Even with international boycotts, public dissidence and performance artists nailed to the cobblestones of Red Square; Moscow manages to dazzle first-timers like a Chekhovian tale that’s best told as the first snow begins to fall. The lobby bars of the Ritz-Carlton and Metropol begin to fill, where ballerinas once flirted with Grand Dukes and Lenin once boomed Bolshevik rhetoric.
Today, men in fur-trimmed coats shop among bejeweled women at nearby GUM with its Bosco Café overlooking the Kremlin while trendier types seek out SHOP&BAR Denis Simachev or Le Form that’s like a Moscow-version of Dover Street Market. The city’s billionaires are consumed by art as boho artists mingle with plutocratic wives at the ever-expanding Garage Gorky Park. Russia’s most influential art museum, it’s adding a new pavilion by Rem Koolhaas and revamping one of the city’s most iconic restaurants.
Dining is a learned art in Moscow, perfected with silver spoons of caviar at Café Puskin, venison pie at Turnadot or discussing mixology over bone marrows at Uilliam’s. Chateau de Fantomas currently attracts the swankiest crowd, a semi-private member’s club that makes Soho House feel like a poor house. And for those undaunted by face control, that uniquely Moscow practice when bouncers look at your face and decide if you’re worthy of entrance at fashionable bars and clubs, hotspots like Gipsy and Soho Rooms make you forget there was ever persecution or injustice or even a revolution or two in early-morning Moscow.
