About Café Pushkin
Café Pushkin opened in 1999 and built itself to look like it had been there for two hundred years. The four-storey faux-aristocratic townhouse on Tverskoy Boulevard is a constructed fiction, the building is 1990s, the 'pharmacy' sign downstairs is theatre, the wood panelling and the library dining rooms are set design, but the cuisine is entirely serious. This is imperial-era Russian cooking at the level the country's aristocracy actually ate.
The menu reads like a 19th-century nobility banquet: beef stroganoff in the original preparation, veal Orloff, pozharsky cutlets, solyanka soup, pelmeni hand-made to order, and a blini programme with the full range of accompaniments from salted herring to malossol caviar. Portions are generous. The kitchen does not attempt modernist reinterpretation; it executes the classics with obsessive precision.
The four dining rooms each offer a different register, the Library is the most atmospheric, the Pharmacy downstairs is the most photographed, the Mezzanine is quieter for conversation. Café Pushkin is open 24 hours. The pre-theatre dinner and the post-ballet supper are both Moscow traditions the restaurant has anchored for a quarter-century.
Tourists love this place. That fact has not undermined the seriousness of the cooking. The kitchen is disciplined and the service, in period costume, avoids the camp that similar concepts elsewhere tip into.
Best Occasion Fit
A birthday dinner should feel like an occasion, and Café Pushkin has built itself specifically to do that. The theatrical setting, the classical menu that signals a special night without requiring difficult decisions, and the willingness to stage the room around a celebration (cake with sparkler, old-fashioned birthday service) make this Moscow's default high-end celebration restaurant.
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