two months after the statement, Inna Zubtsova became general director of the operating company. Lega kept the company.
Nor did the stop reach the bakery behind the cafés. In January 2022 Bushe’s central production was making more than 40 tonnes a day, RBC Petersburg reported. That month the company leased a 6,600 sq m production complex in Otradnoye, in Leningrad Oblast, planned to add a further 40 tonnes a day; that capacity was the company’s stated plan, not output.
Three years in the red
The filings of ООО «Буше», the operating company, show a net loss for 2022, another for 2023 and a third for 2024, the deepest of the three. Three losing years in a row is a long run for any chain. At Bushe each of them had a single owner. Registry cards put every share of the company in Lega’s name, as they have since 2003, and no outside shareholder stood beside him: there was no partner or investor to share the losses. Whether the business could carry them with one owner, year after year, was now the question.
The business around the losses did not shrink. The company averaged 838 employees in 2022, by registry data that MK St Petersburg cited. By May 2023 the two formats together had 63 points in St Petersburg, according to Kommersant and RBC Petersburg, and Kommersant called Bushe one of the city’s largest bakery chains. Sales at ООО «Буше» were higher in 2024, the year of the deepest loss, than in 2022. The chain was selling more and losing money at the same time; no statement on record from the company or its founder explains why.
Moscow, the one city the stop had left open, went the other way. Bushe had six points there in January 2022, according to the trade outlet ProductToday. Kommersant and RBC Petersburg counted five in May 2023, and the trade site Restoranoved.ru listed two in February 2025. A new format came and went as well: in May 2023 Bushe tried a vending machine in Renaissance Plaza, and Novy Prospekt later reported that the project had been wound down.
For 2025 the company filed a net profit, on sales higher again, after the three loss-making years the sources agree on. The filing records the turn; it gives no reason, and no company statement explains it.
Alive, in its own word
Can a chain stay “alive”, in Lega’s word, by refusing to grow? Bushe’s record gives a narrow answer. It refused one kind of growth in one city and kept growing elsewhere: Moscow for a time, its second format, room to bake more. Nothing on record says the refusal explains the losses or the profit that followed it.
“Alive” remains the word of the people who run it. Lega used it in 2018, of the number he would not pass. The company uses it now, of everything it does. Twenty-seven years after Razyezzhaya Street, its 2025 filing shows a profit and every share is still its founder’s.
Researched 34 sources in Russian, English.