Header: Mikhail Loskutov
Birch is a 400 m² restaurant on the ground floor of the Ritz-Carlton at Limestone House, in the Dubai International Financial Centre. It belongs to the chef Arslan Berdiev and was inaugurated in February 2025, eight years after the first Birch opened its doors in St Petersburg. The interior was carefully designed by DA Bureau, the same St Petersburg studio that designed the original restaurant, and the project took a year and a half to be completed.
The already established Birch
The St Petersburg restaurant opened in 2017 with award-winning chef Berdiev at the helm. The chef had won the Russia, Baltics and CIS final of the S. Pellegrino Young Chef competition in 2016, and in 2022 was named Chef of the Year by the Russian National Restaurant Award WHERETOEAT.
The first restaurant was built on three materials: light wood, concrete and steel. It also introduced semi-bar seating, which is unusual in fine dining, because the chef believes that he and the guest should be looking at each other from the same height when the dish is brought to the table.
“We turned the restaurant world of St. Petersburg upside down with this technique, and we wanted to implement it in Dubai too.”
DA Bureau
Green marble and wood
The Dubai restaurant is divided into more areas than the first one. The studio separated them with blocks of deep dark green marble and ran a single strip of veneered wood under the ceiling above all of them. The strip curls along its whole length, from the entrance to the back of the restaurant.
The curls refer to the first Birch, where the main hall was built as a birch grove made of wood blocks. The strip is meant to look like the shavings left over from cutting them.
From the entrance to the main hall
The lounge bar is where guests wait before being taken to their table. Here, very low seating by the fireplace at one end and armchairs with armrests by the bar at the other create a cosy and inviting atmosphere, preparing guests for what’s to come.
The main hall past it is split in two: one half has the semi-bar seating and a large communal table (both brought over from St Petersburg), and the other has ordinary low tables raised onto a podium. Dubai restaurants normally use lounge seating, and the studio kept it here alongside the counter seating that lets guests keep eye contact with the chef.
The open kitchen is built as four separate islands, with several tables turned to face them so guests can watch the cooking from where they sit. A large marble service station separates this part of the room from the rest of the seating.
The lab and the private dining room
Two rooms are located at the far end of the restaurant, separated from each other by translucent glass wine fridges. The first is Berdiev’s office and laboratory, with an island kitchen and a shelf of niches holding the spices he collects from wherever he travels. It is here that new dishes are created.
Next to it is a private dining room with its own terrace, used for one-off culinary presentations. The table in it was designed in three layers: the first is a white tablecloth, the second a wooden surface made of separate modules (one for each guest), and the third is a mirror. Regarding the latter, the pastry chef assembles the desserts directly on it, in front of everyone at the table.
At the table, the goal was to achieve the perfect mix of traditional and new, with the studio wanting both to count equally. The same goes for the rest of the restaurant, where plain forms in warm wood tones are paired with a touch of high classicism.
Project information
Interior Design Company: DA Bureau
Design Team: Maria Romanova, Iuliia Kubitskaia, Alisa Klimenko, Ekaterina Piven
Design Executive Team: Anna Lvovskaia, Boris Lvovskiy, Fedor Goreglyad, Maria Romanova
Assisting Team: Yulia Grigorieva, Alena Goreglad
Photography: Mikhail Loskutov
Location: Dubai, UAE
Date: 2025
