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Restaurants and cafés
Today Moscow restaurants and cafés amaze you with their diversity – both in terms of gastronomic creations as well as their interior themes. Some of them take pride in being loyal to one particular cuisine – Japanese, French, Italian, German, Balkan, Jewish, etc. – others are dedicated partisans of culinary diversity. Simplicity, coziness or striking luxury, music with karaoke, live orchestra or quiet privacy, exotic atmosphere, retro or classical style – Moscow has it all to suit all tastes and purses. The pleasures of discovering menu offers of Moscow restaurants are not reserved for gourmets only – most food catering outlets can boast diversified and original menus created under the influence of the chef’s cooking skills and recipes as well as the style of the establishment itself. There’s a special segment of Moscow food catering market occupied by restaurants with exclusive cuisine that employ Russian and foreign celebrity chefs. There you will see exquisite interiors, not observed anywhere else, and will hear a special ‘culinary slang’. All this will make you sensate a real gastronomic exaltation at contemplating the still-life excellence with which the food is arranged on the plate and at savoring the palette of tastes and aftertastes of all the dishes that you are served. Like cuisine, interior decors of restaurants and cafés are also very diverse and their themes depend on the kind of public that these restaurants cater for. One can imagine the ordinary interior of a city café to drop in with your friends – light, clean and cozy filled with coffee and fresh pastry aroma. On the other end of the spectrum we have establishments serving certain social classes or interest groups and featuring some associated signs or sports attributes coupled with original style and mind-blowing furniture. There are also luxurious VIP restaurants whose interior includes live peacocks, waterfalls, antique chandeliers, fountains in lavatories and madly expensive masterpieces of art on walls. 
Usually a café is characterized by a more modest menu than that of a restaurant and a less eloquent interior design. As a counterbalance, one can choose here from endless variations of coffee, tea, chocolate and pastry. On top of that, many cafés today offer a certain choice of hot dishes and salads. Moscow has all kinds of cafés – glamorous club-type cafés, French and Italian cafés evoking images, sounds and colors of European capitals. Sometimes interiors, quality of service, menus and prices in elite cafés resemble so much those of a good restaurant that it is almost impossible to tell the difference and, as the result, they make the same vivid impressions on their guests. As a rule, such cafés are adjoined to luxurious hotels and stand-alone business centers. Winter in Moscow is very long. That’s why café and restaurant visitors hurry to take advantage of the warm season to sit on open-air verandahs under the leafage of blooming linden trees or against the background of the urbanistic flow of Moscow life. In summer time restaurant patios, terraces and tent-covered sidewalks are really crowded and noisy. You may have lived in Moscow for several years and may have been visiting various restaurants, cafés, coffee and tea houses and clubs every day, and yet a great number of them will still remain unexplored. It’s impossible to enumerate or name by guess all styles, culinary peculiarities and traditions, interior design and musical accompaniment variations that can be met in Moscow gastronomic establishments. When making a choice among Moscow cafés and restaurants you can always find a lot of elegant, reserved or swish ones where you can have a business meeting or a dinner with guests who are quite particular about class of the establishment they go out to. If we start to speak about tastes and preferences, then it would be right and logical - while in the Russian capital - to visit a Russian restaurant and to taste traditional dishes of the Russian national cuisine. In any of those you will be offered caviar and balyk (sturgeon cured fillet), jellied meat and baked ham, mushrooms in brine, vegetable salad, pierogis (pasties), dumplings and pancakes, fish broth with crayfish tail and rasstegai (a small pie with fish stuffing), rich scalded stchi (cabbage soup) when it is cold outside and a cold soup called okroshka with kvass (soured bread juice) and kefir when it is boiling hot in summer. For you to choose! Useful linksList of Moscow restaurnats |
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© 2010 Department of Foreign Economic |