Face value: The restaurant tsar

摘要

At the corner of Malaya Bronnaya and Bolshaya Bronnaya streets, in the now-plush area of Moscow known as Patriarch's Ponds, stands a statue of two nestling storks. For decades, the building behind the statue has intermittently housed an eatery named Aist (stork). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the street corner and the Azeri canteen that then stood on it were infamous for the bloody shoot-outs they hosted between rival Caucasian gangs. "Life was different then," says Arkady Novikov, who with his partners re-opened a restaurant on the spot at the beginning of this year; "people were different." The menu in Mr Novikov's latest venture is European, the decor lush, and in the evenings the junction outside is swamped with BMWs and tinted-windowed jeeps, drivers and bodyguards snoozing on the front seats as their burly bosses dine with expensive lady-friends. But Mr Novikov kept the old name—Aist—and the statue of the storks. "This is our history," he says; "maybe it's good, maybe it's bad." The nod to the past, he says, makes business sense, too: Muscovites come to see what has become of the old shooting ground.