RESTAURANT REVIEW, With Shameless Confessions Included Paulaner Bräuhaus-Moscow Paveletsky Shliuzovaya nab., 2/1. (Metro Paveletskaya). Hrs. 11am-2am -- > Moscow is not the jolliest place in the world, for reasons I don’t need to retail here, but if you’re looking for a reliably happy hour (or two), there’s now a place you can count on for it – and you do the counting eins-zwei-drei, in the vernacular of half-liters, rather than the eins-zwei-polizei that life in the Big Onion so often projects. The Paulaner beer people, who micro-mass-produce some of the world’s best draft, have been busily upgrading my old Paveltsky vokzal ‘hood since March with a cavernously friendly House beer restaurant – apparently one of 28 worldwide, w/ Manhattan’s opening soon – at which amazing things can and do happen on your way to the bottom of the second liter: Moscow begins to fade from memory; a lot of patrons are *obviously* more overweight than you; and both your wife and the waitress reveal themselves by stages as better looking than you’d realized. Did I say happy hour? Ed Snowden could get serious jollies here for 90 minutes! Hey, I started looking for him a half-hour on. OK, it was our 1-month anniversary on Friday – which I remembered, luckily, via the simple expedient of smoothly responding, “Of course it is, honey,” when N. mentioned that that’s what Friday was. It was also a Homecoming Celebration for her after 3 wks away with some ripped-abs boy-toy under the transparent fiction of chaperoning invalids on a sanatorium furlough (w/ grandson V.) in a fictional southern location called “Anapa.” So we had two reasons to find out if there was anyplace left in town that was still doing Oktoberfest, and through the magic of laptopia we found it. After we’d specifically ordered beer they brought ambrosia of the gods instead (600 R/liter), which went well w/ our side dinner of Too Much Food, Please – sort of a Bavarian Meat Lovers für Zwei thing which our authentically Dirndl-clad (and increasingly attractive!) Russian Fräulein mounted on a candle-heated-from-beneath platter right on our table (no. 306 – remember I said cavernous?) because try as you might, you can’t inhale 2860 roobs-worth of roast beast ‘n’ sausages with Paulaner draft before some of it cools down a little. A bit more deutsche-kapusta/sauerkraut wouldn’t have hurt, but we couldn’t complain – and didn’t, as the remains (which would’ve fed two more peeps) were neatly doggy-bagged right before we stumbled back downstairs to the too-clean bathrooms and out onto the street, after 15 amusing min. of post-loo waiting for each other in the wrong places. Which I bet that happens there a lot. OK, the fight card: -- > Beer: the House oktober-holiday special draft; fabulous. Yeah, way expensive, but so what – you wanna be happy or not? 5/5 -- > Food: v. good indeedy. The wife thought the meat gravy was a little too something, I forget what, you’ll have to ask her yourself. Oh, and more kraut, pls – so a mere 4.5/5. -- > Atmosphere. On a Sat. @ 5 pm the place is about as fast-order-friendly (which it isn’t always, I read) as you can get – plus, you can sit anywhere in the barn-like main hall, which we chose over the empty but clearly less gemütlich non-smoking salon. And I’m glad we did, since it’s def an elbow-stretching as well as -tipping kind of experience. -- > Prognosis: This Bräuhaus will actually be somewhat nicer when the place is, well, a little more rundown – which is a sentence I swear to cripes I never thought I would write in Moscow. But really: it’s all still quite brand-spanking-new, which is not what you go to a beer hall for and not what you find in München, of course. Still, the decor is sympathetically forced-authentic, and the patrons – especially when the serious fat guys start filing in w/ their friends after 18:00 or so – clearly enjoy themselves. The threat of live music, happily, went unfulfilled; but it’s there (you could see the instruments!), so you’re on your own. 4.5/5 -- > Bathrooms. So clean you’re afraid you blundered into the Ladies. Again. 6/5 OK, if you’re reading this Sun. at 18:30 or so, there’s still plenty o’ time to make the final evening of Oktoberfest. Say hi to Ed, OK?
Posted on: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 14:35:56 +0000
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