THE SKAZKA
A Moscow café
I lived on and off for some time in Moscow, back in 1992 , during the Gorbachev moment of glasnost and perestroika. Those were the periods hopefully dubbed ‘openness’ and ‘restructuring’ , when it was clear to most in Moscow that there was very little openness available and nothing at all to restructure.
When I was first in town, I went in search of a good Moscow café and soon learnt how silly I was. Soviet thinking could not fathom , or tolerate, the notion of café culture. The idea of a pleasant, private place, where people met, talked and argued about everything under the sun, was counter-revolutionary, unpleasantly foreign and might be seen as downright subversive.
My friend, Nadia, was perplexed when I told her what a café was, and did, in Europe. I told her it served drinks, coffee and tea, wine and beer and sometimes served light meals.
‘Light meals ? Why go to a place where they serve next to nothing? In Moscow, we call that a restaurant .’
I soon understood what she meant. Restaurant menus often boasted dozens of different courses, very few of which were ever available. But I knew this had not always been so . When he visited Moscow in Tsarist times, back in 1903, an English visitor , Lieutenant–Colonel Newham Davis, found many decent cafés like the Café Philipov, the Yar and the Godlen Anchor, and happily commended them in his book, ‘ The Gourmet’s Guide to Europe.’
The Russian Revolution of 1917 put paid to such congenial watering holes. It was not until the Gorbachev era that distant relations of the café began to make their shy return. I remember the short-lived Glazur, billed as ‘the first co-op of the Soviet Union’, and could be called a café of sorts . Backed by a Belgian Brewery, the Glazur fielded a white piano and stern, unsmiling waitresses hovered over the diners like hospital nurses, and the menu carried this promise:
‘Our cuisine shall satisfy the tastes of the most exacting gourmand.’
It was the use of that preemptory ‘shall’ that caught my eye. The food was good, a Russian smorgasbord , or zakouski : olives, radishes, minced red cabbage, herring , pickled onion, potatoes and celery , smoked sturgeon. The Glazur was so successful for a while that a local mafia gang firebombed it, because the owner refused to pay protection money .
My friend Nadia did offer to introduce me to the closest thing she knew to what I called a café .
‘It’s on the outskirts of Moscow and called Skazka . It means the fairytale.’
It was snowing as we drove out of Moscow and Nadia recalled for me the old patriotic hymn children learnt to sing in the time of Stalin: ‘ “We were born to make fairytales (skazka) a reality. Of which people made a bitter parody: ‘We were born to make Kafka a reality...’”
The Skazka turned out to be a couple of wooden chalets, set in a snowy wood , and labelled ‘Bar’ and ‘Restaurant ’. Useful terms in Gorbachev’s Russia, because they might be stretched to cover anything, or nothing. The Skazka stood embedded in snow right up to its broad window sills and looked tightly locked. We knocked and got no answer.
On the roadside, a man was barbecuing shashlik, turning the skewers of roasting meat on a grill made from half an oil drum packed with charcoal.
‘Don’t waste your time in there’, he said. ‘Eat with me, instead.’
Nadia was amused. That sort of stalemate always tickled her . I went over to the door of the Skazka and banged in it for some time. Eventually, a tall waiter with perfect black hair that appeared to have been painted on, opened the door a crack and told me the Skazka was full and to come back in half an hour.
‘I told you to eat with me,’ said the shashlik seller
Nadia stepped past me and spoke rather sternly to the waiter and the room, he claimed had been full , suddenly had a free table. Indeed, so many free tables it looked like the Skazka was very short of customers. I felt much as Alice in Wonderland did ,at the Mad Hatter’s tea-party, when he insisted there was no room for her at his almost empty table.
It was half an hour before the waiter with the perfect hair came over and took our order . Nadia pointed out we had to get back to town and asked if he would hurry our food
He turned to her with a charming smile. ‘Oh please, but you have barely arrived. Don’t leave us so soon.’
Nadia was amused, again, ‘You see how it is with us. At first, we do not want to let you in – and then we won’t let you go.’
When we finally emerged, it was dark. The shashlik seller was packing up.
‘Did you enjoy the fairytale?’ he asked.
Delighted to know you enjoy them, Mike.
Thoroughly enjoying these, Chris.