infused with fresh ginger and honey, is delicious.
As Narzi had told me during our phone call, the city is
just waking up to mixology. “The market is virginal,” he
said, “like London 15 years ago. Now, there are exciting
new ideas and better products available than ever before.
There’s been a boom in great places to drink.”
He wasn’t wrong: Moscow has a phenomenal bar
scene if you know where to look, combining the laid-
back cool of NewYork’sWilliamsburg with the anything-
goes party vibe of Madrid. At one end of the spectrum
you’ve got elegant rooftop lounge bars such as City Space
and Kalina (
kalinabar.ru
) –
at the other, places like Don’t
Tell Mama (
donttellmama.ru
).
Colourful, with an eclectic
vintage feel and exposed brickwork, it’s a café by day, a
banging DJ bar as evening falls.
But for maximum fun, head for
Red October on Bolotny Island. A
chocolate factory in Soviet times,
now it’s filled with a bohemian mix
of art galleries, restaurants and
clubs. I’d been told it was like
London’s Shoreditch, only more fun,
and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s here
that the city’s party animals cut
loose every weekend in bars like
Strelka (
strelka.com
),
with its sightly
shabby NewYork-loft vibe, and clubs
such as Gipsy (
facebook.com/
ilovegipsy
)
and Belka (
facebook.
com/barbelka
),
where people arrive late and crawl out
even later.
Has Hollywood got it right?
The release of
A Good Day to Die Hard
last month cast a
spotlight on the city, but not in the way locals would have
liked. In this fifth
Die Hard
film, Bruce Willis engages in
running gun battles with mafia henchmen against the
backdrop of Red Square. The same negative cultural
stereotypes abound in last summer’s blockbuster
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
,
in which Tom
Cruise breaks out of a Russian Gulag full of swarthy
Slavic types before breaking into the Kremlin (which
then explodes).
Fur hats aside (Moscow is freezing in the winter),
these depictions are, of course, ColdWar fantasies. “These
movies are a great way to bring tourists, but they’re also
full of prejudices,” says Sergei Pavlovich Shpilko, who
heads up Moscow Tourism. “It sometimes feels like
there’s an information vacuum. We want to dismiss the
old stereotypes – like matryoshka dolls – and show we’re
a modern place.”
It’s fitting then, that we’re sitting in the Moscow
Museum of Modern Art (
mmoma.ru
)
as we chat, in the
midst of an exhibition by Aidan Salakhova, one of the
city’s leading artists. Surrounded by eye-catching
sculptures, we could easily be in a room at the
Guggenheim in Bilbao or Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne.
The modern-art scene here is thriving, but this is a side
of the city rarely documented. The Garage Centre for
Contemporary Culture (
garageccc.com
),
for instance, is a
cool space set up by Roman Abramovich’s partner, Dasha
Zhukova, and one of the hottest tickets in town for big-
name shows, such as a recent retrospective on film-maker
Michel Gondry. Winzavod (
winzavod.ru
),
is another
cultural boon: a former winery that
houses a dozen galleries, many for
working artists.
Is Moscow expensive?
It’s possible to spend an awful lot of
money – especially in the ritziest
bars, restaurants and boutiques
along
the
main
shopping
thoroughfare, Tverskaya Street – but
you don’t have to. Take the Metro,
grab lunch for around €10 at a
Russian café chain such as Mu-Mu
(
cafemumu.ru
)
and follow the advice
of Nikita Bogdanov, Airat Bagautdinov, Artem Savilov
and Sergey Sobolev. Two years ago, they started Moscow
Free Tours (
moscowfreetour.com
),
which they offer every
morning, taking in some of the best tourist sites in town
with a lively commentary. “Travelling around Europe,
we were inspired by the example of free tours in other
cities and we found it shameful we didn’t have anything
like that in Moscow,” explains Bagautdinov.
This quartet is part of a new generation of young
Russian entrepreneurs who are taking inspiration from
their experiences abroad, then returning home and
making Moscow more tourist friendly in the process
–
introducing Segway rides, for instance; or big, red,
double-decker sightseeing buses (
hoponhopoff.ru
).
“
Our generation is different for many different reasons,”
says Bagautdinov. “The fall of the Iron Curtain, a strong
economy and cheap flights mean we now travel a lot.
We decided to establish Free Tours in order to break the
stereotype that Moscow is an expensive city.”
And Moscow is just the kind of place where a guide
Truth No 02
THERE’S BEEN
A BOOM IN
GREAT PLACES
TO DRINK
»
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D I S C O V E R Y
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