Azat Nazmutdinov

At first it was frightening to start a business alone. On top of that the financial position at the start was difficult — I had to put in all my savings and bring in investment. Many laughed and didn't believe, saying: 'You're going the wrong way.' That only spurred me on!

An engineer from Nizhnekamsk #

Nazmutdinov comes from Nizhnekamsk, a town in Tatarstan east of Kazan. He studied engineering at KGEU, the Kazan power-engineering university, and after graduating in 2010 he went back to Nizhnekamsk to co-found a handyman firm with partners. The firm started as Vash Master («Ваш мастер»), taking on household jobs, and grew into a kitchen-furniture maker, VM Kuhni. It was a business built by people who knew one another, and it gave him a trade and a company before he was in food at all. An engineer who had already turned a handyman service into a manufacturer knew what it took to make a small firm into a larger one, and he knew it from a business shared with partners.

That first business is the path he did not go back to. When his place in Kazan collapsed six years later, the furniture trade in his home town was the obvious place to return to: a known business, in a known town, with partners he had already worked with. He stayed in Kazan instead, and that choice is where this story turns.

The project in Kazan #

In 2015 he joined the Tubetey project in Kazan, a venture in Tatar fast food led by Sultan Safin (Султан Сафин), as an early partner, with his wife, Elena Kofonova (Елена Кофонова). By Safin’s account the project and the brand were ready to launch that year, and the couple came into the team as it started, without investing. What Nazmutdinov brought, and what he hoped for, was not only work. He believed, he said later, that a shared business would make the friendships within it stronger.

In 2016, as the project began developing franchises, he asked for a franchise in Kazan for himself, free of charge, and was given one: the café at Spartakovskaya 23. Safin came to regret it. Of granting it, Safin told Business Online in 2017: “I let him, and that was a mistake.” In October 2016 Nazmutdinov founded a company of his own, Kystybyi (Кыстыбый). He still dates its anniversary from that month.

By the autumn of 2016, then, the shared project had given him what he wanted from it: a café to run in Kazan and a company to run it with. The franchise made him the operator of a Tubetey café, his to run but trading under a name that belonged to the project. Both the café and the new company depended on that franchise, and on the partnership behind it.

The break #

At the end of 2016 his place in the project ended. The franchise at Spartakovskaya 23 was withdrawn, and the partnership he had joined a year and a half earlier was over for him. It came two months after he had founded his own company, which had no other café to trade from. He did not hide what it cost. Asked in June 2019 whether the exit had been excess baggage, he told Business Online: “Of course, emotionally it was very hard, let’s not pretend otherwise. I believed a shared business would strengthen our friendships, but such illusions shatter quickly in business. There was a short depression, which I came out of tougher.”

His explanation of the split itself is brief, and it names no culprit: “Each of the four partners had their own vision of how the business should develop,” he told Realnoe Vremya in February 2019. Safin, for his part, told Tatar-inform in March 2017 that certain requirements had not been met. The two accounts, one from the man who granted the franchise and one from the man who ran it, describe the same ending from opposite sides, and they stand side by side.

In that June 2019 Business Online interview he also named his main partner in the business: his wife, Elena Kofonova, who had come into the Tubetey project with him in 2015.

What he did next was his own decision. He could have let the café go and gone back to Nizhnekamsk and the furniture trade. He kept the café open instead, under a new name, Kystybyi, taken from a Tatar flatbread, and ran it without the partners he had joined. The cost was his savings, and the doubts of people around him. “At first it was frightening to start a business alone. On top of that the financial position at the start was difficult — I had to put in all my savings and bring in investment. Many laughed and didn’t believe, saying: ‘You’re going the wrong way.’ That only spurred me on!” he told Realnoe Vremya.

Within months he was speaking as a founder. In April 2017 Tatar-inform interviewed him as the founder of Kystybyi tatar-food, the café’s first trading name. In June he told Kommersant that the chain was a new concept and would grow by franchising, and that it planned to franchise in Chelyabinsk.

The first year alone #

The first year was spent proving that the renamed café could stand on its own. By March 2017 even Safin, giving Tubetey’s account of the withdrawal to Tatar-inform, referred to the café by its new name. The name had come from a single Tatar dish, a flatbread folded over a filling, and Nazmutdinov built the menu and the brand around it. The café that a few months earlier had sold under another chain’s name was now the only place in Kazan that carried his.

He did not plan to stay at one café. The Chelyabinsk franchise plan he described to Kommersant in June 2017 was for 2017 and 2018; it was never carried out. Closer to home, he planned a second café, on Yamasheva 76, 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. A man who had started alone, a year after losing the partnership he believed in, was planning for families and for other cities.

A partner and mentor #

The partnership that came next looked nothing like the one that broke. In 2018 Aidar Ismagilov (Айдар Исмагилов) joined him as a partner; Nazmutdinov calls him his “partner and mentor”. On 14 December 2018 KSTB was registered at Spartakovskaya 23, the address of the café he had kept, as the company that runs the chain, with Nazmutdinov holding half of it. A month earlier, in November 2018, the name he had put over the café door two years before was registered as a trademark, “Kystybyi tatar food”. That year the first Kystybyi franchise opened, in Naberezhnye Chelny, east of Kazan.

The franchise tested the second promise he had made in 2017, and it did not hold. By February 2019 he had taken the Chelny unit back. Looking back in December 2025, he told Milliard.Tatar: “After the opening in Chelny there was a ‘wow’ effect, but it was as if we had run ahead of our own development and weren’t technologically ready — we failed on service and stability, and running this machine began to take up a great deal of resources.” The unit ran as a company branch until 3 September 2022, when he and his partners closed the Chelny project, four years after the franchise had opened.

Running the chain #

After Chelny, the chain he runs grew in Kazan, one café at a time: on Kulakhmetova Street in 2019 and on Akademika Parina Street in 2021, the year Tatarstan banned night-time catering and tightened QR-code access, which hit café traffic. In May 2023 it opened in Terminal 1 of Kazan International Airport, trading 24 hours a day; Aviapages reported it as the airport’s first halal food outlet. It put the chain in front of travellers arriving in the city, without taking it out of Kazan. In 2024 a food-court island opened at the Art Center on Ershova Street in September and a café on Pushkina Street. In December 2024 the Bauman 9 flagship opened, and that month he became general director of AA-Restorans, a second operating company. He and Ismagilov own it in equal halves, as they own KSTB. Nazmutdinov had been KSTB’s director until 25 March 2025, when Ismagilov took the post. Each partner now runs one of the two companies: the founder the newer one, his mentor the one registered at the address of the first café. In 2025 two more Kazan sites opened, in the Kait gastro-complex on Podluzhnaya Street and on Dekabristov Street, both under the name he had put up in 2016.

In December 2025 Kystybyi won the Tatar restaurant category of Tatars of the Year, a people’s-vote rating run by the Kazan outlet Milliard.Tatar, and Nazmutdinov went to the Kazan Kremlin to accept it. The rating is decided by a public vote, not by a jury. That month he put the chain at about nine restaurants, and its own factory was expanded.

Tougher #

The break of 2016 changed the shape of his partnerships. The project he joined in 2015 had four partners who, in his words, each had their own vision of how the business should develop. The business he kept in 2016 now has two owners with equal halves of both its companies, one running each, and the second owner is the man he calls his mentor. Where he once relied on a project among friends, he now holds a stake on the registry, equal to his partner’s, in a company he started alone.

His plans changed shape too. In June 2017, six months after starting alone, he told Kommersant the new chain would grow by franchising, and he named Chelyabinsk as a city to grow into. The Chelyabinsk plan was never carried out. The one franchise that opened, in Naberezhnye Chelny, was back in his hands by February 2019 and closed in 2022, and in December 2025 he described it as running ahead of the company’s own development. Every restaurant he counted that month was in Kazan or at its airport, the city where he had kept the first café open.

He says he came out of the depression tougher, and his record since reads that way. He kept the café when the franchise went, took the Chelny unit back when it failed on service, and closed it in 2022. The café on Spartakovskaya Street, the one he refused to close at the end of 2016, still trades as Kystybyi. People told him then that he was going the wrong way. Nine years later he went to the Kazan Kremlin to accept a public vote for the chain that grew from it.

Last updated: October 28, 2026

Researched 35 sources in Russian.