Sultan Safin

I have no connections. I'm an ordinary village guy from the Samara region.

The choice of 2015 #

The first Tubetey pavilion had opened on 14 June beside the suburban ticket office at Kazan-1 station. A month later, with the championships under way, Safin left Saudi Aramco to commit to the business he had co-founded with Ainur Kamaliev and Ruslan Gilmutdinov.

It was a choice between a career that had already proved itself and a venture that had proved one summer’s demand. The order of events matters. He committed before the business had shown it could last, not after, and he left a job that had taken five interviews to win.

It did not last, at first. In August, a month after he left, the city froze the arena pavilions. Several years of losses followed. Safin does not soften that period. “You don’t have to be a businessman to see that everything was running at a loss,” he told Business Online in December 2025. “For several years we survived practically without money, on bare enthusiasm.”

Five interviews #

Safin comes from Kamyshla, a Tatar village in the Samara region, outside Tatarstan itself. The republic reached him first as a summer: in 2005 he spent one at the Idel camp in Bolgar, his first contact with Tatarstan. Two years later he enrolled at the Institute of Geology of Kazan Federal University, where he studied until 2012. On an internship in China in 2010, the idea of a Tatar halal fast-food business came to him, and in 2011 he and Kamaliev, who would become one of his co-founders, settled on a name for it: Tubetey. It would be four years before the first pavilion opened.

Geology took Safin further from home before it brought him back. He took a master’s degree in Saudi Arabia and then joined Saudi Aramco as a reservoir engineer on the Ghawar field. It was not an easy door to open. The company does not usually hire without solid work experience, he told RBC in 2017, but he had been lucky: “after five interviews my candidacy was approved.”

The post was the kind of career a geology graduate trains for. It was secure, it was abroad, and it had nothing to do with pastry. Safin kept the food idea alongside it. In 2014 he wrote the full concept and strategy for the business as a single book, a plan on paper drawn up while he was still working in the oil industry. That was the career he left in July 2015.

The lean years #

The company began franchising in 2016, while it was still in the loss-making years that followed the freeze of the pavilions, and Safin spent an internship in Denver, in the United States. The same year brought a franchise decision he later called a mistake. A free franchise he had allowed his franchise partner, Azat Nazmutdinov, was revoked late in 2016, and Nazmutdinov went on to build Kystybyi, his own venture. Of granting it, Safin told Business Online in 2017: “I let him, and that was a mistake.”

Franchising let other people open outlets under the Tubetey name. One, in Naberezhnye Chelny, was withdrawn in February 2019 after quality failures.

Closing most of it #

The Tubetey profile tells the cut from the company’s side. From his, it meant taking apart most of what he had spent four years building. By June 2019 Safin had closed most of the network. “We cleaned out the team hard, because values and the people around us are what matter most,” he told Business Online that month, as reported by Buybrand. After the 2019 cut, he and his co-founders chose to bring in investor partners as co-owners of restaurants supplied from the company’s own kitchen. He has been general director of Tubetey’s management company since 2018. When COVID reached Kazan in 2020, the team under him, by his own account, reassigned about 30 roles in two weeks. By 2025 he described his work as leading strategy, product and brand.

A decade on #

Ten years after the first pavilion, and after the career he gave up for it, Safin leads a company rebuilt restaurant by restaurant with investor partners. The two counts published in December 2025 and January 2026 put it at between about 11 and 17 restaurants, with about ten investor partners. He co-owns the management company that holds the trademarks with Kamaliev and Gilmutdinov, his two co-founders.

Selling a national cuisine as fast food means winning over people for whom it is not home cooking, and Safin is frank that the work is unfinished. “Sometimes, of course, we doubt ourselves, because we’re not selling pizza,” he said in December 2025. “It’s hard to make people fall in love with something that isn’t their own.” He went on in the same breath: “But I believe the real peak is still ahead, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this.”

Last updated: November 7, 2026

Researched 33 sources in Russian.