Feeling Curious Nostalgia for Bad Old Days
By Mark Bond
[Note from pb..This is true for much of the FSU, last few years have seen big changes in the increase of restaurants and bars]
It is indicative of the enormous changes that have taken place that it is now practically impossible to imagine that there were only three places in Moscow where you could buy a pint of decent draught beer in 1986. They were the Heineken bars in the National and Kosmos hotels and the Warsteiner Stube in the International Trade Center.
Even the pleasure of drinking a normal pint of beer was spoiled by the aggressive doormen checking your passport. Evidently, one couldn't have Russians seeing such decadence! The experience was further spoiled by the usual nagging attentions of a hard currency prostitute or two. Getting rid of her by claiming to be gay or telling her that she would have to pay for sex allowed one to finally get down to sampling the amber nectar.
Given the stunning lack of atmosphere, it was often a better idea to patronize embassy clubs, which were generally open to all Westerners. The German Embassy club had the best draught beer and also sold Haribo jelly bears, which were always a great gift for friends' children.
The few Russian beer bars that were still open in 1986 after Mikhail Gorbachev launched his dry campaign served beer that was so watered down and foul that you could drink 20 glasses and still be sober. This problem could be solved by smuggling in bottles of vodka and surreptitiously adding it to the beer.
Things were no better on the restaurant front. For a start, there were hardly any restaurants, and those that existed were guarded by a modern equivalent of the hound of the Baskervilles -- a doorman or "shveitsar." The restaurant could be totally empty, but the doorman would nonetheless tell you it was full or fully booked.
Once you had finally argued your way in, it was always the same story. You were given a menu, foolishly spent a few minutes choosing the desired dishes, only for the waiter to inform that your dish was off the menu. After a while, you learned to put an end to the menu charade and ask what was actually available.
When the bill came, the waiter would blithely attempt to inform you orally of the damage. This was usually 2 or 3 times more than the real price, so you always had to ask for the menu, go through the price of each dish yourself and pay accordingly.
Amazingly enough, this did not generally have the effect of shaming the fraudulent waiter, but rather of making him angry. He might even throw the change back onto your table.
Those people who were unlucky enough to be vegetarians were condemned to eking out an existence on bread, cucumbers and cold beetroot soup.
However, the pice de rŽsistance has to have been the ruble restaurant on the first floor of the National Hotel. My Russian fiancee and I decided to have a bite to eat there and had sat down and started to order when the restaurant manager came up to us and said, "You can't eat in here."
She tried to make out that it was only for foreigners, which was patently untrue, and when I asked why I was not allowed to eat with my fiancee, she replied that we should come back when we were married!
My fiancee managed to drag me away from a shouting match with the restaurant staff, pointing out that the KGB could make her life a misery by taking her into the interview room that they had in every hotel and asking her what she was doing with a foreigner.
Dining out in the Soviet Union was not the most enjoyable of experiences and could be compounded by the smallest of details, such as coffee after a meal. It was always served with what seemed like four or five teaspoonfuls of sugar, even after you had explicitly demanded coffee without sugar.
By 1991, although things had changed significantly, there was still hardly anywhere to go for a drink or a decent meal. The first normal pub, the Shamrock Bar, opened in the Irish House on Novy Arbat and the queue was so long to get in that expats would try to get membership cards from their Irish friends.
There was much joy at the opening of the small Jever bar in the Rossiya Hotel, as it provided an alternative place to go. Of course, almost anything that was worth eating or drinking had to be paid for in hard currency.
At the beginning of 1991, you could not get a room in the Savoy -- Moscow's only Western-managed hotel -- unless you flew Finnair (the hotel was owned by Finnair). In the spring, Moscow's first large Western hotel, the Penta, was opened. It only had one large restaurant and no proper bar, but at least the food and rooms were of normal standard and prostitutes would not be knocking on your door at night. After the seedy Rossiya, National and Ukraina hotels, foreign guests thought they were in paradise.
Compared to the provinces, however, Moscow was in a different league. I will never forget a rotten steak I was served in the Zhiguli Hotel in the town of Tolyatti that had actually gone green. This was followed by a telephone call to my room at 3 a.m. from a prostitute looking for business. Our floor lady must have been selling foreigners' telephone numbers to the local hookers.
Apart from hotels, there were hardly any decent restaurants in Moscow. There was an American restaurant, Trenmos (whose owner was eventually shot dead), the Italian Arlechino, the Alexander Blok ship restaurant and that was about it. If you didn't want to hang out with foreigners or some sleazy local types, your only option was to fill up the trunk of your car with beer, vodka, etc. from a Beryozka hard currency shop and head over to a friend's.
The only places where you actually felt that you were getting something approximating a nice night out were the family-owned cooperative restaurants, some of which actually succeeded in serving decent food and creating a cozy atmosphere.
Today, very few of these places either exist, or if they do, they are largely unrecognizable. The Shamrock and Jever bars, the Savoy and Penta, are still going strong, although for the most part they have undergone major change.
With all the bright lights and the mass of hotels, restaurants and bars now available, it is hard to believe that there was almost nowhere to go with a Russian friend in 1986, and that up until 1992-93, you would spend most of one's leisure time at home or at friends' apartments.
However, it is remarkable that Moscow has shed its Soviet traditions so quickly. A night out at a Soviet restaurant was a really wild experience, with everybody getting drunk, a live group or discotheque blaring out a variety of hits and every man and his dog trying to pinch your girlfriend for a dance.
I cannot now offhand think of a Moscow restaurant that has preserved these time-honored traditions. In some ways this is a pity. Having dinner in a quiet restaurant and going to a disco or nightclub does not quite give the same adrenaline rush.
It's strange how you do miss some things.
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