This was a pretty amazing article - appeared a few weeks ago on the afisha.ru website and generated some reaction from the Moscow dining public. So I translated it:
White Russian
Zhenya Kuida, 18 Sept. 2009
"Our patio has been open all summer - it's a pity that no one really wrote about it. But we still did a great job with it - even on weeknights there was a line for it, people were booking tables an hour in advance. I've been scolded for the fact that not enough people know about our patio, but I just didn't have time, we built it all ourselves in a month, practically with our own hands, Arkady didn't even know. I heard he was going to hire another director for this restaurant and was on his way here to talk about that with me, but when he saw our patio he decided to let me keep my job."
Alexei, the director of Novikov's latest restaurant Tatler, is showing me sketches of how the interior is supposed to look. Inside they're doing the work (changing it from the restaurant which currently occupies the space, I Fiori), and for now only the white-curtained summer patio is open.
At the next table over, someone is smoking a hookah. The sketches show wooden tables, an open kitchen, Ralph Lauren furniture and clocks set to London time.
"Tatler is, after all, first and foremost a London magazine, the most important one about celebrities. Arkady really wants to make this restaurant more democratic, American-style, to get people to come here for lunch - big portions, big plates, an eclectic menu. It's true that we have a French chef, so this is difficult for him. At the last tasting Arkady took a long time explaining to him that he needs to have fewer fashionable things, that everything should be simpler. Why don't you order something, try something, everything is delicious, we have a new menu!"
The waiter walking by drops a menu, and Alexei rushes to help him. "I remember well what it's like to be on your feet all day. I myself am not from Moscow, I worked my first few years here as a bartender in a casino and then as a waiter in GQ Bar. I always found it interesting to work at the bar - even when I was a kid, I dreamed of becoming a bartender and making cocktails."
Alexei's phone rings, and he has a long conversation about a car loan. "I want to buy a Volvo, maybe now they'll give me a loan, one of the co-owners [of the restaurant] is a banker, he promised to help, and now I have a decent salary. It was, of course, a big step for me to become a manager. Although I'm really young, I run pretty much everything in the restaurant - I hire the staff myself, I watch the till, I structure people's work. Arkady only looks after the chefs and other little things."
Two beefy Armenians sit down at the table next to us, and Alexei's face darkens.
"Of course this used to be a completely dead restaurant. When I became manager, I cam here and freaked out - the place was full of darkies ["черные"]. It's like that everywhere - as soon as the darkies start to come, that's it, the restaurant dies. Of course I try to fight it - I don't let them in, I tell them that the tables are occupied or reserved, there's no table for you here, but you can't control everything, they still get in. And then normal Russian people come up to you and say, 'What sort of a zoo are you running here?' They also feel uncomfortable when something like that is sitting at the table next to them, they just want to come have dinner at a place with their own people, without these darkies. But what can you do, in these times of crisis things have become very difficult, who comes to restaurants these days? Just the darkies, no one else has any money. Just watch how restaurants go bad before your very eyes, and the same thing happens with clubs. One must strictly maintain the proper ratio - you can let them in sometimes, but not too many, so that they don't ruin the look of the place."
Alexei notices the hookah attendant walking by and calls him over. "By the way, we have excellent hookahs - the best in the city. Try the apple-flavored one, people say they come back to try it again."
2 comments:
Lyndon, I'm hard-pressed to imagine what you, as someone who's done time in Russia, could possibly find "amazing" about this. In a country that lynched more than 100 blacks last year, this is actually very mild discourse. He doesn't even suggest violence. All this amounts to is a reflection of the common attitude of ordinary Russians, who are among the most racist people on the planet.
The only thing I see that's amazing here is your clinical attitude. Where's your own condemnation? Can you expect Russians to do so if you can't manage to?
LR, I've missed you so. In response to your apparent outrage at my lack of outrage, a few points:
1. On the day I posted this, my goal was to throw up a couple of quick translations - I haven't had time to do much else, as you might be able to tell from the fact that on that same day (in October) I was still posting things about a trip I took in May.
2. What I found to be amazing was not that someone in Moscow would have or speak these thoughts - it's that someone in a service sector would be so non-media-aware and/or have so little clue about how bad these words would look in print. If you follow the link to the post on Ilya Barabanov's blog about this article, you'll see I wasn't the only one amazed by this.
3. A "clinical" translation without extraneous commentary often speaks better for itself than when surrounded by a bunch of self-righteous, frothy commentary. Don't you agree?
4. I hesitate to go down this road, but can you please explain to me what you mean by "lynched more than 100 blacks"? If you mean "people of color attacked and severely injured in documented hate crimes," that number is much too low; if you mean "people of African descent (as we Americans usually do when using the word "blacks") actually killed (which is what's implied by "lynched")," the number is almost certainly much too high. So please be clearer in the future if you wish to be taken seriously.
Peace out.
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