Kystybyi

An outlet of his own

Nazmutdinov came to the café through the Tubetey project, a Kazan venture in Tatar fast food that he joined as an early partner in 2015, with his wife, Elena Kofonova (Елена Кофонова). By the account of Sultan Safin (Султан Сафин), a co-founder of Tubetey, the couple came in without investing. In 2016, as the project began developing franchises, Nazmutdinov asked for one in Kazan for himself, free of charge, and was given it: the outlet at Spartakovskaya 23. Safin later said that letting him have it had been a mistake. From then on he was running a café that was his to manage but not his to name.

He was not new to running a company. After an engineering degree at KGEU, the Kazan power-engineering university, he had gone back to his home town, Nizhnekamsk, in 2010 and helped found a handyman firm that grew into a kitchen-furniture maker, VM Kuhni. The café on Spartakovskaya Street was a different trade in a different city, and it came to him through someone else’s brand.

What he wanted was a business of his own, and in October 2016 he founded one. Kystybyi’s company card and his own anniversary dating both put the company’s start in that month. The new company had no other place to trade than the café he already ran under Tubetey’s name, a few months into its franchise. Whatever it was to become, it depended on that café staying open. If the outlet went, the company would have nothing to sell from, and the savings he would put into it would have nothing to show.

The sign comes down

At the end of 2016 the franchise was withdrawn. The outlet lost the Tubetey name over its door and its place in the Tubetey network, two months after Nazmutdinov had founded a company that had no other outlet. For a franchise café the name over the door is most of what a passer-by knows about it; once that name was gone, the café on Spartakovskaya Street had to be found again, under another one, by people who had come to it for Tubetey. The two sides give different accounts. In March 2017 Safin told Tatar-inform: “We had a franchise there. Because certain requirements were not met, we withdrew it.” Nazmutdinov’s own account, given two years later, was that the four partners in the project had each had their own idea of how the business should develop.

He did not close the café. In December 2016 it began trading as Kystybyi, a name taken from a single Tatar dish, a flatbread folded over a filling. Closing it would have ended his new company before it had traded a day under its own name. Keeping it open cost him. By his own account, he put all his savings into the business and brought in investment, at a start he later called frightening, and many people laughed at him and told him he was going the wrong way. Six months after the change he described what he had made to Kommersant: “Our chain is not a direct competitor to Tubetey; it is a new concept with a new product, but it will also grow by franchising.”

The new name took hold quickly. When Safin spoke to Tatar-inform in March 2017, he noted that the café was now called Kystybyi; in April the same agency interviewed Nazmutdinov as the founder of Kystybyi tatar-food, the chain’s first trading name, written half in Russian and half in English, «Кыстыбый tatar-food». The chain took its name, and the centre of its menu, from the one dish; later it would also use a short mark, KSTB, for the company and the brand. Among the Tatar fast-casual chains of Kazan, it has since become Tubetey’s most-cited counterpart.

Too far, too fast

The ambition Nazmutdinov stated in June 2017 was to grow by franchising, and to grow beyond Kazan. Kommersant reported a plan to franchise in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, in 2017 and 2018; it was never carried out. Closer to home, a second café, on Yamasheva 76, was planned to open by mid-November 2017: 220 square metres and 75 seats, a family café with a play zone and a mother-and-child room. The chain that had begun as one renamed outlet was planning for families, and for other cities.

The first franchise came in 2018, in Naberezhnye Chelny, east of Kazan: the chain’s first outlet outside the city. The same year Aidar Ismagilov (Айдар Исмагилов) joined Nazmutdinov as a partner; Nazmutdinov calls him his partner and mentor. In November 2018 Rospatent registered the trademark, “Kystybyi tatar food”, in class 43, and in December the operating company, KSTB, was registered at Spartakovskaya 23, the address of the café that had kept trading in 2016. Two years after losing the use of another chain’s name, the business had registered a name of its own and a company to hold it. For 2018 the group reported revenue of ₽60M, according to the company card Business Online printed with an interview the following June.

The franchise did not hold. In February 2019 the Chelny unit was bought back after failing on service, and it became a company branch. Nazmutdinov’s own reading, given in December 2025, was that the chain had run ahead of its own development: it was not technologically ready, it failed on service and stability, and running the franchise took a great deal of resources. The promise of 2017, to grow by franchising, had met its first test within two years of being made, and the company had taken the unit back rather than leave its name on a café it could not run well. Buying back a unit is the reverse of franchising: the company takes back the running of a café it had chosen to let someone else run, and with it the work the franchise was meant to spare it. In Chelny it did so, and the unit traded on as a company branch for three more years. On 3 September 2022 the owners closed the Chelny project, and Kystybyi was left trading in Kazan alone.

A chain in its own city

What followed was growth inside Kazan, one site at a time, each under the name the café had taken in 2016. A café on Kulakhmetova Street opened in 2019 and one on Akademika Parina Street in 2021, the year Tatarstan banned night-time catering and tightened QR-code access to cafés, which hit their traffic. On 19 May 2023 Kystybyi opened in Terminal 1 of Kazan International Airport, trading 24 hours a day; Aviapages reported it as the airport’s first halal food outlet. The airport counter put the chain in front of travellers without taking it out of its city, and it trades through the night, the hours the 2021 restrictions had shut. The new sites are all in Kazan, close to the café where the chain started, and none opened in another city.

The year 2024 brought three openings in the centre of Kazan. A food-court island at the Art Center on Ershova Street opened on 15 September, a café on Pushkina Street followed, and on 1 December the flagship opened at Bauman 9. In 2025 two more Kazan sites opened, in the Kait gastro-complex on Podluzhnaya Street and on Dekabristov Street.

In December 2025 Kystybyi won the Tatar restaurant category of Tatars of the Year, the people’s-vote rating run by the Kazan outlet Milliard.Tatar, and Nazmutdinov accepted the award at the ceremony in the Kazan Kremlin. The rating is decided by a public vote, not by a jury: the category win was the readers’ choice, not a panel’s. The same month the chain’s own factory, which stands behind its cafés, was expanded. Speaking that December, he put the number of restaurants at about nine.

What the café became

The decision of December 2016 can still be found at the address where it was made. The café on Spartakovskaya 23 that lost its franchise still trades as Kystybyi. It is where the operating company was registered in 2018, two years after the sign changed, and in October 2026 it was one of 12 branches 2GIS listed for the chain: eleven addresses in Kazan and one at the airport. The company Nazmutdinov founded in October 2016 began with that one café, and the café is still on its list, beside the flagship on Bauman Street and the branch at Kazan Federal University on Kremlyovskaya Street.

The two counts of the chain are different measures and are best read side by side. The founder’s own figure, about nine restaurants in December 2025, is his count of the places he runs. The 2GIS listing of 12 branches, ten months later, is a map service’s count of addresses, and it includes the airport counter, the food-court island on Ershova Street and the unit in the Kait food hall. The counts were taken ten months apart by different methods, so the gap between them is not a measure of growth. Both put every address in Kazan, the city the café stayed in.

In December 2024 Nazmutdinov and Ismagilov set up a second operating company, AA-Restorans, with Nazmutdinov as general director; each owns half of it, as each owns half of KSTB. Since 25 March 2025 Ismagilov has been KSTB’s director.

The decision also shaped who owns the business. The café he ran in 2016 traded under another chain’s name, inside a project with several partners. The chain that grew from it is held by two people, Nazmutdinov and Ismagilov, each with half of both operating companies, KSTB and AA-Restorans, according to registry data. One of them runs one company, and the other runs the other. The café that could have closed in December 2016 became the first outlet of a business its founder now co-owns with the partner he calls his mentor.

The other promise of 2017 turned out differently. The plan to franchise in Chelyabinsk was never carried out, and the one franchise that opened, in Chelny, was back in the company’s hands by February 2019 and closed in 2022. The chain grew instead where the café had stayed: its flagship on Bauman Street, its cafés across the city, its counter at the airport, all in Kazan, under the name of one Tatar dish. The café that kept trading in 2016 did so in its own city, and the chain built from it has stayed there.

Last updated: October 28, 2026

Researched 35 sources in Russian.