One Night in Moscow

Big ups to Paris Hilton, who appears to have made Moscow her second home. She was just in town last month to visit roosky BFF Kiira Plastinina, the heinously rich teen-cum-heinous fashion designer. (I wonder what that last sentence will do for my Google hits…) This week Paris came back with that guy from Good Charlotte to promote her sexy new fragrance Can-Can Cocktail. (Again...)

Paris and Kiira ride the short bus the elevator at Yevropeisky shopping mall

Most Western stars are far too prudent to venture east of Cannes, and with good reason. A bad night in France ends with herpes and a sugar hangover, not missing organs and a ditch in Butovo*. Also, many customer service mainstays we take for granted in the West have not yet reached the former Soviet Union. Like human rights. And TiVo.

But I guess some people have a taste for extreme tourism. And you better believe Paris is getting real paid every time she shows her face in these parts - $1 million a night, if you read the Russian tabloids. Ow, ow! For that money, few people would kick Moscow out of bed for eating crackers. Certainly not me, with Long Island Ice Tea prices at 500 rubles and rising.

Paris about to get feised at her own party

Paris was last spotted at Wall Street Bar, the new and thoroughly weird conflation of all things English speaking. In the neo-modest tradition started by The MOST, it is touting itself as a not entirely depraved place for serious businessmen to meet other serious businessmen and stupidly attractive women. Seriously, looking at the girls in these photos, Paris Hilton comes off as about a 7 and me a feral gypsy child.

The Russian PH knockoff -- plastic smells weird, causes headaches

Wall Street Bar frequenters work hard and play hard. And get paid hard and pay hard (450 rubles for a mojito). There’s Bloomberg TV on the plasma screen cuz the Asian markets open at 3 am. Buy! Sell! Buy! Jackpot!

Checkin' her stocks

The ol’ co-opting-a-famous-name-sans-any-connection trick reminds of a scam language school Garvard Inglish which operated in Moscow in the early naughties. They flew in hordes of teachers from the First World then kept them as indentured servants in Russia, raking all the dough without paying the help. I knew some of these forgotten victims -- Americans and Brits who came with a dream to see the world and exploit innate language skills rather than get a real job. They were left destitute and malnourished, without enough money to cover the rounds at Silver’s. Since the expat.ru servers crashed, there’s no one left bearing witness to this atrocity but MDBIT.

But anyway, unlike that naughty Garvard, we trust Wall Street will provide refreshing beverages and invaluable business connections.

*Moscow suburb you never want to end up in. May as well be Afghanistan, because there’s no sushi and kalyan.

Wall Street Bar, 9/1 Volkhonka Ulitsa, Metro: Kropotkinskaya, Tel. 7(495) 916-5731

Photos: Paparazzi.ru, elite.ru

Faster, Stronger, Bigger Veranda

Ah, spring. It doesn't get any better than this. The snow's thawed to reveal all sorts of interesting animal, mineral and vegetable. All the metro dogs have that special look in their eye for you. And you've just got out of paying any taxes back home because you made waaaay below 84K this year (damn you, flaccid dollar).

Oh deer. It's this time again.

Moreover, just surviving the brutal spiritual washboarding of a Moscow winter is thrilling. Like winning a Darwinian marathon. The weak of spirit all gave up ages ago and went back home or to Eurasian safety zones, like Turkey. It's called the Great Winter Sucka Dropping. The strong remain in Russia to get the spoils of good weather: verandas.

Pagan spring veranda goddess

"Suck it, Zimaaa!!!" Ubermensch

There's no happier time on the club scene than "Goodbye Winter" party season. For one, greeting spring is a testament to the human will. And with thinned out crowds, there's more room to get freaky deeky. These photos are from a Vesna party at Emporio Cafe, where the beautiful and seski Survivors emerged from the tundra to take what's theirs. RWARRRR!


Photos: Mainpeople.ru

The Old Man & the Cheese

Haven’t you heard? Looks like we’ve been eating poo (a lot of it). Good one, Moscow.

But mastication stopped being fun a looong time ago. I, for one, lost my appetite somewhere around Etazh, a nasty little cafe chain that’s managed to harness the city’s worst restaurant tendencies: face control, tacky design, shameless misrepresentation of the rich culinary traditions of Japan, Italy and Mexico. Also, it’s loud, and the waiters are mean.

Screw you, Etazh.

When eating is a constant struggle, it’s easy to lose hope. For guidance, many turn to an expat eating club. Such as:

Journo Clusterfuck Thursdays — When you were young, energetic and could still fit into size 4 jeans, you went to Propaganda Thursdays to make friends. Some of them were even Russian. Now that you can’t be bothered with new people and all you want is a chimichanga and a margarita, you go to Hemingway’s, even though chances are high you’ll be trapped at the end of the table with “Francis” from “Element.” I mean, "Matt" from "Jew News." I mean, I love you guys.

Wednesday Evening Food Critics Association of Moscow — The Skull & Bones of the Moscow expat social world, WEFCAM is governed by intricate set of dining rules, such as “Teresa must always pay 1,000 rubles.”

Turkish Women’s Association — Rumor has it they eat tartines at Le Pain Quotidien on Mondays.

Cheezeburger Klub — I’m not only the president, I’m also a member. The club generally convenes at McDonalds Pushkinskaya, Starlite Diner Mayakovskaya or my kitchen Aeroport. Contact me if you want in.

Then again you may not want to eat with expats. They’re mostly cheap, fussy bastards, like this joker who did amateur undercover reporting into Hemingway's lack of chili cheese.



If you really want to lose your lunch, check out his riveting "Four Russian Hookers" documentary. It's like Spike Lee's "Four Little Girls," except starring an aging expat loser and his hookers.

Hemingway's, 13 Komsomolsky Prospekt, Metro: Frunzenskaya, www.hemingways.su

Burn, Kofe Haus, Burn

Cue a primal, Arsenio Hall hoot of "USA! USA! USA!" My opinionated, fanny-packed brethren sent us Starbucks on Sept. 2 to wipe out the capital's miserable coffee-joints. The most expensive drink on Starbucks' menu may be 270 rubles, but it's undoubtedly better that the thimbles of slop we got by on before. Look, I'm not the only one that feels this way. The design studio of Art Lebedev posted this cute little message on its blog:

Dear Starbucks! Do what you have to do to put Kofe Haus and Shokolodnitsa to death

Add Zen Coffee, Coffee Bean and especially Kofemania to that list, to make the Great Purge complete. Here's the contact if you want to join the movement: my_job@starbuckscoffee.ru.

Photos: flickr.com/photos/joemclaren, artlebedev.ru

Starbucks (inside Mega Mall), Khimki, Tel. 648-9466 , starbuckscoffee.ru

FAQ You, FAQ You, You’re Cool, FAQ You, I’m Out

There was I time I hated myself for being so poor I had to hang out at FAQ Cafe, a D.I.Y. bohemian place which looks ready to cave in on itself at any moment. Then I learned to stop worrying and love the arty, free-spirit-or-else of it all, because at least it’s not as bad as the rest of the club scene.

Or is it?

OR IS IT?


It all brings back bad memories of being in high school, taking Basic Photography and then showing it to people and writing poetry and then showing it to people. Plus, even if they’re hippie lesbians, the girls at FAQ still get nakey on the bar after two cocktails, which undermines everything, I think.

ArteFAQ, FAQ’s sophomore project, opened this summer on the other side of Tverskaya and is way more sophisticated. While FAQ Café is still getting scrounging money for shots of bathtub vodka, ArteFAQ enjoys imported beer and is writing a PhD dissertation on how to food is performed in the Soviet experience. If I don’t meet my husband in a bookstore poetically reaching for the same copy of Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish,” like I always imagined since I was a little girl, then it will be at “Gastrololiya,” a series of talks hosted at ArteFAQ about the critical theory of gastronomy.


The décor’s also a big improvement: overflowing bookcases, sundry old photographs, a fire crackling in the fireplace and a homemade Roy Lichtenstein painted on the ground. Basically everything people think academia will be like, before they realize they’ve condemned themselves to a life of poverty.


The best part about peeing there is that there’s a giant, quivering TV eye in one of the stalls.


Photos: faqcafe.ru, artefaq.ru

FAQ Cafe, 9 Gazetny Per., Bldg. 2, Metro: Okhotny Ryad, Tel. 629-0827;
ArteFAQ, 32 Bol. Dmitrovka Ul, Bldg. 1, Metro: Tverskaya, Tel. 650-3971

Me Me Me, Yay!

Gods are timeless and immutable, but restaurateur-diety Arkday Novikov symbolically marked a birthday anyway at Galereya, his pet favorite glitterati hotspot, on July 28. Where mortals see birthdays as an opportunity to treat their friends to bathtub vodka and a DIY sandwich bar, He took it all the way "there" with a modern-day Trimalchio's feast. And in true Novikov fashion, branded the fuck out of everything. What's my name!

Novikov or Bust!

Having trouble digesting under the dead shark-like gaze of Novikov? Then use his abounding self-likenesses as an opportunity to do anything you ever wanted to him.

I don't care if Sergei Zverev is becoming Jocelyn Wildenstein, homegirl has a sense of humor.

People did the same thing when WinZavod ran the "Four Seasons of Putin" exhibit earlier this summer. Такого как Путин!


Galereya, 27 Petrovka Ul., Metro: Pushkinskaya, Tel. 937-4544/4504

Photos: Geometria.ru

Mappin' Around

Now that I know how to Google Map, the MDBIT steamroller is unstoppable. My first project was on a theme near and dear to my heart: how to get drunk on the relative cheap downtown without drinking antifreeze. (It's good to see we have a sense of humor about things.) Click on the map to take you thurr.


Silver's is a pocket-sized Irish pub a short jig away from the Kremlin. Ruinous half-liter 180-ruble bucket o' Long Island Iced Tea, which is now rumored to be 200 rubles, kick-started most of my relationships in Moscow. Great place to perfect your all-purpose British Commonwealth accent. Forever congested with bleating expats, smoke and one retardedly hot South African (Hi, sugarbutt!). Do NOT try to change the channel from rugby on Friday night, clown.

Oft-overlooked on the drunken warpath is booze 'n' noodles joint Barfly, perhaps Moscow's best kept secret. Criminally bad service — "You waited 30 minutes to tell me you're out of vermouth for my cocktail?! Let me just go hang myself in the bathroom" — is made up for with 99-ruble Harvey Wallbangers. Assemble midnight snacks piecemeal from Moscow-rare ingredients like egg noodles, Shitake mushrooms and "tofu cheese." Barfly is so small, it'll only have a table if you drop by at 6 a.m. Which you should.

Cheese and wine, wine and cheese — what else do you want? Instead of dinner, head to VinoSyr. Bottles of wine start at $15 and cheese plates are, uh, also cheap. Beware: there's really nothing besides wine and cheese. Again, I cannot stress this enough: the best thing about this place is that no one goes there and you can have the whole elongated table to yourself.

The summer of 2007 zeitgeist bar, and it's not that expensive! Fashion designer Denis Simachev is soooo IT right now, as is the bar in his new boutique. Hey look, I already wrote about it. Cocktails start at a not insane 165 rubles, and house cider is 195. Yes, that's a hentai mosaic: black humour is the name of the game here. Fills up with Moscow's weirdest-haired hipsters by dark, so move quick to get a table.

Too poor to be pretentious, FAQ Cafe is bravely artsy low-key egalitarian in a city that hates that shit. So cheaply put together, looks ready to cave in at any moment. Split a bottle of Sovetskoe champagne for only 390 rubles (Wait, hippies, that's a 400% mark-up!). Some of the best people in the world work there, including free-spirit waitresses who take off their shirts. No, really!

Bargain-bin boho bar Gogol was an anomaly on upscale Stoleshnikov, before Simachev Bar came along and freaked everyone out. Big place with lots of lebensraum. Half-liter draft beer for, like, 100 rubles. Bypass the food. Some find the DIY interior and matching clientele DEPRESSING, but it's not as bad as OGI. Above all else, dependable when you've been denied entry everywhere else.

Some say the cocktail was born at Help. They are wrong, but this place does have the city's thickest tome of mixed beverages (starting from 180 rubles). Girls, if he's dating you here he thinks you're cheap, too. Bartenders do wacky tricks, are insolent and hate cheap expats.

Duma. (No, not THAT Duma!) A good-natured club that's terribly hard to find (but now you have a map, yo). Barely gets in on this list in terms of price (150 rubles for cheapest draft beer) but you're also paying for ambiance. Has the power to draw in a bigger Moscow Times/Bloomberg crowd than a Dissenter's March or a Strokes concert.

Last Drop is dank and underground with unreasonably loud music, but nonetheless it's a convenient place to sustain a 4 a.m. second wind of drinking when it's too cold to do it on the street. Prices marked in "droplets," which are actually just the number of rubles.



Silvers, 5 Tverskaya Ul (entrance on Nikitsky Bulvar), Metro: Okhotny Ryad; Barfly, 6 Strastnoi Bulvar, Metro: Chekhovskaya, Tel. 209-2779, www.barfly.ru; VinoSyr, 6 Maly Palashevsky Per., Metro: Pushkinskaya, Tel. 739-1045, www.vinosyr.ru; Simachev Bar, 12 Stoleshnikov Per., Metro: Teatralnaya, Tel. 629-8085, www.denissimachev.com; FAQ Cafe, 9 Gazetny Per., Metro Okhotny Ryad, Tel. faqcafe.ru; Help, 27 1st Tverskaya-Yamskaya Ul., Metro: Belorusskaya, Tel. 973-8000, www.helpbar.ru; Gogol, 11 Stoleshnikov Per., Metro: Pushkinskaya, Tel. 514-0944, www.gogolbars.ru; Duma, 11 Mokhovaya Ul., Metro: Okhotny Ryad, Tel. 692-1119, www.clubduma.ru; Last Drop, 4 Strastnoi Bulvar, Metor: Pushkinskaya, Tel. 292-7549, www.lastdrop.ru

Oh No, Bocconcino!

Went out for lunch today at Bocconcino, Arkady Novikov's posh pizzeria. At noon, two girls crashed their BMW into the wall, right where two men were sitting. The best part was then they got out and had lunch.






Bocconcino, 7 Strastnoi Bulvar, Metro: Pushkinskaya, Tel. 299-7359

Summerfolk (or There Goes the Neighborhood)

You bet it gets hot in Moscow in the summer: 36 degrees today and climbing. In times like these, poor people take a dip in the Moskva, rich people drive to their dachas and very rich people drive to their dachas in Zhukovka, 10 km outside the city center on the Rublyevo-Uspenskoye highway. In this village's elite settlements, new cottages start at $1 million, with things like helicopters thrown in to sweeten the package. These gated communities bear spacestation names — Zhukovka-3, Gorky-22 — or else evoke faraway American suburbia: Green Hill, Apple Garden, etc.


Subbing birches for beaches, Zhukovka is Moscow's Hamptons, a pretty place soured by urban vs. townie, richy vs. poory tension. A long time ago, Tsar Aleksei decreed that no industry shall ruin Zhukovka's natural beauty, making it the prime destination for black-lung city dwellers in the years to follow. Standard-issue huts were distributed among the proletariat in the late Soviet era. In the present day, many owners have held onto these and tend chickens in them year-round, despite the creeping onset of very important neighbors. At the neighborhood potluck you'll find the political elite (many members of the State Duma and the FSB (ex-KGB), Ukraine opposition leader Yanukovych), captains of business (Roman Abramovich, Nornikel head and skiing whore-monger Mikhail Prokhorov) and pop singers (Eurovision loser Alsou). Putin's brigade, heading deeper into Rublyovka, chokes the highway twice daily.


Poor people living in huts, rich people complaining of the livestock smell — a class war is a'brewing, if you listen to the old man on the porch in the rocking chair. As demand for luxury housing in the suburbs increases, things are getting nepriyatnie. The Guardian reported in February of mounting land grab "casualties," including the car-bombed Valery Yakovlev, formerly a community property official. The more civil are leaving it at strong suggestions that stubborn people surrender their land titles. The plebes have responded with harshly worded graffiti.


Before the Revolution comes, don't forget to enjoy Veranda u Dachi (Summer Terrace of the Dacha), part of Zhukovka's upperclass retail/dining neighboorhood, which was named the Best Out-of-City resturant by Menu.ru the last two years. The theme is pre-revolutionary country living — owner Arkady Novikov calls the restaurant a love letter to one's own home — but there's no Chekovian idyll. Cozy details like rustic cupboards with marinating cloves are undermined by perversely expensive prices and a degenerately rich clientele. A conservative estimate for dinner (Italian, Japanese, Uzbek and Chinese cuisines) is 70 euros.


The restaurant is attached to Dacha, an art gallery started by collector Yemelyan Zakharov and Sasha Vertinskaya, granddaughter of the ballad singer Alexander Vertinsky and niece of director Nikita Mikhalkov. It sells provincial knickknacks, and hosts haute couture shows like the one below.


The entire point of this article when I sat down to write it, arms sticking to the desk, was that it's now summer veranda season. Moscow is really cold more often than its really hot, so we really care about these things, yo. Veranda u Dachi's patio opened; people went.






Veranda u Dachi, 70 Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Shosse, Zhukovka village, Tel. 418-3394, www.artdacha.ru

Photos: readrussia.com, novikovgroup.ru, elite.ru