17 April 2024~ Craft Garage Kaliningrad a Pit Stop for Good Beer
On the same evening that we happened upon the Beer Bar on Prospect Mira and Bar Sovetov, we stumbled upon and into Craft Garage. You’ve guessed it! Whereas it could be argued that my MOT was long overdue, that I was urgently in need of a rebore and my big ends had gone, Craft Garage is not that sort of place.
In spite of the name, the service that Craft Garage provides is strictly beer related. Why else would I beer there? (Ho! Ho!) The clue lies in the ‘Craft’ part of the name. Craft standing for ‘Craft Beer Bar’ ~ crafty, ay!
Craft Garage Kaliningrad
The trend for this type of bar, as opposed to a fully fledged traditional pub, gained popularity in the UK in response to the micro-brewery boom and the inherent advantages of low start-up and maintenance costs together with ~ as the bars are usually small ~ a means of avoiding or at least diminishing the outrageously iniquitous business rates ~ a robber baron tax, which, not unlike death duties, is totally unjustified and is the current primary cause (bar one🙊) of the decay of Britain’s high streets.
The trend for such bars in Kaliningrad, whilst not motivated by the same factors, has gathered pace in recent years, as the taste and therefore the market for beer in general shows an exponential increase, decreasing the sales gap of old between Russia’s flagship vodka.
With my fan belt slipping and my radiator running dry, I was pleased to learn that not only was stumbling into Craft Garage an excellent idea, but that the bar dispensary was in stumbling distance itself, ie just inside the door.
Behind the bar, a youngish chap presided over a chalkboard containing beers of sufficient quantity and with enough interesting names to verily make one’s moustache curl. I’d left mine at home, but the barman’s made up for it. He had one of those Salvador Dali jobs, and the beer was certainly working.
As Salvador Dali was not listed among the range of beers on offer, and I didn’t know how to say in Russian ‘Which beer should I drink to grow a moustache like yours?’, I decided to play it safe, plumping for a beer recently tried and tested at bar Forma, which goes by the name of Kristoffel. It’s a nice name and a nice beer.
Craft Garage is not full of old engine parts, grease monkeys and the smell of spilt fuel and tyres; it is a well-oiled hip joint, suitably decorated and furnished around the novel theme that it has adopted. Its name and image lend themselves admirably to the continued restaurant and bar interest in the nuts and bolts ‘industrial look’, of which there are two categories. Both are shabby chic, but one is more shabby than chic, and Craft Garage occupies the top-drawer end of the chic curve. Excuse me, I am going to use the word ‘plush’.
For example, there is nothing shabby about the brick-effect walls, the cutaway oil drum chairs, the framed exploded vehicle-engine diagrams, the polished tables and bar area. In fact, polished is another good word, as everything in Craft Garage is as clean and sparkling as the pampered plugs of your favourite Rolls Royce’ engine. And whilst the floor is designer distressed, it is completely free of skidmarks.
The vintage accoutrements are, of course, less believable than a black Dr Who, but the willing suspension of disbelief works better for me in this case than my analogous reference. Moreover, Craft Garage has the advantage of allowing you to travel back in time with the company of your choosing, and whilst you can and must fault woke, you cannot fault Craft Garage.
A complete oil change (which you will need if you have spent half a lifetime drinking Watney’s) starts from 300 roubles.
There’s regular and premium, thus every engine is catered for, even the high-performance kind, and as every beer comes complete with a not-to-be-sneezed-at octane rating, when you finally reach the finishing line you can be sure of feeling well tuned up.
Craft Garage, the place to go when you want a night on the pistons!
Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad Retro with a Heart of Gold
It’s a venue which immortalises the House of Soviets, serves good beer, hosts music evenings and likes you, the customer.
13 April 2024 ~ Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad Retro in the House of Soviets
Do you believe in coincidences? In my most recent post I wrote about the gradual disappearance of Kaliningrad’s most infamous and controversial landmark, the House of Soviets. Less than a week later, I find myself in a subterranean bar dedicated to that very building.
Bar Sovetov is located in what once was, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the residential quarter of choice for Königsberg’s affluent citizens.
On foot, it is something of a trek from the city centre to this still sought-after district, but it is one I made on numerous occasions in the days when a bar, long since gone, the enigmatically named Twelve Chairs, exercised a consistent influence and justified the effort.
Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad
Whilst in the character of its rooms, Bar Sovetov does not possess the intricacy or the old-world charm that gave Twelve Chairs its je ne sais quoi, it is no less thought-provoking in the nature of its decoration and appurtenances of thematic quirk.
The two-roomed bar, with its truncated corridor leading to the lavs, is very much a pop art haven. Victor Ryabinin, former artist and local historian, would have adored it! Symbolism abounds: ‘Look Out!’ the slogan reads. ‘Big Brother is Watching you!’ You see it above the full-sized wall mirror in which you are watching yourself.
A white face mask framed between two suspended lamps exudes from the wall. Wearing a baseball cap in such a way that it partly conceals its features, it holds to its lips an admonitory finger attached to a long white arm. As with the face above it, the arm emerges from solid brickwork as it would through the fold of a curtain. Both face and arm are whimsical, especially in the matter of their relative dislocation, but irony and surrealism are the uniting forces that bring them together.
These are just two of many examples of Bar Sovetov’s camp milieu. Wherever you look, be it high or low, another element of the quaint and fanciful leaps out to greet and surprise you.
With the obvious exception of Aleks Smirnov’s Badger Club, lovers of the out-of-the-ordinary will be hard pushed to find even among Kaliningrad’s most unconventional watering holes anything that surpasses Bar Sovetov’s quaint burlesque. But for all that it camps it up, the nostalgia has a genuine ring; it springs from a source of real affection. And the humour the props elicit, be it aimed at you and me or tailored to the refined perception of the discerning intellectual, leaves plenty of form intact for the inquisitive mind of the history buff.
The genesis, erection, completion and the long-standing but idle years of the House of Soviets’ occupation are captured step by step in a series of timelined photographs. The images of the building in its promising phase of construction, with cranes on either side, are particularly poignant memories, given that in its obliteration almost identical cranes in almost identical places stand either side of the shrinking structure.
On the opposite side of actuality, a wall in the bar’s first room is a bold painted visual replica, close up and in your face, of the House of Soviet’s exterior. The effect is profoundly Gotham City, gaudy, haunting, claustrophobic but seminally cartoon, a perfect piece of ‘dark deco’ kitsch. Further urbanisation occurs not in the question itself, which is off the wall whilst on the wall, but in the way it is daubed across the wall, which reflects the mind of graffiti man stretched to its utmost limit: “Who,” it asks, “killed the House of Soviets?” If we didn’t laugh, we’d cry.
More real photos of the fated hulk that over its 53-year existence dominated Kaliningrad’s skyline, exciting in its awesome prospect, ambivalent and contentious in what it actually stood for and why it stood for so long, can be found in the bar’s back room.
It is here that the structure’s rightful place in the socio-political era into which it was given a sort of life or maybe a life of sorts is given historical context. Framed copies of Soviet art, amusing, powerful and all iconic, visually break up the hard brick-wall to which they are attached, whilst in one corner of the room a little shrine pays tribute to the final days of Sovietism.
There, upon a shelf, rubbing shoulders with the printed word and a quaint assortment of nick-nacks, sits a large portrait photograph of if not the architect of perestroika then the man who is widely considered to be its chief executive officer, former General Secretary Gorbachev, twinned in the opposite corner with a replica set of traffic lights, which, for some exotic reason or perhaps no reason at all beyond their anomalous presence and illuminative oddity, cast a lurid reddish glow across the whitewashed brickwork.
The seats in this comic-strip memory, when not authentic 70s’ vintage, are made from wooden pallets, painted to look distressed, put together as benches and kindly equipped with padded seats. However, recalling the slatted wood benches with which Kaliningrad’s trains were furnished twenty-three years ago, such convenient cushioned luxury may be but the useful product of indulgent historical revisionism. Whilst the past is unrelenting in its prescribed but often unforgiving and impractical perpetuity, concessions ought to be made, don’t you think, to our poor post-Soviet posteriors. Historical accuracy has its virtues, but is it worth corns and blisters?
Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad
The bar itself, that is the thing on which when you buy your beer it temporarily rests on top and the area to the rear of it, is a content-managed zone, where normal things normally sold behind bars share more than their fair share of shelving space with the weird, the wild and the whimsically whacky. Note the hollow concrete blocks shown in the photo below that have been used to comprise the wall of the bar. Is that or is it not a passing nod to the House of Soviets?
A conforming principle of all such bars, that is to say craft-beer bars, is that the beer selection is written in chalk on good old-fashioned blackboards. What is it, I ask myself, and I suppose you ask yourself too, about this rudimentary practice that makes it so applicable, so pleasingly, conventionally and fundamentally right and so well received in its prime objective, which is to call to our eager attention the dispensation of quality brews? When you’ve found the answer to that one, you might go on to answer the question ‘Who killed the House of Soviets?’ I have a hunch that in both cases we will discover the hand of Old Father Time.
From the six or so beers on offer, I ordered myself a ‘Milk of …?’ Er, a ‘Milk of …?’ What was the name of that beer? Ah yes, now I remember, I bought myself a ‘Milk of Amnesia’. How could you not drink a beer like that, with a name so unforgettable?
In summing up the Bar Sovetov experience, the beer is good. The atmosphere is atmospheric. The people who run the bar are real; in other words, they are genuinely friendly and they are also good at what they do. They effortlessly embody and earnestly convey the qualities prerequisite for fulfilling the role they have given themselves, that of convivial mine host, in an age when many are either not up to it or simply not fit for purpose.
Those who earn their living in the hospitality trade at customer-facing level, would do well to bookmark this truth, that the bar or pub in which they perform is as much a stage as any other and their customers are their audience. Once the curtain goes up, if you cannot manage authenticity, you must put yourself out there, put on a smile and remember that it’s show time! If the act is one the punters like or at least is one that they can believe in, and the beer is good and well kept, they’ll keep on coming back. Loyalty is everything, and that applies to the service industry as it does to everything else, and I cannot think of a better bar more deserving of it than Sovetov.
13 March 2024 ~ Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad
Those of us in the UK who are firm believers in the importance of preserving traditions and the history of our country, and who do their bit in this regard by paying homage to, and overpaying for the beer in, one of the oldest legacies of our country’s heritage, I am talking about the British pub, will be well acquainted with such familiar pub names as the King’s Arms, Nag’s Head, Fox and Hounds etc, and had you been around in the 1980s and 90s the fad of renaming pubs with silly names, such as the Slug and Lettuce and Goose and Firkin, but in all your days of pub frequenting you may never have come across any drinking establishment, be it a pub or a bar, that goes by the name of Form.
Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad
Form is a malleable word with manifold definitions, as any search through online dictionaries testify. One of the simpler meanings is that of a hard, plain bench, the more complicated reserved for the exotic world of aesthetics. Then there’s ‘he’s got form’, which is, in police parlance, another way of saying he’s done time, which is another way of saying he’s been in the nick, which is another way of saying that he has been in prison. But whether ‘form’ has to do with a hard-arsed bench or is recognition of a criminal record, one thing we know for certain is that Form is the name of a Kaliningrad bar that sits next door to the Yeltsin.
In short, the Yeltsin and Form are geographical neighbours, located either in the same building or one that is joined and adjacent. I have not quite made up my mind which of the two it is, as usually when I visit them I have downed a pint or two, which seems to a certain extent to demagnetise my compass. Suffice it to say, for arguments sake, that the space between the two establishments is less than a stone’s throw away.
This convenience of vicinity does not automatically mean that once you have found the Yeltsin, you have also found Form. The Yeltsin has a belter of a sign and sits prominently on the cusp of a junction which, at certain times of the day, is fairly heaving with traffic. So, if you are looking out for bars, the Yeltsin is hard to miss, and those that say it isn’t should hurry along to SpecSavers.
Conversely, its bedfellow, Form, has no such startling signage, at least not one that is visible from the busy vehicular street, and as the entrance is off the pavement, down some steps and tucked at the back of a forecourt, getting to know that the bar is there either involves a pedestrian element or relies upon word of mouth.
Take us, for example, me and my fellow pub crawlers. It was the bar staff at the Yeltsin who apprised us of Form’s whereabouts in answer to our question where is the next nearest bar?
Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad
Vicinity, and close proximity, are not the only things that the two bars have in common. Both bars cater predominantly for a young clientele. Both, in fact, are student hangouts. Both bars have an appealing basic look. Both have a vintage approach to décor, and some of their customers, not all, but some, have a bit of vintage about them. Both bars cater to the craft beer penchant for the names of beers and their respective strengths to be written in chalk on boards. And, last but by no means least, both bars have a reputation for keeping and serving premium beers on a selective, rotating basis.
Where the two differ is that the Yeltsin is more alpha male and Form more feminine. Now, don’t get excited and don’t go all western liberal gender woke on me, I do not mean it like that. My definition divides the two bars into one which seems geared to young male drinkers who equate craft beers with male camaraderie, and the other that seems to attract a more mixed crowd. Or, to put it another way, go to the Yeltsin for good beer, to listen to tracks on a classic juke box and a game of table football ~ you can also admire the urbanised bogs, with their lashings of bold graffiti ~ but go to Form if you want to sit in a group around tables you’ve pushed together to discuss the grades you got for your essays.
Neither of the two bars are better than the other, not in the strict comparative sense, but nuances in composition lend to each a slightly different feel.
From an architectural standpoint, Form has less form than Yeltsin. Yes, yes, I know: he was a larger-than-life man, with a lived-in and craggy face … Form, on the other hand, is little more than a room ~ little more than a large room, granted ~ hived off down one end by the inclusion of a shelving unit filled with intriguing vintage stuff, which acts as a screen for a makeshift cloakroom.
Form is not exactly spartan, but neither is it cluttered. It contains a number of antithetical but, even so, well-planned pieces that might not or ought not work together, but in Form they actually do. And Form is very comfortable. The floor may be plain old concrete, but it is patched with vintage mats — real, proper, woven mats, agog with interesting patterns. The retro furniture is hotch-potch, but all the more engaging for it. The wall mirrors look in shape as if they once belonged to, and are now on loan from, a 1970s’ lava lamp, and up there on the ceiling some strange artistic drawing is going on: lots of dark black swirling lines, some being tightly compressed, others apart and free flowing, which would not look less at home superimposed on a TV weather chart.
As for the lighting ~ how could I possibly not mention the lighting! ~ the ambient light is dimmed exactly to the right level, and the wall lights are of that special kind that direct illumination in an accommodating intensity only to where it needs to be and just as much as there needs to be, thus creating the sort of mellow cloistered moon-filled shadows in which a canoodling couple could easily fall in love or a single man could fall in love with his beer.
The bar within the bar, ie the actual bar itself, is straight out of DIY Ville. Wooden, too high for comfort, so that when you try to lean upon it, you look as if you’re begging, which, when the bar is full, I imagine you very well might be, all behind it is on display ~ buckets, pipes, barrels, glasses ~ whatever they use behind the bar you see it. It’s a wonderfully basic bar and that’s basic with a capital ‘Б’.
As the seating is notably mismatch, finding a chair to suit you should not be a crucial issue, but in the unlikely event it becomes one, there is plenty of scope for musical chairs.
Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad
My most recent visit to Form was a strictly Jack Jones affair: I was going it alone. Having purchased for myself a half-litre of Kristoffel Blond, six percent in strength and 400 roubles a pop, I took up temporary residence in a low-slung, wooden-framed fully cushioned chair, which, in my professional opinion as an always-on-duty vintage dealer, had travelled into the 21st century from way back in the 1970s. The chair and I were perfectly matched. Within a few minutes of sitting there, a couple, on whom I had never laid eyes before, opted for the seats opposite and joined me at my table.
In broken Russian and beery English Me, and in beery Russian and broken English Them, we conversed quite satisfactorily. What the gentleman of the two did not know about craft beers you could write on a half-torn beer mat. Thus, we spent in our comfortable vintage chairs a pleasant 60 minutes talking the kind of talk that only beer drinkers are able to talk whilst they are drinking beer.
Definitively and succinctly put, Kaliningrad’s Form is a comfortable, laid-back place. It has a lighting system to sing about, a convincing vintage feel and beers you can fall in love with. It caters inexclusively, but let us hint predominantly, for those who are young and intelligent enough to know what it means to drink sensibly, but nevertheless probably don’t, and strange old English fellows who certainly do but don’t, never have and in all likelihood never will be able to, but who are skilled in waxing lyrical about beers of outstanding quality — which is something that Form has — and also about good bars — which is something that Form is.
If it was up to me, I would say that Form is always on form, but I’ll leave it up to you to form your own opinion.
24 February 2024 ~ Patisson Markt Restaurant Kaliningrad Good Value
It’s one of two buildings that flank the entrance to what was once Königsberg Zoo, now the Kaliningrad Zoopark. Once upon a time, it was an old eatery with a distinctly Soviet feel. In 2004, I nicknamed it the Restaurant of Many Menus, for just that reason. In one would go and out would come the menus, several at least, weighty tomes, impressively, if not dauntingly, cram-packed with a plethora of traditional Russian dishes, all for one and one for all unashamedly non-vegetarian.
Not so today. Gone are the leatherette bound-in-brown gastronomical bibles, replaced by simple card menus that are pretty and neat by design and eclectic in their choice of nosh. Attractive in themselves, they are by no means incipiently necessary, since Patisson Markt operates on the self-service principal. All you have to do is skim your pre-selected tray along the polished metallic surface of the long zig-zagging shelf and construct a meal of your choosing from the many and varied selections of food displayed in the glass-fronted cabinets.
Above: The long serving counter cuts a dash of its own; a glass and metal complement to the unadorned concrete ceiling, all agog with pipes and wires, as if plaster board and trunking have yet to be invented.
The long zig-zag cafeteria counter offers a mouth-watering selection of savoury dishes, with more than enough vegetarian options to placate the non-meat palate. As a lover of simple food, it is not often that I can say that I was impressed with what was on offer, but here I most assuredly was.
That’s me saying that …
As might be supposed, meat and fish are everywhere, but Kaliningrad has at last come of age, and there are easily more than enough food variants not containing animal parts to placate and delight the fragile sensibilities of the staunchest vegetarian. As far as I am aware, this is as true of the sweets as it is of the savoury dishes. To my knowledge, none of the ice creams, tartlets, cakes, pastries and anything delicatessen are made with pork or beef, so if sweet-toothed things turn you on, Patisson Markt should flick your switch.
The carousel below provides a tantalising exposition of the delicious variety of food on offer at Kaliningrad’s Patisson Markt.
Patisson Markt Restaurant
This welcoming restaurant next to the zoo has come a long way since it was something entirely different. Various tweaks over the years, followed by a redefining makeover, have transformed a restaurant which was perfect for its time, including its bulky menus and traditional Russian grub, into bright and breezy, hip and buffet, thanks mainly to a design initiative that cunningly unites the naturalistic world around an alfresco dining experience.
I spy whilst eating apple pie (yum), an unusual-looking roof roundel. Whatever it is and whatever it may have been, it visually consolidates the foliate theme, that of nature’s outside in.
The naturalistic elements feeding this idea are simple but effective. Take open-ended, cubicle-type, high-standing shelving units, some made of wood others from ebonised steel, fill the compartments with logs cut to order, add convincing imitation ferns, plants and jars of pickles and arrange them in such a way so that each distils its own space from the generic space it occupies.
In any other interior context, the long and angular servery would focalise the content of the room, but hived off behind a light-blue-painted screen with pockets of shelving modules and open louvre window shades, it melts into the background, letting the props and various artifices manage mood and atmosphere.
Above: Louvre screen and windows … I’ve seen this done in the Kavkaz Restaurant: the knowing that you are inside but the feeling you could be outside. The blinds and trellised glass windows add an imaginative touch.
The open plan but cleverly screened nature of the long room together with its floor to ceiling windows, pleasantly partner to give a sense of bright and airy that is just seclusive enough to create the illusion of private dining without the feeling of being hemmed in. I don’t have to tell you how well it works, as I have told you that already.
The immediate room from the entrance lobby is the one where the former restaurant plied its trade. However, its ‘old-fashioned dine in secret whilst feeling uneasily bourgeoise’ has since been consigned to history, and I am perhaps the only one who remembers its enclosure and secretly mourns the loss of its War and Peace style menus, which have faded into obscurity long ago with my youth.
Nevertheless, of the two dining areas it is still the least ethereal. The luxury of light and bright resides in the long extension or knocked-through room on the other side of the building, which, through the conceits that I have described, bring the outdoors indoors, making the restaurant summer in summer and keeping it summer in winter.
Patisson Markt Restaurant
Patisson Markt is light on your senses and also light on your pocket. It is a ‘something for everyone’ place, even for a plain-and-simple-food man like myself, and for those with more discerning tastebuds there is plenty more besides, all with taste and quality but not at the price of a trip to the moon.
Opening times Friday & Saturday 9am to 12am Sunday to Thursday 9am to 11pm
And you should try these whilst you’re at it?
Mama Mia Restaurant There are pre-set lunches at a very good price. I had Greek salad, soup and pizza accompanied by cranberry juice. Café Seagull by the Lake Café Seagull is an excellent place for simply relaxing. The terrace and the restaurant windows look out over Kaliningrad’s ‘pond’. The cuisine, both in terms of presentation and taste, received top marks and the service could not be faulted. Balt Restaurant (Zelenogradsk) Recommend the Balt? I’d buy it if I could! Soul Garden (café garden complex) If you don’t go there, you’ll never know what you’ve missed! It’s unusual, and the view is well worth viewing.
Updated: 13 January 2024 | First published: 15 September 2022 ~ Upper Pond, Kaliningrad, new Garden Cafés
A few moments ago, you said in your bestist Russian, ‘Short pashalta’ (bill please), hopefully paid when you got it and have just legitimately left the Seagull by the Lake café, which was the subject of one of my earlier reviews. Turning right, you are now strolling along the side of the Upper Pond opposite a cobbled Königsberg street in the direction of Youth Park.
If you keep walking, you will arrive at a point where the presence of a fenced garden reduces the pavement to a narrow strip. Pedestrian activity is fairly busy here, and as the walled and railing boundary to your left, hedged in with dense confers, prohibits leeway, in order to make headway you will have to play kerb-hop, which is like kerb-crawling but without the fringe benefits.
When the walled and confer garden slips away, at the point where the pavement widens, you would, had you been walking here in the spring of 2022, have found yourself confronted by a disused café/restaurant, a rectangular slab of a building, covered all over in wave-like crustations, one corner surmounted by a metallic lighthouse, another by Captain Ahab, as I saw fit to anoint him, looking proudly over the rails of his elevated quarter deck with a massive globe, the world, at his feet.
Captain Ahab aloft the old Prichal Restaurant // Demolition in progress 2022
Before demolition commenced // Roofless in September 2022
Forever curious and not a cat, I wondered in my previous post on Ahab, whatever would become of him and the gardens that he presided over. Both the marine-themed café/restaurant and its gardens had been sinking steadily, year on year, into dismal destitution. Decay had moved in where trade had left off, and decay, dreariness and impending doom were the avatar of its fate.
The oriental garden went West first (every pun intended). The reed-thatched roofs turned green and mouldy, fell in upon themselves and then collapsed. The shrubs and bushes, once the beneficiaries of a culture of assiduity, exploited the dearth of supervision and in its absence had reverted, like children bestowed with too many rights and a woeful lack of moral guidance, to the clarion call of the wild.
And yet, even at its height, when all in the garden was rosy and the restaurant to which it belonged, although a most peculiar spectacle, was not quite the eyesore it eventually became, to contemplate the whole with anything else but regret was a feat so tremendously difficult that it challenged you to do so in contradiction of every tenet you had ever considered complied with good taste.
Indeed, if an oriental garden overlooking a man-made pond, which once belonged to the German city of Königsberg in what used to be East Prussia but now is Russian Kaliningrad, set against the side of a curious but somewhat tawdry building, which would look decidedly more at home in an amusement park on the north coast of England, failed to provoke the question WTF is going on? ~ then you might as well give up entirely, welcome the immigrant boats at Dover and, Heaven forbid that you could be so reckless, put your faith in the Labour party. On the other hand, with a little charitable latitude of thought, there is room for the hypothesis that having sailed the seven seas, Captain Ahab, believing by appearances that he must be off the coast of China, decided to drop anchor.
It looks like Chinagrad?
Not that it matters a fig. The garden, with its reed-thatched gazebos, which went the way of neglect ahead of Ahab’s building, possessed a certain twee appeal, and there was unity of composition in the design of the man-made structures, the choice of materials used, the natural blending of bushes and shrubs and the seemingly inorganic, but actually carefully planned arrangement, by which each and all of its components had been scrupulously laid down.
Then ~ I believe it may have been early in 2021 ~ a large tree came crashing down in the wind, smashing its way through the wall and railings. And the garden once so cultivated, so trimmed, so neat and expressly inviting was reduced from what many believed to be an object of mastered near perfection to the most inexpressible mess.
In the twelve months before Ahab and his Mablethorpe arcade hit the demolition skids, the beautiful gardens that were, but which, alas and wistfully, entered the realm of no more and never will be again, began to be ruthlessly cleared, and as the sounds of chain saws died away, replaced by the rhythm of hammers and the high-speed whines of angle grinders, it was clear to the not-so-innocent bystander, me, who was gawping there and quite on purpose, that alterations were underway.
Roadside view of garden, September 2022The garden as it appeared in September 2022Pond in the garden next to Upper Pond, Kaliningrad, September 2022Small terrace, work still in progress, Upper Pond, Kaliningrad, September 2022
Even as a passer-by, I saw shrubs being pruned, new vegetation planted, pavements taking shape, and two large and rather bland slope-roofed garden sheds rising above the perimeter, and, at the centre of all this make-good mayhem, Patrick McGoohan’s (The Prisoner’s) dome, or so I was pleased to fancy, only to be brought down to Earth with the phlegmatic explanation that the dome was an igloo geodesic constructed around a stainless-steel frame comprising triangular sections which supported a membrane of stretched PVC. Just as I said, The Prisoner’s dome, the home of the New Number Two (Didn’t see Rover, however?).
Hello, Hello, Hello and what do we have here?
The Phoenix that has arisen from the ashes is quite unlike anything that I have ever beheld. To say that there ‘aint no rhyme or reason in it’ is not necessarily pejorative. You see you’ve got these two big wooden sheds, one selling snacks and coffee and the other with a floor to ceiling plate-glass window through which youngsters sit a-gawping; a large geodesic igloo thingy; a piazza with tables and chairs; two small elevated terraces snug-fit to the lake side; and a long lake-facing and canopy-covered seating area, providing space for several groups sitting on low divans, each around their own personal coffee table.
The latter seating area is a peach; the haunt of the delectable; mainly affluent trophy girls who ostentatiously flaunt themselves by sharing the pipes of their hookahs.
Hookahs: everyone should try one!
These single or multi-stemmed smoking instruments, which cool and vaporise tobacco smoke prior to inhalation by passing it through a water reservoir, were better known to the pioneers of 20th century hipster fashion by the nickname hubbly bubbly pipes.
During the swinging sixties, hubbly bubblies were chiefly associated with the facilitation of opium consumption (naughty!); today, they are the limelighters for a new generation of fadists, some young, some not-so-young, but agelessly would-be trendy (Some believe just by smoking the hookah they qualify for this perfumed club.). They puff away conspicuously on these rather flamboyant instruments, using highly scented shisha tobacco (different flavoured molasses). Now, throw arty-farty lighting into the mix and the smoke exhaled appears to change colour. Wow, even more people will see you! And don’t you look extra cool!
Health experts disagree. Forever seeming to forget that life is bad for your health and is never almost but always fatal, they share no interest at all in egocentric fashion, routinely condemning the hookah as just another sure-fired way of inviting lethal respiratory problems to call time prematurely on an existence already imperilled and grievously overtaxed by vice. What a hookahless bunch of killjoys!
The Mercure from the terrace
On my first visit to this wonderous place, where one can eat, drink, relax, gaze out over the pond and attach one’s self to a hookah or two, it seemed as if whoever had thought of it had forgotten to give it a name. I therefore decided to christen it the Discombobulated Gardens? But since that ambiguous day in 2022, I have learnt that it goes by the name Soul Garden.
On my first and subsequent visits to Soul Garden, I gave the hookers a miss, content to sit back on the terrace, staring out and into the pond at the bold, mirrored and distant reflection of the irradiated Mercure Hotel, whose trademark zig-zag luminosity levitates in a limbo state high upon the Kaliningrad skyline, also hanging motionlessly within the depths and darkness of the pond’s expanse, achieving what we have yet to accomplish, where we like to say we never can be ~ in two places at once.
From the vantage point that the gardens offer, this view across the pond, particularly on a warm summer’s evening, is positively captivating, but with the summer of 2022 (and now 2023) as gone as Captain Ahab, you’ll have to take my word on this.
View from completed garden terrace across the Upper Pond; Mercure Hotel in the distance
During my premiere visit to Soul Garden, the view from the pond side had been so mesmerising that I almost failed to notice that in the time it took to order a beer and have it brought to my table, my hands had grown considerably larger. This Soul Garden phenomenon was explained to me by the waitress. Don’t worry, she reassured me, the reason why your appendages suddenly look much more impressive than they actually are in real life is that the glass in which your beer is served is less than the usual half litre.
Now, I am not suggesting that smaller glasses are indicative of sharp practice; I was just a little surprised, that’s all, what with my hands growing larger and my glass getting shorter, but there really is no need for alarm. Verily, all of Kaliningrad’s bars and restaurants clearly state the volumes in which their beer is served, it is clearly marked in the drinks’ menu. But should the need ever arise, don’t be afraid to ask: “Please could you show me your glass!” I am sure the staff will be most obliging.
In summing up, what I used to like to think of as a place called Something Gardens, but which I now know is Soul Garden, the word intriguing must be applied.
Like me, you’ll be intrigued by the layout and facilities as well as by the name, and you’ll also be intrigued by what they have planned for Ahab’s building. Like the gardens before they had soul, the carcass of the former construction is borderline identity crisis. Since the first stages of partial demolition, in which its tower, globe and ship, and come the day Captain Ahab, were mysteriously wafted away, throughout 2023 the shell of the building has sat on the banks of the pond teasing us one and all with its day-by-day month-on-month suspended animation.
Perhaps this is the reason the captain slung his hook: whilst he had no objection to Moby Dick, he foresaw in Jonah’s whale a completely different kettle of fish. But until the day dawns when all is revealed, it’s premonition to the starboard bow! Barrelman to the crow’s nest, and steady as she goes!
Arty Crafty it is and all the better for it! 17 April 2024~ Craft Garage Kaliningrad a Pit Stop for Good Beer On the same evening that we happened upon the Beer Bar on Prospect Mira and Bar Sovetov, we stumbled upon and into Craft Garage. You’ve guessed it! Whereas it could be argued that… Read more: Craft Garage Kaliningrad a Pit Stop for Good Beer
Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad Retro with a Heart of Gold It’s a venue which immortalises the House of Soviets, serves good beer, hosts music evenings and likes you, the customer. 13 April 2024 ~ Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad Retro in the House of Soviets Do you believe in coincidences? In my most recent post I wrote about… Read more: Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad Retro in the House of Soviets
Good beer in a vintage-inspired bar 13 March 2024 ~ Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad Those of us in the UK who are firm believers in the importance of preserving traditions and the history of our country, and who do their bit in this regard by paying homage to, and overpaying for… Read more: Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad
Light, bright and affordable ~ Pattison Markt 24 February 2024 ~ Patisson Markt Restaurant Kaliningrad Good Value It’s one of two buildings that flank the entrance to what was once Königsberg Zoo, now the Kaliningrad Zoopark. Once upon a time, it was an old eatery with a distinctly Soviet feel. In 2004, I nicknamed it… Read more: Patisson Markt Restaurant Kaliningrad Good Value
Upper Pond, Kaliningrad, garden cafés replace Prichal Restaurant Updated: 13 January 2024 | First published: 15 September 2022 ~ Upper Pond, Kaliningrad, new Garden Cafés A few moments ago, you said in your bestist Russian, ‘Short pashalta’ (bill please), hopefully paid when you got it and have just legitimately left the Seagull by the Lake… Read more: Upper Pond, Kaliningrad, new Garden Cafés
Basically one of the best beer bars in Kaliningrad 28 December 2023 ~ Yeltsin Bar: The Best Craft Beers in Kaliningrad There’s an awful lot written about Kaliningrad’s number one specialist craft ale bar, Yeltsin, named after Russia’s first post-Cold War president. Most of it is good; and much of it correct. The essential ingredients… Read more: Yeltsin Bar: The Best Craft Beers in Kaliningrad
A Trip Around the Caucasus Updated 10 December 2023 | First published 2020 ~ Kavkaz Restaurant Kaliningrad Housed as it is on the ground floor of a rather large building across the road from Victory Square and directly in front of the colossal shopping centre built in Königsberg style, it would be inaccurate to say… Read more: Kavkaz Restaurant Kaliningrad
Reviewed 9 January 2024 ~ Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information
Airspace Closures
Russia has closed its airspace to airlines from multiple countries in direct response to airspace closures effecting its airlines, which were introduced by western governments opposing Russia’s military operation to ‘demilitarise and de-Natzify’ Ukraine. Airlines on the banned list are prohibited from landing in or flying over Russian territory. As a result, air travel disruptions are widespread. If you intend to travel in the immediate future, you should contact your airline or travel agent for further information. Links to Airport/Airlines websites can be found at the end of this guide
To visit Kaliningrad, you will need to apply for and have been issued with a Russian visa. For those of you who are not sure what one of these is, it is an official document that permits you to legally enter a foreign country, in this case the Russian Federation. The visa is valid for a specific duration of time. It contains the date of entry to the country and the date of exit, as well as your name, travel document (passport) details and the purpose for which you are travelling.
There are various types of visa depending upon the
nature of your visit, but, for the sake of this blog, let’s assume that you are
visiting Kaliningrad as a tourist.
Russia Kaliningrad Tourist Information: Tourist Visa
A tourist visa will allow you to enter Kaliningrad,
and leave, within a specified time-frame of 30 days. This means that the maximum
length of stay in Kaliningrad is 30 days and no more. It is important that
you leave the country before or on the date of exit.
Before a tourist visa can be issued, you will need to
have confirmation of where you will be staying throughout the duration of your
visit. Two documents are required,
commonly referred to as visa support documents, and they consist of: (1) a
Voucher; (2) a Booking Confirmation.
If you are staying in a hotel, you will need to ask
the hotel to send you a hotel voucher and confirmation of tourist acceptance.
Once you have received these, you should then take them to the Russian National
Tourist Office. The London address is:
The Russian National Tourist Office 202 Kensington Church Street London W8 4DP
To complete your visa application, you will need to
take the following with you to the tourist office:
1. An original passport, valid for more than 6 months, containing at least 2 blank pages for your visa and entry/exit stamps
2. An application form (obtainable from The Russian National Tourist Office)*
3. One valid passport-type photograph
4. Payment for application
*The Russian National Tourist Office can assist you
with all stages of your application, including visa support documents. You can
contact them by telephone, on 0207 985 1234 and/or visit this page on their
website: https://www.visitrussia.org.uk/visas/getting-a-russian-visa/
Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information: Professional visa support company
To make things easier for you there are various visa-support companies that you can contact, which will take you through the entire process. My support company of choice is Stress Free Visas, if only because if you do get stressed whilst using them you can have a good laugh at your own expense! Their website address is www.stressfreevisas.co.uk.
When using their service, you will be asked to fill an
application form online. It is as well to know what to expect before you start,
since when they start asking you questions, such as what is your inside leg
measurement, it will be difficult to do so unless you have a tape measure
already at hand. OK, it’s not that bad, not quite, but there is information
that you will need that you might inconceivably not have thought of.
To this end, please see the following:
Q: Who is paying for your trip to Russia? A: [If it is you, put ‘independently’]
####
You will be asked ‘information about your financial
situation’. You will need to enter your ‘overall monthly income from all
sources’ and various other financial details.
####
You will need to include your National Insurance number
####
You will be asked to enter ‘place of birth’ and ‘date
and place of birth’ of your spouse
####
You will be asked to provide the following details
about your parents:
Name Date, country & place of birth Nationality If deceased, date & place of death
####
You will be asked to provide the name of the hotel you
will be staying at, plus address and telephone number
####
And that, as Bruce Forsyth used to say, “is all there
is to it!”
To assist you in all visa-related matters, here again is the web address for Stress Free Visas: www.stressfreevisas.co.uk
The art, science and agony of waiting: a round trip from Kaliningrad to the UK via Gdansk, Poland
Updated 5 January 2024 | Published: 19 January 2023 ~ Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival
In November 2022, my wife Olga and I travelled from Kaliningrad to the UK via Gdansk. It was the first time I had made this journey since the advent of coronavirus.
This account should be read in conjunction with my post How to Get to Kaliningrad from the UK and treated as an addendum to the information contained therein. It is hoped that it may help you to decide whether or not to take this route in the future and what to expect if you do. To be forewarned is to be forearmed ~ not that to be forearmed will do you any good.
Passage to and from the UK to Kaliningrad via Gdansk Airport is, in the post-apocalyptic coronavirus world, now the era of unprecedented sanctions, a realistic if not tedious alternative to the other options available to you. By no means the most traveller-friendly route, nevertheless as an A to B expedient, with a great deal of fortitude and more of patience you will eventually arrive at your destination without incurring the need to navigate every letter in the traveller’s alphabet.
Recently, in November 2022, this was the route we took to travel to the UK. Pre-coronavirus we always took a taxi from Kaliningrad to Gdansk. At a cost of approximately £100, of the two options, bus or taxi, the latter, of course, was the more expensive, but what it lacked in economy it more than made up for in comfort, door-to-door convenience and, most importantly, a smoother, less traumatic transition at the Russian-Polish border.
Our November trip was the first in which I would take a bus from Kaliningrad to Gdansk. Kaliningrad Central Bus Station is a wonderful Soviet incarnation, built, I should imagine, circa 1970s. It is neat, tidy, user-friendly and surrounded by shops and refreshment facilities.
There’s nothing to bussing it from Kaliningrad: You just pass yourself and your luggage through a scanning system, buy your tickets in the usual way from the counter ~ thankfully staff-manned, not machine-oriented ~ and when it is time to catch your bus, brandishing your barcoded ticket, off you go through the gates.
Not one for using minibuses on any journey except in town, I was relieved to find on the day of travelling that we were blessed with a proper coach.
We were required to load our cases into the luggage compartment ourselves, which was no great shakes as we were travelling light. Even so, if you happen to be an old codger suffering from comorbidities or a damsel in distress, you may find that you need to enlist the kindly services of a fellow-travelling Sir Galahad, since loading luggage of any kind does not come under the driver’s remit.
Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival
The journey to the Russian border in Kaliningrad is an effortless one, taking around 30 to 40 minutes in all. From the other direction, Gdansk Airport, the distance is the greater of the two. But travelling isn’t the problem; it’s the waiting you have to worry about.
Whether you travel by car or by bus, prepare yourself mentally for an indescribably protracted period of boredom at both border checkpoints. I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a competition between the Russian and Polish authorities to see who can make your stay at the border more drawn out and uncomfortable. In days gone by, when Russians flocked to Poland to buy sausages and the Polish nipped back and forth to Kaliningrad to smuggle in cheap vodka and fags, crossing from either direction, Russia to Poland, Poland to Russia, was a traffic-queuing nightmare. But at least then it was understandable why it took so long.
Now, in the New Normal ~ in the coronavirus aftermath and knock-on effect from the troubles in Ukraine ~ queues at the border, which is to say magnificent queues, are largely a thing of the past, but interminable waiting is not.
For example, on the day that we travelled, there were two cars in front of us and no one behind us, but still it took four hours to cross from Russia into Poland.
By taxi the process is quicker, not substantially so, but it is quicker and a lot less painful. On both sides of the border, Russian and Polish, our driver would take it upon himself to hand over our passports to the authorities whilst we sat in the car until summoned to appear before the border officer’s window.
This procedure is strangely daunting. It has its equivalent in the unfounded guilt you feel (and I am certain that you do) whenever a copper walks by (“Evenin’ all!”). I find that it both helps and doesn’t if, whilst standing under the border officer’s partly hidden officious eye, you imagine yourself in the leading role of one of Len Deighton’s spy novels.
One other thing, other difference between the taxi and the bus, is that when you take a taxi your bags are checked in the car. A uniformed man or woman with stern features out of a can, asks you to open your bags and then studiously looks at your underpants (hopefully those in the case, not the ones you are wearing!). He, or a colleague, will also bring a dog along to sniff around for drugs (in your cases not your underpants) which, of course, we never have (drugs, that is, not underpants) except, perhaps, if you can call them drugs, a vintage bottle of Bile Beans which, through force of habit as well as nostalgia, I carry for good luck. Get away! You don’t! Do you?
By bus the procedure though similar is far more demanding, obviously because the vehicle you are travelling in contains more people and more people means more documents to process but also because each passenger is required to lug his, her or its own luggage out of the bus, across the tarmac and into a bland and impersonal room.
Here you queue obediently, waiting for the inquisition before the border officer’s cubicle. No smiling, this is serious business, so why on earth do I always feel an uncontrollable urge to laugh? Eternity comes and goes and suddenly stamp, stamp, stamp, they are inking little official things in the pages of your passport. This is music to your ears, for next they will dismiss you, and you’ll suffer to drag your heavy cases across to the waiting conveyor belt in order to have them scanned for all those things that you shouldn’t have stashed, and didn’t stash, inside.
Admittedly, this hiatus in your journey does provide you with the opportunity to pay the bog a visit, making it not entirely a waste of time. The problem is, however, that you can almost guarantee that one or more in your party are either not in possession of the prerequisite travel documents or are carrying something in their bags in contravention of regulations. When this happens, as it did for us, your wait at the border can be delayed to such a frightful extent that by the time you eventually move, you have forgotten what movement was. Thus, do not be surprised if you have read War and Peace from cover to cover, experienced a couple of birthdays and your restless arse is covered in cobwebs by the time the bus starts rolling. Naw, it’s not as bad as all that; but believe you me, it is bad enough!
Whilst we all know from experience that the wheels of bureaucracy tend to grind slowly no matter where we are, what kind of mentality is it that oils the cogs of rudeness?
It is sad to admit, but all the same a regrettable fact, that border security on both sides of the fence, be it the Russian or Polish side, can be, and mostly are ~ with one or two exceptions ~ how can I put it? ~ beyond officious. Let us just conclude that anyone working for border control is unlikely to be considered for a post in the diplomatic core and prudently leave it at that.
Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival
So, you have been stared at, stamped and waved on, survived death by terminal boredom and at last the wheels are turning. The bus that you are travelling in, which contains people a lot more stressed and impatient than the ones you started out with, trumps off up the road, gets stuck, for extra harassment measure, at two or more sets of traffic lights and then trundles forward a few more yards before grinding to a sickening halt on the Polish side of the border.
And it’s here we go again: the only noteable difference being the cut of the uniforms and insignia on them.
By the time we arrived at the airport we were veterans in the waiting game, but even our rigorous introduction was insufficient to prepare us for what was yet to come.
I will say that as far as design is concerned, I personally like Gdansk Airport ~ all those tubular steel struts, asymmetrical folds and sweeps and the way that the ceiling soars like giant birds in flight. Great visuals and expressive atmosphere; shame about the security staff. They are as rude as rude, but there is entertainment to be had in being to them what Manuel was to Basil in Fawlty Towers: “Qué?”
Above: I can’t stand the waiting any longer; you’ll have to go by yourself!
On the day that we travelled through Gdansk Airport nothing short of utter confusion reigned. The flight was scheduled for 3.10pm and our bus driver, who would normally have deposited us at Gdansk bus station, realising that those of us who required the airport were in danger of missing our flights because of the long delay at the border, drove us on to the airport terminal. We sailed through Gdansk airport security system, bought a couple of bottles from the duty free and checked the electronic flight boards. Everything was fine; but then it wasn’t. The flight at 3.10 had become the delayed flight to the UK departing at 4.30! A Jack Daniels with ice helped.
We were sat close to gate 27, where we should have been, when, suddenly, it was ‘all aboard’ but at gate 28! The flight time has also changed to 4pm, but at 3.50pm they are opening the gates, and we are all on our feet and queuing. Our so-called priority passes, which do nothing more than allow you to queue lower down the stairwell than those who have been smart enough not to pay for the privilege, put us in this position, where we stood with mounting impatience for nigh on fifteen minutes, before it was announced that we had to return to the waiting area.
As we passed one of the company’s representatives, I asked why? What was happening? His reply: “We are waiting for a new captain!” Good heavens, I thought, I hope he qualifies before next spring. I did offer to fly the plane myself. Humouring me, the man asked if I had a licence. “Dog or TV?” I replied. Flying licence! “Well,” I said, “I’ve got a kite and an airman’s hat.”
Back in our seats, where we were fast becoming super-waiters, I hoped that the ‘new captain’ was not in fact the old captain, whose delay was due to one too many. I disclosed my fears to Olga, who thought she had caught a glimpse of someone wearing a battered captain’s hat and nothing else, being dunked in a bath of ice-cold water behind the airport’s dustbins, which is only a stones (or stoned) throw away from the airline’s Lame Excuse Department.
The electronic score board now informed us that the next flight from Gdansk to the UK was rescheduled for 5.30pm but, as before, it lied. Lucky for us we were far too tired to be somewhere else in the airport, for at 5pm we were off again, through the checkout and down the steps.
By now everyone without exception was suffering from chronic waiting disease. Many of our fellow passengers had found consolation in the bottle and as a result resembled zombies hired from Rent a Misfit.
At long last, it happened, but it didn’t: We, and the worse-for-wears were sitting on the plane but wait a moment … a moment … a moment … the pilot had not arrived. Was he waiting to be awarded his model aircraft flying diploma or had he got stuck in the bathtub?
At last it did happen! We had lift off! Shame that the same could not be said for the airline’s credit/debit card system. I presume it must have died from something like airport terminal waiting. And why was there no vodka on board? Hiccup! This is your captain slurring.
Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival
We landed at Luton Airport ~ now there’s a relief ~ where everything, I was pleased to find after almost three years’ absence remained delightfully British. Of course, there are obvious visual exceptions to the definition of what constitutes British, but the prevailing wind continues to blow in the direction of British standards. One contributory factor is that apart from the airport’s security guards, who are tooled up and reinforce-vested, London-Luton’s border control and its customs officers do not do military; smart and corporate is the name of the game and even the airport’s immigrant staff can scrub up satisfactorily when they put their mind to it. I’m not sure if the airport retains classic British salutations such as ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ and ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ or whether it has succumbed to pseudo-liberal pressure for gender-bending woke alternatives. But what I can say categorically is that as far as first impressions count, London Luton hits the spot.
The second thing you will notice at Luton Airport, indeed any airport in the UK, apart from the majority minorities, is that no sooner have you retrieved your cases than mugging your purse and wallet begins. UK airports are hideously expensive. London Luton’s Airport carpark must be run by the mob, as the cost of a two-minute stay in the so-called drop-off and pick-up zone is protection-racket extortionate. Yes, I think we can all agree that there’s nothing like England’s welcome mat, but once you have crossed the threshold you know that the meter is ticking.
Return journey
A piece of cake our trip to England certainly had not been, but the return journey took the biscuit. When we were outward bound, we had purposefully travelled light, but going back our extremely large cases were stuffed to the gills with items unobtainable in Kaliningrad, such as 40 jars of marmite, decorative retro metal wall signs, plus numerous gifts and souvenirs.
Having overdone it on shopping sprees, on visits to the pub, on workouts, on late nights and on generally trying to cram too much into too little time, our cases may have been full, but I was travelling on a half empty health tank ~ nothing like a good holiday to set you to rights, I say! And it was grim: the 4.30am start required to catch our flight from Luton was grim, but at least it was uneventful.
The real problems for us began when we arrived in Gdansk ~ and here is something you should bear in mind, especially if you are Russian.
Olga’s daughter had booked our return from Gdansk bus station using an online booking system. The bus was scheduled to depart at 6pm, but it was about 11am Polish time when we arrived at Gdansk airport. This disparity between the flight’s arrival and the bus’s departure had been purposefully contrived, as, although there was an earlier bus at one o’clock, the excessive delays on the outward journey had caused us to act with caution. Sod’s law had it, however, that the return flight was bang on schedule, and we were back in the business of waiting again.
Our immediate destination from the airport was the bus station. We would go there by taxi, stash our bags in the left luggage department, presuming that they had one, and then idle our time away.
Gdansk bus station is reminiscent of Corby dole office in the 1960s, even down to the stink of piss. It is a concrete catastrophe from that era, constructed on two levels, decorated with pigeon shite and a lift that does not work. The left luggage department is not a department as such, but a big tin thing on the station’s lower level split into different sized lockers with doors that need coins to operate them*. Consequently, we had a twofold problem: (1) Karting two incredibly heavy cases down umpteen flights of steps and (2) obtaining Polish coins in the correct denominations.
The extreme awfulness of Gdansk bus station and the thought of time to kill, encouraged Olga to investigate the possibility of exchanging the 6pm bus tickets for the 3pm service.
One thing that Gdansk bus station did have going for it was that it had a cafeteria*. I use the term cafeteria because it reminded me of somewhere I once had the misfortune to visit on a school trip. I think it was the canteen of an up-North pickle factory. Our school was short on education but inventive in saving funds. {Apologies to Headmaster Lowe. I am not referring to the Prince William School but Chalky White’s secondary modern!)
*Please note that when I was in Gdansk in September 2023, both the left-luggage canisters and the cafeteria had ceased to exist, thus making Gdansk bus station an even more horrible place than it was before. Thought I’d better warn you. They haven’t closed the toilets yet, but it costs 5 zlotys a pee!
Knock the school if you like, but let’s don’t knock the cafeteria. At least it was somewhere to sit, to have a hot drink and a snack. Cosy, it was not; friendly, it was not. There are still some things to be said for England! But first we needed zlotys (that’s Polish money, if you did not know it).
The extreme awfulness of Gdansk bus station and the thought of time to kill, encouraged Olga to investigate the possibility of exchanging the 6pm bus tickets for the 3pm service. We had no zlotys for tea, and we had no zlotys for the left-luggage lockers. Gdansk Bus Station Information office had no information. Exchanging tickets? An earlier bus? Don’t ask us, we’re only the information office.
We were both cold, tired, hungry and I was feeling ill.
I volunteered to go and seek out a ‘hole in the wall’, even though I instinctively knew, erroneously as it happened, that the location we were in was unlikely to be furnished with such a crucial convenience. Whilst I was gone, Olga said she would contact her daughter to see if it was possible for her to exchange the tickets online. It turned out that it wasn’t.
One 20-minute walk later, I espied the kind of hole I was looking for. It was not a hole in the wall exactly, but a hole protruding from a shop window. I did not like the look of this hole when I saw it from a distance and liked it even less at closer quarters. I certainly had no inclination to entrust my debit card to it in case the machine had been ‘got at’.
Flustered, and not relishing the thought of returning to Olga with mission unaccomplished, nevertheless this is what it amounted to. The real rub was that when I did return, Olga asked me why I had not used the cash dispenser at the front of the bus station? Doh! I had only walked straight past it! What a kick in the nuts! And the words of our old friend Barry, who had accompanied us on our trip to Kaliningrad way back in 2004, echoed across the decades, “You pair are a walking disaster!” ~ to be said in a northern accent.
Too tired to exonerate myself, I followed Olga’s directions but with the gravest misapprehension. The hole in the glass window which I had not used because it had looked dodgy was a paragon of virtue compared to the one at the bus station. The Perspex screen was scratched, it reflected dull orange in the LED light with which it was lit and the options that it displayed were almost indiscernible. It took four attempts to get it right, to extract money from that mean machine and throughout the entire dispensing experience I felt distinctly uncomfortable. It was a mean little machine in a mean hollowed-out husk of a building, and it also refused to provide a receipt.
Have zlotys will eat, we took refuge in the café. There we would buy tea from the miserable woman behind the counter, change some zloty notes into zloty coins to use in the left-luggage piggy bank, dispose of the bags, go for a walk.
It was a cold day but at the time of our walk it was blue skies and sunshine. We decided to return to Gdansk old town where we had not been since my first journey to Kaliningrad at the turn of the 21st century (makes me feel like Dr Who ~ the man version, not the PC one! {There was only one Dr Who and that was William Hartnell!})
Gdansk ‘old town ‘is, in fact, a perfect facsimile of the old town, since the old town underwent extensive modification thanks to Adolf Hitler and his Luftwaffe architects. However, if you ever go to Gdansk, the new-old town is well worth visiting.
We took in the sights and found food and warmth in one of the many restaurants, but now the sun had gone, leaving in its wake a sharp and chilling cold. With one and a half hours to kill, we made our way back to the bus station. We had no idea from which bay the bus we needed departed, so Olga did the logical thing, she returned to the bus information office.
As before, the information office which had no information about exchanging tickets had no information about our bus: Which Bay does your bus depart from? Don’t ask us we’re just the bus information service. We eventually worked it out for ourselves; not which bay we needed but that from the official information office to the average man on the street, once they tumbled that Olga was Russian, your Polack turned deaf and dumb. I suppose like every EU member, Poland is waiting for Biden to tell them when they can be polite again.
The second information office, which lay inside a concreted labyrinth of subterranean walkways, went one better. Not only did they not know from which bay our bus departed, they denied its very existence and the existence of the bus itself, although we had tickets to travel! It was beginning to get amusing.
Dragging the heavy cases from the lockers up two flights of steps and then loitering in the bitter wind was not so funny. We asked a couple of Polacks on the street the bus question for which we could get no answer, and one of them was so appalled or frightened when he heard the Russian lingo that he practically dashed away.
We decided we must divide and conquer. I went to reconnoitre the bus park to see if I could spot the bus, whilst Olga, having clocked a small group of people huddled against the wind behind the back of the bus station, went to ask the dreaded question.
My mission was unsuccessful (isn’t it always!), but on my return I found that the group that Olga had approached were waiting (note that word ‘waiting’ again) for the same bus as us. Like us, they had little or no information to go on, but thought that the bus would depart close to where we were standing. The girl who Olga was talking with then added, in a low whisper, “It’s probably better if they (‘they’ meaning the Polacks) don’t hear you talking in Russian.” Well, now, this was what I call information! And it seemed to improve my Russian no end, because, having been warned to the contrary, Russian words and phrases were flying out of my mouth like economic migrants spilling from small crammed boats across the length and breadth of Dover’s shores.
Therefore, it was probably fortuitous that, struggling to contain my new-found language skills, my eye alighted on a bus hidden away at the side of the road. There was no bus bay and no other way of knowing whether this was our bus or not, but working on the hunch that it wasn’t speaking Russian, we decided to investigate. And hey presto, Fanny’s your aunt and Bob’s your unfriendly Polack, was I right or was I right!? (for once!).**
** In September 2023, I discovered a piece of paper taped to the wall on the inside of Gdansk dole office, sorry I mean bus station, stating the bay number from which the bus leaves for Kaliningrad. Then it was bay 11. Bay 11 is not really a bay as such but a number painted on a piece of tin stuck on the corner of the bus station. Although the destination from bay 11 is a place or a town in Poland, as stated on the piece of tin, and Kaliningrad is not mentioned, three people have since corroborated that this was the bay they used to travel by bus to Kaliningrad. The best way of locating this ‘bay’ is not to ask at Information, as they’ll either grunt or will not tell you. Exiting from the front of the station, with the railway lines in front of you, hang a hard left and then left again, and walla! ~ bay 11!
Relieved that we had discovered our transport out of Poland, I was less excited by the fact that our chariot of deliverance was a minibus, even less so when the answer to the question ‘Where do we stow our heavy bags?’ was in the Skibox clipped to the back of the bus. Though the driver made the mistake of lifting our heavy cases into the Skibox for us, he never made the same mistake twice, neither at the border crossing or later when he put us down in Kaliningrad. And who can really blame him?
The cases did have to come out again when we arrived at the Russian border, and, naturally, we had to go through the same rigmarole of standing in front of poker-faced officers sitting in little square cubicles, but that inquisition apart the process though tiring was fairly straightforward. Nevertheless, we would have to endure another hour of waiting when some woman was detained either because she had the wrong travel documents, the wrong items in her luggage or who can say what else was wrong with her? But something was not quite right.
Finally, back on home territory, all we had to do now was lug the cases into a waiting taxi and from the boot of the taxi into the house.
The return journey, which had begun at 4am British time, ended in Kaliningrad at 12 midnight. Ahh, back to a nice warm house, which no doubt it would have been if the fuse box had not tripped out owing to some electrical fault or other.
In conclusion, the Kaliningrad to UK or UK to Kaliningrad route via Gdansk Airport and by bus is not as direct as one would like. However, it gets you there in the end and on the way tests personal virtues, such as patience, diplomacy, tact, resourcefulness, stamina and so forth. Yet, those of a nervous disposition are advised to approach it with caution. Prepare yourself for the journey. Perhaps an hour of meditation and a course on anger management before you leave the house?
Basically one of the best beer bars in Kaliningrad
28 December 2023 ~ Yeltsin Bar: The Best Craft Beers in Kaliningrad
There’s an awful lot written about Kaliningrad’s number one specialist craft ale bar, Yeltsin, named after Russia’s first post-Cold War president. Most of it is good; and much of it correct.
The essential ingredients of Yeltsin’s success are a wide range of tap and craft bottled beers from around the world, no frills food and a basic, industrialised look and atmosphere. With its juke box, table football and predominantly young clientele, it is the closest thing in Kaliningrad to a UK student bar that you would not expect to find in any Russian city ~ except, perhaps, Kaliningrad.
Yeltsin Bar
The Yeltsin sits at the end of a big solid block of a building on a fairly busy road junction about five minutes walk from Victory Square, Kaliningrad’s city centre.
You’ll wonder what it is when you first see it, as the name Yeltsin is all there is, cut solidly into a bronzed metal sheet attached to the outer wall. It is an effective sign prompting further investigation and one which pre-empts the Yeltsin design and ethos.
To get to the Yeltsin, one must leave the pavement and descend by a flight of concrete steps. A small beer garden, or more accurately beer courtyard, with a gravelled surface and some rudimentary seating precedes the entrance, and preceding communism, and to a limited extent surviving it, is a fine example of the Russian tradition of wall carpeting, albeit on Yeltsin’s outside wall as opposed to the usual practice, which is to hang the carpet on an interior wall for insulation and decoration.
This wall feature, as quirky as it is, pans into virtual insignificance in comparison to the voluminous blackboard, which, stretching from head height to the point where wall meets ceiling, contains an inventory of beers that ranks as truly awesome.
Beer rotation is ongoing, and with each outgoing and incoming beer, the board requires amendment. Up and down the step ladder demands good co-ordination and an admirable head for heights. One can only suppose that the bar staff either refrain from imbibing or have undergone rigorous training in the art of balanced consumption or balance whilst consuming.
Board-Chalker wanted; must have a good head for heights and proven expertise in the techniques, mechanics and dynamics of staying on a stepladder.
The Yeltsin Bar in Kaliningrad
As I wrote in a former post, the Yeltsin is an honest to goodness no frills bar. It is not ‘back to basic’, it is basic. No carpets (apart from the one outside) and no deluxe or chintzy wallpaper. It’s got hard seats, high stools, plain tables, industrial-style hanging ceiling lamps, a 1970’s style football game, a good old-fashioned juke box and an awful lot of atmosphere. It is not a soft-seat comfort place. It’s a place to hang out and drink beer. In fact, it is simply just a great place, with an easy-drinking atmosphere. What more could one possibly want?
Well, now, the proprietors of the Yeltsin obviously anticipated your answer to that question, and the answer they came up with was the more you want is street cred. And how they have achieved that is to turn the antechamber leading to the toilets and the toilets themselves into municipal halls of graffiti. The result to more conservative-leanings may be a trifle downtown urban for positive acclamation, but for me personally it seals the envelope on the Yeltsin statement of beer and basic.
The thing about the Yeltsin is that it’s a good thing, where less than more really works and where all the additional quirky bits feed into the central premise, which is that young and laid-back beer drinkers only need a glass for their beer, a table on which to place their glasses and stools on which to park their arses, anything else is superfluous.
In the Yeltsin’s case this superfluous anything just might be the huge wall-sized TV screen, which on my most recent visit to the bar was showing a fixed, that is stationery, video-camera image of a busy traffic underpass somewhere in Bangkok (How thrillingly arty fart is that!).
I cast a glance across it and then returned to the beer.
Updated 10 December 2023 | First published 2020 ~ Kavkaz Restaurant Kaliningrad
Housed as it is on the ground floor of a rather large building across the road from Victory Square and directly in front of the colossal shopping centre built in Königsberg style, it would be inaccurate to say that the Kavkaz Restaurant is ‘tucked away’ or that it is ‘off the beaten track’, but by not facing the main street and not advertised in any demonstrable fashion, you could say that it is reclusive, although no sooner had we entered the place than an editorial decision was taken, as I changed the word ‘reclusive’ to ‘exclusive’.
Immediately on stepping inside through the great glass double doors, words such as classy, quality, posh and ultimately very expensive chinged into my mind one after the other like metal tabs in an old-fashioned cash register, the last more forcibly than the rest, although in fairness I was about to discover that looks expensive does not mean is expensive.
For a few moments I was lost in the vastness. There
are big restaurants and bigger restaurants, but this was one of the biggest.
The metal tabs were singing again: huge, massive, cavernous, grand, and I must
not forget impressive!
It is being this impressed that makes it happen to you rather than you making it happen. A gaggle of pretty young waitresses, dressed in regulation black skirts and white blouses, hover near the entrance of the restaurant ready to escort you to your preselected, pre-booked table. Coats, hats and any other encumbrances are checked in with the cloakroom attendant, and before you know it you have been whisked away majestically to your seat.
No frills ceiling at the Kavkaz Restaurant Kaliningrad
Kavkaz Restaurant Kaliningrad
The Kavkaz Restaurant is a Georgian restaurant and its theme the Georgian Caucasus. As a Romanticist celebration of all that is vast, time-honoured and traditional about Georgia, the restaurant cannot be faulted. Its atmosphere, in great part, relies upon its shabby-chic credentials. The tall square brick pillars have a white-wash exterior, but one that is worn and ostensibly weathered; the ceiling is exposed, but the concrete is torn and ragged; the wallpaper, richly embossed with abstract designs, is scuffed; and the plasterwork screed on some of the walls has seen better days that never existed.
In the cozy secluded area where we were seated, the tribute to Georgia’s beauty continues in framed pictures of mountain men on horseback set against a sublime backdrop of snowcapped, sunlit and half-shadowed mountains. To the back of my seat, at the far end of the room, stand twin staircases equidistant apart. The sides are shabby-chic plasterwork; the tops crested with dark wooden rails. The stairs lead to a small upper storey that is confined to this area only. Brick pillars at frequent intervals, fitted with tall, pierced wooden shutters, the interior moulding of foliate design, create an illusion of sitting outside a building, of sitting below a veranda. In our sequestered corner, the illusion was so convincing that my wife and I were almost compelled to play Romeo and Juliette. But the romantic moment quickly passing, she stood upon the veranda, and I took a photo of her instead.
Olga Hart looking down at me from the balcony in Kavkaz Restaurant Kaliningrad
The Georgian Caucus theme is wonderfully pervasive and permeates everywhere effortlessly. The distressed brickwork, weathered stucco and plaster wall-motifs, the exposed ceiling and idealised pictures of tribesmen riding the mountain range conspire with perfect lighting to make you feel at once relaxed and, if you are not careful, rather more bohemian and definitely a lot more gallant than you could possibly ever pretend to be. It was as well, therefore, that any further straying into the realms of fantasy was brought rapidly to a decisive conclusion by the sceptical face of Pushkin himself staring down from a portrait on high, as if Romanticism was his sole province and yours to sit in Kaliningrad drinking vodka and beer.
Romanticist images at the Kavkaz Restaurant Kaliningrad
Looking somewhere else, I was pleased to observe the arrival of the first volley of vodkas. There were four in all, four tall glasses slotted into a wooden platter with snippets of cheese on one side. Ahh, and here was the beer as well.
Vodka served in style at Kavkaz Restaurant , Kaliningrad, Russia
Several dishes were served up, but as this was a celebration of a friend’s birthday, my apologies ~ I could not keep track of who was eating what and who was enjoying what they were eating. However, between drinking different flavoured vodka’s, we did manage to take some photos of the restaurant’s menu, which you will find in this review.
Kavkaz Restaurant , Kaliningrad, menu Kavkaz Restaurant , Kaliningrad, soups menu
From where we were situated going to the gents was something of a trek. Fortunately, my trip across the Caucasus was amply facilitated by vodkas and beers. From where Pushkin could no longer see me, I observed, whilst trying to walk straight (these mountains are prone to vertigo) that the other side of the restaurant was just as intriguing as the one we were dining in, and another visit would be needed to try it out for size.
One of many toasts at Kavkaz Restaurant Kaliningrad ; Mick & Olga Hart
On returning to my table, my vodkas, beers and wife, she listened intently (as intently as her twiddling habit on her mobile phone allowed) about my trip to the other side.
“Where have you been?” she asked. “I thought you went to the toilet.”
“I’ve been to the other side,” I replied.
She looked at me for a full three seconds, with an expression that seemed to say, isn’t that that where you’ve always been, and then went back to twiddling.
Pushkin was glaring again, so I ordered a second beer and looked him in the eye. He wasn’t a bad old stick, and neither was the Kavkaz Restaurant.
Updated 23 October 2023 | published 6 April 2023 ~ Sir Francis Drake an English Pub in Kaliningrad
“Would you like to go to an English pub?” Asked in England, this would be a completely pointless question should it be directed at me; but asked in Russia’s Kaliningrad 22 years ago, when the city was little more than a one-bar town, I was waiting for the punchline.
In 2001, going out for a drink in Kaliningrad meant either calling in at the subterranean snooker bar at the front of the Kaliningrad Hotel (big hotel; the only one) or taking a table in one of two restaurants that were lingering on from Soviet times. So, it was hardly surprising when Olga asked me, would I like to go to an English pub, I thought the question a trick one.
It was the name of this English pub that put me to rights: in the UK we have King’s Arms (we don’t know which king); Richard III (found under a carpark in Asian Leicester); the Lord Nelson (not yet suffered the ignominy of having his statue tossed into the drink by loony leftist agitators); we even had Jack the Ripper once, until, at the behest of the feminist mafia, the original name Ten Bells was obsequiously reinstated. And yet, whilst a whole host of famous-named pubs spring readily to mind, such as the Black Rod in Basingstoke and the Big Black Cochrane in Shepherd’s Bush, sometimes referred to as the BBC, I cannot recall ever frequenting a Sir Francis Drake in England.
Sir Francis Drake in Kaliningrad
In the small, secluded outpost of Russia, the Sir Francis Drake established itself as the first of Kaliningrad’s English-themed pubs. It occupied, and still does occupy, a fairly non-descript building in a built-up area some distance removed both from the old town centre, the district once dominated by the Kaliningrad Hotel, and its more typical town-centre successor: the area in, around and containing Victory Square.
The Sir Francis Drake locale is an unlikely place for an English pub or any pub for that matter. It brings back memories of streets in London excluded from exploratory pub-crawls as possible places of ill repute ~ assumed publess, therefore pointless.
Mick and Olga Hart in the Sir Francis Drake English-theme pub, Kaliningrad 2001
Thus, if on my maiden journey to the Sir Francis, I had expected to find something approximating to a typical English hostelry, which I didn’t, I would have been disappointed. Nevertheless, the owners of the Sir Francis Drake had shown good sense in singling out their establishment and attesting to its themed credentials by erecting by its courtyard gate a proper, hanging English pub sign complete with full-length portrait of the famous man himself, the eponymous Sir Francis in all his 16th century glory. That sign, and what a tremendous sign it was, has long since gone, replaced by a less traditional but self-explanatory clipart-type image, depicting a foaming tankard of beer.
Mixed fortunes
The Sir Francis Drake, as might be expected, has passed through various hands since the days when my English brogues first pitter-pattered across its threshold, and its changing fortunes tend to reflect the grasp successive owners have had of what it is that makes an English pub successful and how best to replicate that success.
For example, shortly after my first visit to the Sir Francis Drake, the bar’s courtyard, a small, paved drinking area or hard-surfaced patio adjacent to the entrance, acquired chairs and tables at which, on days when the weather was clement, people would sit and drink. Fast forward two or three years, and all had gone to seed: half a dozen rusting metal chairs around a wonky table completely spattered with bird shit huddled under a ragged canopy, which was dirty and leaked profusely in more than several places but was good at dragging mosquitoes in during the height of summer, did little to boost the passing trade, which simply kept on passing.
Within the bar, the fairly formal atmosphere that once had dwelt there with noble intent, but which in itself was as like to anything lurking in an English pub as nothing is to something, had packed its bags and gone, fled, vamoosed, hurried away, leaving in its wake a tired and tawdry desolate feeling, a non-existent menu and a middle-aged lady behind the bar unarguably more accustomed to propping herself on her elbow and dragging on a fag than she was to serving customers. She pulled me a pint of beer (Good Heavens, it was Charlie Wells!) and rustled me up a bowl of soup: I drank my beer; ate the soup; and left.
It was to coin a phrase one of those “I am going outside and may be gone for some time,” moments, and thus it came to pass; until many years later fate decided to bring me back from Kaliningrad’s blizzard of bars.
The rediscovery of the Sir Francis Drake coincided with house hunting. We were looking for a property to buy and whilst engaged in this quest had set up camp in a rented flat nearby.
The nearest watering hole to our place of rest was a small craft-beer bar, a new concept to Kaliningrad that had just begun to be trialled. It was a superbly spartan venue but had more beers than a bootleggers’ lock-up. Serving food would have spoilt its image, but to entice my wife to remain in a bar until they kicked me out, I had to ensure that my usual pub diet, which was normally limited to crisps and peanuts, could cunningly be augmented by something approaching a proper meal. Women can be the strangest of creatures.
The closest bar to the foodless establishment was the Sir Francis Drake, and although our last encounter was enough to make us shy away, that the outside area was again presentable and since through its large arched windows a thriving clientele could be seen eating as well as drinking, we decided to bury the hatchet. (That’s an age-old expression, in case you’re wondering, not an ancient Königsberg ritual.)
The bar’s interior had not, and has not, hardly changed a jot since I first clapped eyes on it in May 2001, which is all to the good, since in the UK so many pubs, particularly village pubs, have suffered to have their original appearance, and with it original atmosphere, systematically destroyed by the boardroom boys in suits; those little-minded £-men, whose vandalism ironically demonstrates the feeble knowledge they have of how to sustain a pub and make it pay, an ignorance only equalled by their utter lack of consideration for conservation and history. One day it might just dawn on them that the two go hand in hand. The Philistinism by which they run, and by which they ruin their pubs, is only matched in idiocy by the quick-change con men masquerading as interior designers, whose cack-handed, ill-conceived and badly applied cosmetic surgery scars and robs each pub they touch of the richness of its unique character, charm and personality. The result for the pub is certain death, albeit sometimes a lingering one.
Kaliningrad’s Sir Francis Drake is not steeped in antiquity and thus has less to fear than those that are, but its continuity of almost three decades is something of a novelty, something to be proud of, especially in an age that boasts that the attention span of your average phone junkie is Dwarf from the North in stature and Liz Truss in longevity.
Limited by its size (referring now to the Sir Francis Drake, not the Midget Beyond the Midlands) as much if not more by the props at its disposable, nevertheless, with its heavy portcullis-type doors, panelled walls and dark wood beams, the bar continues to cultivate a pleasing and passable, if not strictly genuine, impression of a traditional English tavern or something that could or should be, and we’d like it no less if it was.
Now, if the Sir Francis Drake had been a genuine English pub, that is to say located in England, it would no doubt have got off to a reasonable start, but inexplicably over time, with no respect for theme or atmosphere, it would be out with the conforming styles and in with the girly-wirly lilacs, other pithy boutique pastels, a mish-mash of pale wood furniture raised on big block legs, inconvenient high-backed seats and, just for good ludicrous measure, a bar looking more out of place than anything that your imagination, even without an addiction to Gold Label and pickled eggs, could conceivably contrive.
I have personally witnessed, back in my days as a beer magazine and pub-guide editor, bars constructed of oak dating to the nineteenth century and period pieces from the 1950s manufactured in plywood kitsch, torn away and replaced with nasty pallid harlequin bricks or MDF veneer, materials which, even devoid of taste, you would not wish on an outside bog in Wigan, let alone install in a pub in Wigan or anywhere else for that matter.
So ten out of ten for the Sir Francis Drake for retaining its integrity and for showing the Brits that it can be done.
Less ten out ten, however, for not repelling the TV invasion. If the UK’s Sir Francis could see off the Spanish fleet whilst playing a game of bowls, thus consigning Spain to a fate of idle siesta-prone work-shies, surely Kaliningrad’s Sir Francis could have thwarted the millennial plot to inundate every last drinking establishment with an armada of flat-screen TVs. (We are talking tellies, not transvestites (which to your way of thinking is the lesser of these two modern evils?)
In all fairness, bars, wherever they may be, need to do whatever they can to bring the punters in. Nowhere is that more crucial than in the beleaguered pubs of England, which sadly in more recent decades have fallen foul of a political class that puts ethnics first and tradition last (But what of the Conservatives? What are they conserving? The answer is themselves.)
The Sir Francis Drake hasn’t much space, not enough in fact to swing a Spaniard in, but it has done what it can to cram as many people as possible into the space it’s got. In 2018 and 2019, at a time when we frequented it most, getting a seat on the off chance was a risky business indeed. Whether that is the case today, I cannot really affirm, since, at the time of writing the Sir Francis Drake is under new management, making its present popularity difficult to assess, whereas its erstwhile popularity was never in any doubt: want a table? Book in advance. So, book we always did, and just to play it safe we booked in April of this year.
The best tables in the joint, hence those that are snapped up first, occupy two elevated platforms on either side of the entrance. They cater simultaneously to two innate desires: the need to be seen and whence to see from ~ an exhibitionists’ and voyeurs’ dream hermaphrodite in fulfilment.
The 2018/2019 management, who probably threw in the beer towel during the mask-wearing coronavirus years, were without question, Sir Francis Drake’s most loyal and its most trusted friends.
Throughout their tenure they maintained and retained the integrity of the historic premise, even down to preserving the framed and glazed biographical timeline of the life of Sir Francis Drake, an absorbing document in many ways and one that inevitably showcases the achievement for which he is best remembered, the annihilation of the Spanish fleet, a military-geo-political triumph that paved the way for Britain becoming the greatest naval power on Earth and in the fullness of time the greatest empire.
No less spectacularly, the same management also introduced a revolving selection of imported beers and lagers, authentic tasty pub-grub served by tasty female bar staff and young blokes behind the bar who looked as if they knew their stuff probably because they did. It’s amazing how many don’t.
Whilst all the other important fixtures and attractions remain intact, sadly Sir Francis Drake’s superb bar staff and their faithful if rather cliquey friends, who were the mainstay of the clientele, have, like the remnants of the Spanish navy, long since drifted away. People come and people go, but legends live on regardless.
The last time that I raised my glass in the legendary Sir Francis Drake, September 2023 was drawing to a close. At that time, the menus, both food and drink menus, left over from the previous management were looking somewhat jaded. The beers advertised did not match the available brands, and the foodies who were with me voiced similar reservations with regard to the dishes advertised and the quality of the meals. The service was good, however, and the folks behind the bar efficient, warm and friendly. Thus, the latest report for Sir Francis Drake, which reads nothing like anything that has ever been written about its eponymous hero, is: ‘Has the ability … could do better … look forward to improvements …” Or have I simply taken these words from a long succession of my old school reports?
Let’s not search for the answer. In the Mick Hart Guide to Kaliningrad’s Bars, the Sir Francis Drake still rates highly ~ seven out of ten at least!
Epilogue
There is no question that the honour of laying the last word of this post should have gone to Sir Francis Drake himself, but, unfortunately, he is unavailable for comment.
Suspecting treachery among the UK’s ruling classes (yet again), I urged him to make all haste to Dover and there play bowls as he did before in Plymouth. If anyone can stem the French Armada and save us from the migrant hoards, Sir Francis is that man. But he must not tarry in his God-given task.
For even as we speak, the UK’s woke-finder generals are busy rewriting slave-trade history, liking and wanting nothing more than to besmirch and depose our national hero as an excuse for the great unwashed to tear his statue from its plinth and toss it into PC Pond. Then they will take each of the pubs that they say his name dishonours and rebrand them in the language of Woke. On t’other side of Hadrian’s Wall, it will be Humza Yousaf King of Kilts, and way down south in London town, Sound-as-a-Pound Sadiq Khan, that Diamond Asian Cockney Geezer. Cuh, would you Adam and Eve it! Is it any wonder that Sir Francis Drake cried “Bowls!” and hurried off to Russia?
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