Moscow’s Aragvi restaurant, once the legendary haunt of KGB spies and cosmonauts, has reopened with its Soviet-era grandeur restored.
The high-end eatery on the main Tverskaya street, which opened in 1938 at the height of Stalin’s purges, has relaunched under the same name after a US$20 million restoration.
The restaurant opened on the initiative of Stalin’s notorious security chief Lavrenty Beria for the use of officials from his NKVD agency, the Soviet secret service later renamed the KGB.
Photo: AFP
It grew popular with other officials, and later in the 1960s, under then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in the so-called “Thaw” period when censorship and repression eased, lured a more bohemian crowd of artists and actors.
Aragvi was immortalized in Soviet literature and featured in films, although its sky-high prices made it accessible only to a tiny elite.
Diners had to pay one-10th of the average monthly wage for the privilege of eating alongside artists, cosmonauts, filmmakers and chess champions.
“In the Soviet Union, dropping a mention of the famous Aragvi chicken — which was grilled with nuts and garlic — gained you entry into the creme de la creme of society,” said one former diner, Nelli Maximova, an 83-year-old retired translator. “And it was really delicious, their chicken.”
In 1943, poet Sergei Mikhalkov was in the restaurant when he came up with the idea of writing the lyrics for the new Soviet national anthem, praising Stalin for inspiring “great deeds.”
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the state-owned restaurant was privatized and changed hands several times, but it rapidly lost its cachet and finally closed down in 2003.
Its new owners, Tashir group and Gor Nakhapetyan, who previously led the Troika Dialog investment group, have spent more than US$20 million restoring the restaurant, saying they want to revive a Soviet legend.
“Of course we wanted to revive nostalgia for a bygone era,” said Nakhapetian, who grew up in ex-Soviet Armenia.
The new menu includes the classic Georgian dishes that made its reputation, such as khinkali (dumplings full of meat and bouillon) and khachapuri, bread topped with cheese, as well as non-Georgian specialities, such as borscht and Black Sea herring pate.
Hearty Georgian fare, from a region wedged between Europe, Russia, Asia and the Middle East, is hugely popular in Russia, although it is usually more affordable than in Aragvi.
The restaurant is named after a Georgian river and located inside a former hotel where Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov once stayed.
Its main dining rooms are painted in the grand Soviet manner, with sheaves of corn, tractors and beaming workers, particularly the room once reserved for the use of Beria.
In the Stalin era, the restaurant had its most important ingredients, particularly those for its famous satsivi or cold chicken in nut sauce, delivered in a special train carriage from Tbilisi.
Under Stalin, an ethnic Georgian, “Georgian food was served at the Kremlin and was seen as the cuisine of the Soviet ‘tsars,’” said Leonid Parfyonov, a television host who has written many books about life in the Soviet Union.
Even after Stalin’s death, “in the context of the bleak Soviet culinary scene, the Georgian tradition of wines and spices brought a breath of joie de vivre, and Aragvi was a symbol of Soviet chic,” Parfyonov said.
Yet Aragvi also had a more sinister side.
It was a hangout for KGB officers who used it as a spot to recruit agents and its dining rooms were wired up with hidden microphones.
“For the KGB, Aragvi was always the favorite place to recruit agents and for farewell parties for agents going abroad,” said Mikhail Lyubimov, who long headed the KGB’s operations against Britain and Scandinavian countries and is now a writer.
One evening, “with plenty of drinking, one of our men invited a beautiful woman to dance, not realizing she herself was a US spy and was being tailed by the KGB,” he said, laughing.
“The front-of-house staff there were mainly retired KGB officers — and the food was sublime,” Lyubimov said.
In the reopened restaurant, the guestbook is full of nostalgic messages, with diners appealing: “Bring back the old recipes” and “Marinade the meat like you used to do.”
Marina Dolgikh, a 49-year-old lawyer, leafed through the menu, saying that she had popped in out of curiosity since she knew of the original restaurant.
Main courses are priced at between 900 and 1,700 rubles (US$12.50 and US$27), a tough stretch for middle-class Muscovites.
“In its time, Aragvi was inaccessible to me,” she said, adding glumly after looking at the prices: “And it’s still out of my budget.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts