Mark Lapin

On Christmas Eve 2025, Mark Lapin stood before journalists and called the demolition of SunDay Ginza — the city’s second forced razing of a Ginza venue in six months — “a day of shock and flagrant violation.” His father was dying. He had four restaurants of his own. He was thirty years old.

All the responsibility lies on me and no one else. If something goes wrong, you can only blame yourself.

The Earned Question #

When succession planning becomes synonymous with crisis management, the question of readiness stops being theoretical. Russia’s largest restaurant group — Ginza Project, approximately 60 active venues spanning St. Petersburg, Moscow, and four other cities — passed formally to Mark Lapin on January 16, 2026, the morning his father Vadim died. The announcement landed within hours, before grief could settle: “Management of the company passes to the founder’s son — Mark Lapin.”

Most sons would have spent the following weeks answering questions about readiness. Mark had answered them years earlier.

In 2021, Grecco — his first independent restaurant, opened during the pandemic with no Ginza backing — won St. Petersburg’s Best New Restaurant award from Sobaka.ru, the city’s most trusted dining guide. In 2022, MIO Bistrot, his first fully solo project with no partners at all, won the same award. Different cuisine. No collaborators. The same result. He was the only restaurateur in the city to win the category in consecutive years with different concepts.

The succession question had already been answered before the succession arrived.

Formation: Restaurants as Native Language #

Mark Lapin did not choose the restaurant business. The restaurant business chose him before he was old enough to resist.

His father refused to leave young Mark with nannies. Instead, Mark attended business dinners, fell asleep on couches in half-finished dining rooms, and absorbed the texture of hospitality through osmosis before he had words for any of it. “Mark grew up in restaurants. In good restaurants,” Vadim told Sobaka.ru in 2019. By the time Mark was eight, he had witnessed the opening of the original Ginza restaurant on a St. Petersburg street whose name he would later come to know as Nevsky Prospekt.

The formation was deliberately cosmopolitan. Vadim arranged a native English-speaking tutor; Mark’s sister had an Italian nanny. Through years of Mediterranean travel — driving the Adriatic coast, working through the gastronomic regions of Tuscany and Liguria, lingering on the Amalfi coast — Mark became fluent in French and Italian. He studied law. He briefly discovered programming. His father narrated the programming phase with characteristic wit: Mark “cooled off toward JavaScript faster than pasta al dente in the evening breeze.” The rebellion was brief.

By 2015, Mark had registered as an individual entrepreneur. By 2016, he was working at Ginza Project — not as a trainee assigned by his father, but as a partner with operational weight. Menu tastings across 80 venues. Quality audits. Technology modernization. Monitoring thousands of online reviews. His father’s design was explicit: he entered as an owner-partner, because “when you’re a business owner, it’s a completely different level of responsibility and involvement.”

In July 2018, Vadim transferred shares in 38 Ginza companies to Mark in two days. Market valuation: approximately one billion rubles. Mark was twenty-three. The structural succession was complete. What remained was the creative validation — proof that he could build something that had nothing to do with the family name.

The Independence Proof #

That proof came in the form of a Greek restaurant on Rybatskaya Street.

In December 2020, mid-pandemic, with St. Petersburg’s dining scene in acute distress, Mark opened Grecco with his partner Alena Melnikova, founder of the Gourmet Days festival. The concept was explicitly independent of Ginza Project — Mediterranean-leaning, with a Greek anchor, and an interior by designer Anastasia Khalchitskaya that evoked the lobby of a 1950s resort hotel: warm gray-sand palette, natural wood, living greenery, the kind of room that made you feel the Mediterranean before the food arrived. Chef Leonid Ivanov, formerly of Probka Family, built a menu spanning meze, pide, seviche, and grilled seafood. Cocktails came from Evgenia Zarukina of El Copitas, once ranked among the world’s 50 best bars. The olive tree became the logo — peace, simplicity, and the centrality of olive oil in Greek cuisine.

Within a year, Grecco won “Лучший новый ресторан” — Best New Restaurant — at the Sobaka.ru “Что Где Есть в Петербурге” awards ceremony, held at the Grand Hotel Europe in October 2021. It received the most public votes in its category. The following year, Mark opened MIO Bistrot on Kazanskaya Street, with views of the Kazan Cathedral — his first venture with no partners at all, Italian chefs Francesco Barbato and Emanuele Primo co-authoring the menu, and every creative and operational decision his alone. “I have my own style and vision,” he told Yandex Eda’s Open Kitchen. “I need space to realize exclusively my own ideas. All the responsibility lies on me and no one else. If something goes wrong, you can only blame yourself.” MIO won Best New Restaurant at the Sobaka.ru ceremony in October 2022.

Two different restaurants. Two different cuisines. Two awards. Consecutive years.

The sequential wins were not the same story twice. Grecco succeeded because of its Mediterranean warmth, its exceptional cocktails, and its audacity in opening mid-pandemic when rational restaurateurs were closing. MIO succeeded because of Mark’s decision to carry it entirely alone — no partners to share the load or the blame. What the repetition demonstrated was not luck and not formula. Anyone could get lucky once. Building two different things and winning the same recognition twice, under different conditions, with different collaborators (and then none), was the kind of evidence that didn’t require a dynastic surname to interpret.

By 2025, Mark had added Mercado del Sol — Spanish-Mediterranean at Belinskogo Street, later rebranded with an Italian focus — and Ogorodniki (“The Gardeners”), Russian regional cuisine inside a fully restored 1911 Art Nouveau mansion, listed on the Ginza Project website. The independent portfolio had grown to four concepts across four culinary traditions. Each one deliberately different. Each one his.

The Crucible of 2025 #

The months before formal succession were a compressive test that no curriculum could have designed.

In June 2025, city authorities physically dismantled Koryushka, the beloved Ginza restaurant inside the Peter and Paul Fortress, after a prolonged lease dispute. Courts had ruled for demolition months earlier; the actual dismantling stripped 150 staff of their jobs — people with children, families, and mortgages, as Ginza’s marketing director noted publicly. Vadim Lapin was already gravely ill. Mark was effectively running the group.

On December 24, 2025 — three weeks before his father’s death — SunDay Ginza on Krestovsky Island was demolished on three days’ notice by city authorities. Two of those days fell on a weekend. Mark’s public statement measured the response in precise terms: “shock,” “flagrant violation of reasonable deadlines,” the stripping of Ginza’s ability “to resolve social obligations to staff and partners with dignity.” He posed a direct challenge to city leadership: “Will the SunDay Ginza territory receive a coherent development plan that will be realized in a foreseeable timeframe? Or will we again witness long years of desolation?”

The statement showed legal precision, political voice, and emotional control — all delivered on Christmas Eve, while his father was dying. No one had written it for him.

Vadim Lapin died on January 16, 2026, at the Beloostrov clinic near St. Petersburg. He was sixty-two. That same afternoon, Ginza announced the succession. The funeral took place January 21 at the Church of the Smolensk Icon on Vasilievsky Island. Twelve days later, on January 28, Mark gave his first and only major interview to Delovoy Petersburg.

He was asked about reviews, reorganizations, and the durability of the Ginza brand. His answers were short. “I want to emphasize that the Ginza Project brand is indivisible.” “Vadim’s departure will not trigger any special actions. The word ‘review’ is inappropriate here.” “For me personally, this is a very difficult time right now. But there is work that requires attention, energy, and time.” Then he moved on to the next question.

What Earned Authority Looks Like #

Mark Lapin now leads approximately 60 restaurants and hospitality projects spanning St. Petersburg, Moscow, Sochi, Rostov-on-Don, Tula, Baku, and Batumi. He shares ownership of the core entity 50/50 with Dmitry Sergeev, the co-founder who oversees the hotel division. He has no fixed office. He works from restaurants and from cars. He has no secretary and answers his own email — or doesn’t, depending on the day.

In the January 2026 interview, amid all the questions about succession and strategy and what comes next, one personal ambition surfaced that belonged entirely to him: “I would like someday to open my own hotel in Petersburg. A boutique project with a few dozen rooms.” The aspiration fits the pattern — something personal, specific, and fully accountable to no one but himself.

The dynastic question was answered before it could be asked. Not by legal transfer or public declaration, but by two Best New Restaurant trophies and a decade of graduated responsibility that began with menu tastings and ended with Christmas Eve demolition statements. When succession came, it arrived not as burden but as confirmation — a formal recognition of standing that had already been established, in St. Petersburg dining rooms, on his own terms.

Last updated: March 15, 2026