Shaped by his mother’s cooking, a rural Moldovan childhood and decades of experience across some of the world’s most demanding kitchens, Denis Calmis has built a career defined by restraint, quality and a deep belief in the restorative power of food.

As part of our In Conversation series, we spoke with chef Denis Calmis about a journey that has taken him from a small village in Moldova to the kitchens of Moscow, and from the studios of Central Saint Martins to the tables of London’ most discerning private clients. Along the way, he has cooked for cultural institutions and global figures, written a book, and developed a philosophy of food that is as personal as it is purposeful.

Rooted in a childhood where the kitchen was the centre of daily life, his relationship with cooking began long before it became a profession. Born in Moldova, he grew up in a small rural village where his mother worked as the local chef and where the family cultivated their own produce.

From an early age, he was surrounded not only by skilled, attentive cooking, but by the land that made it possible, an upbringing that gave him an instinctive understanding of seasonality, simplicity and the value of honest ingredients. By the age of six, he was already in the kitchen, not as an observer, but as an active participant, absorbing the rhythms and rituals of cooking in a way that would inform everything that followed.

His approach today reflects precisely that lineage, rooted in restraint and a profound respect for ingredients. “The quality of what you use is everything. When ingredients are honest and well-grown, the taste takes care of itself.”

At fifteen, Denis left Moldova for Moscow, not out of necessity, but out of ambition. He wanted to encounter the world beyond his village, to test himself, and to discover what might be possible if he pursued his instincts with discipline. He spent two years studying, learnt Russian, and entered the professional kitchen as a pastry chef.

Time spent in a pastry factory gave him the precision and rigour that would underpin everything that followed.

An early opportunity proved pivotal: called upon to assist at a major event hosted by an English-Australian couple, his command of English made him indispensable, and the international professional connections that followed opened a door he would not close again.

By twenty-one, Denis had been appointed head chef at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, a 120-seat restaurant connected to one of Russia’s most significant cultural institutions. He would remain there for a decade, a period of sustained creative ambition that shaped him as much as any single experience in his career.

Over those ten years, Denis moved with the organisation through two locations, contributed to the development of what became Russia’s largest museum, and collaborated with architects on the design of the building and its kitchen. He led an international team, navigated the pressures of high-volume cultural hospitality, and cooked for guests including Naomi Campbell and Roman Abramovich.

It was also during this period that he authored The Chef in the Garage, a book that wove together cooking and personal narrative, using the stories of those who passed through the café as both subject and inspiration. The book captured something Denis has long believed: that food, at its most meaningful, is inseparable from the people who share it. “Food is a connection between people, between cultures, between a moment and a memory,” he says. “At the museum, it became inseparable from everything else.”

After a decade with Garage, Denis opened his own restaurant and worked as a consultant in Moscow, using the latitude of that period to travel widely and deepen his understanding of food cultures beyond Russia. Visits to London brought him into contact with the kind of cooking he had long admired, grounded, produce-led and unsentimental, at restaurants including St John and Rochelle Canteen.

After further travel through South America and a period of reflection, he settled in London, and in his first year there, enrolled at Central Saint Martins to study photography, using food as his primary subject. The discipline of the lens gave him yet another framework for thinking about ingredients, composition and the quiet power of the visual.

His early culinary experiences in the UK included time alongside Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay, each instructive in its own right, though Denis found himself drawn in a different direction. The technical spectacle of high-end restaurant cooking held less appeal than the clarity and intention he had always valued.

“Simplicity is everything for me,” he says. “Food should never hide behind complexity. ”That conviction led him deeper into the study of nutrition, functional food and longevity. Having followed a pescatarian and vegetarian approach for more than ten years, he has developed a sophisticated understanding of how diet intersects with strength, wellbeing and long-term health.

Collaborative work with nutritionists, alongside consultancy projects across Barcelona, Morocco and London, has broadened that knowledge into something both practical and personal.

He has also built a distinguished career as a private chef to high-profile clients, a sphere that demands both culinary excellence and a particular kind of discretion, one that Denis has navigated with the same quiet confidence that defines his approach in the kitchen.

His current project, a wine bar in Notting Hill drawing on Slavic ingredients and Eastern European wines, represents the fullest expression yet of his evolving philosophy. More than a hospitality venture, it is conceived as a functional, biohacking-informed space in which every ingredient is purposeful and every choice is made in service of the people who experience it.

From wild honey to foraged berries, Denis is committed to introducing guests to ingredients that are rarely found on menus and even more rarely explained, while sharing the understanding he has accumulated through a lifetime of cooking, travelling and thinking seriously about what food can do for the body and mind. The project, due to open towards the end of the year, is ultimately a distillation of his own path towards longevity and vitality, and an invitation to others to find their own way.

At its core, Denis’ work remains anchored in the values of his childhood, a deep respect for exceptional produce, a resistance to unnecessary complication, and the conviction that when ingredients are handled with genuine care, flavour will always follow.

In a culture where cooking has become something to watch rather than something to do, he remains committed to bringing people back to the act itself, showing that food need not be elaborate or intimidating, but can be something honest, nourishing and entirely within reach. “Food doesn’t need to be complicated to be extraordinary,” he says. “Cook. Use good ingredients. And pay attention to how what you eat makes you feel.”