MICHELIN Guide Moscow 2022 Service Award: Ivan and Sergey Berezutsky, Twins Garden

"A meticulous fine-dining operation in Moscow, this restaurant revolves around a guest-first service culture led by twin chef-brothers Ivan and Sergey Berezutsky. Each morning, about twenty team members—waiters and runners, sommeliers, maitre d's, the manager, and the chefs—meet for half an hour in front of the open kitchen to share feedback, study who has reservations, and note allergies, intolerances, preferences, and what brought them in. The team’s calm, adaptive approach turns potentially tricky requests into tailored experiences—like listening to a guest who wanted a salad “his way” and then explaining how the local Garden salad is made, tweaking it by a tiny exception so it fit perfectly—while preserving the restaurant’s identity. Guest comments can even reshape the offer: a few accurate remarks led to changing the caviar supplier and total immersion in production, yielding bespoke sturgeon caviar salted with selected black “Thursday-made” salt exclusively for the restaurant. Staff taste all innovations and sit exams so they know the menu, sourcing, and methods inside out. Service is generously staffed—nine waiters with three runners, three sommeliers, two maitre d's, and a manager serve roughly sixty seats across a 44-seat main room and a 16-seat mezzanine “aquarium”—a ratio increased after seats were reduced following the announcement of the MICHELIN Guide coming to Moscow. The sommeliers manage the country’s largest wine list (more than a thousand positions), unique vegetable and mushroom wines invented and produced by the team, and multiple pairings: “Round the world,” “Travel to the Russia,” vegetable pairings for the Vegetable set-menu, and “150 years ago” with deliberately old-fashioned wines like Riesling Kabinett, claret, or non modernised Puligny-Montrachet; they’ll even scour Moscow to secure a regular’s Petrus 2000—buying from fellow restaurateurs and earning nothing except maybe karmic points. For consistently giving guests what they expect and a little more, it received the Service Award, the MICHELIN Guide’s Moscow 2022 special prize, and has become a benchmark that other Moscow restaurants send employees to study." - MICHELIN Guide