Category Archives: VISITOR’S GUIDE to KALININGRAD

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival

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!

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival a bus in cobwebs

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?”

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival Waiting at Gdansk Aitport

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 21^st 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.

Mick Hart expatkaliningrad in Gdansk 2022

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?

Links

▶ How to get to Kaliningrad from the UK
▶ Russia Kalingrad Visa Information
▶ First Day in Gdansk: Year 2000
▶ Boxing Day in Gdansk: Year 2000

Image Attributions

Wall clock no hands: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-graphics-of-wall-clock-with-numbers/12539.html
Bus: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Simple-white-bus/57230.html
Cobweb: https://clipartix.com/spider-web-clipart-3-image-13273/
Gdansk Airport: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:At_the_Gdansk_airport_(Unsplash).jpg
Cash machine: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Automatic-teller-machine/85796.html
Scary pumpkin: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-illustration-of-jack-o-lantern-scary/15600.html
Shh icon: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-image-of-shh-icon/8121.html

Yeltsin Bar: The Best Craft Beers in Kaliningrad

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?

Mick Hart Juke Box Yeltsin Bar Kaliningrad

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.

They sell beer in Kaliningrad

Sir Francis Drake pub
True Bar
Dreadnought Pub
London Pub
4 Great Kaliningrad Bars

The main thing:

Bar Yeltsin
Ulitsa Garazhnaya, 2-2а, Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, 236001

Tel: 8 (401) 276-64-20

Opening times:
Thurs & Fri: 4.30pm to 12 midnight
Sat & Sun: 2pm to 12 midnight
Mon 4.20pm to 12am

Kavkaz Restaurant 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 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.

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.

Related>>>> Georgian Restaurant in Kaliningrad

Olga Hart in the Kavkaz Restaurant Kaliningrad — 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 at the Kavkaz — 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, 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.

Mick Hart & Olga Hart expat Kaliningrad — 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.

Kavkaz Restaurant Kaliningrad Wall Decorations

Essential details:❤❤

Kavkaz Restaurant
1 Victory Square
Kaliningrad, Russia

Tel: +7 (4012) 50 78 80

Web: www. kavkazrest.com

Opening times:
Sunday to Thursday 12pm to 12am
Friday & Saturday 12pm to 2am

Sir Francis Drake an English Pub in Kaliningrad

Why Sir Francis Drake decided to move to Russia

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 Hart and Olga Hart in the Sir Francis Drake bar in Kaliningrad 2001 — **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 16^th 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.

Biographical Timeline in English-themed pub Kaliningrad

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.

Beer menu bar in Sir Francis Drake Kaliningrad

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?

Bars in Kaliningrad
4 Great Kaliningrad Bars, Mick Hart’s Pub Crawl
Badger Club Kaliningrad
The London Pub
Premiere Bar
Dreadnought Pub
True Bar

True Bar Kaliningrad the City’s Latest Music Venue

True Bar makes its debut on the Kaliningrad music scene

16 October 2023 ~ True Bar Kaliningrad the City’s Latest Music Venue

Invited to the opening of a new music venue by singer-songwriter Andrey Berenev, the 14^th of October 2023 saw us, my wife and I, rendezvousing with our friend and drinking collaborator, Inara, at a café close to the venue.

I wondered what type of music the bar would be playing; would it be underground? The music venue is. It is located on Krasnaya street. You can’t miss it, not because you can’t miss it, but because it has three notable landmarks: a café on either side of it, one of which we assembled in, and opposite an arts and crafts shop selling imaginative artwares inspired by the city’s alter ego Königsberg.

True Bar Kaliningrad the City’s Latest Music Venue

The entrance to the bar lies in the forecourt that it shares with this shop and one of the two coffee shops. As it is below decks, you won’t see a building, just an elevated entrance, with the club’s name and logo attached to the wall. The place you are looking for is True Bar.

For the past two weeks, after a warm and sunny autumn debut, the wind has been howling, the rain has been pelting and the temperature has taken a turn for the worse. We were spared the rain on the evening of our visit to the new club, but the wind had not relented, and each gust was bitterly cold.

As we had arrived early, we hid in the arts and crafts shop for a while, and when we emerged discovered three or four young people waiting at the entrance to the bar. My wife, Olga, and our friend, Inara, were chuckling at the possibility that tonight’s venue would be exclusively for them ~ ‘youngsters’ ~ and that we would be the oldest patrons there. I made a mental note of this, whilst the track from Fred Wedlock played in the background: Would there be concessions at the bar for OAPs, sometimes know as OFs (Old Farts)? I was glad that I was wearing reasonably young person’s clothes. Do you think there’s a chance he missed them?

The bar was a bit behind schedule in opening, which meant that our small group of prospective clientele was growing by the minute. It was reassuring to note that among our fellow shiverers, one or two people of a more mature age had joined the throng, including singer-songwriter Andrey Berenev, who had invited us this evening. This was the first time I had met him in person. You may recall in my former post, The Badger Club, Olga had gone to the venue alone, and I had written about the club having been inspired to do so by her account of that evening and from the photographs she had taken. In a manner of speaking, however, Andrey had met me; he remembered me from Victor Ryabinin’s funeral.

When at last access to the bar was no longer denied to us, we shot downstairs like ferrets down a drainpipe.

True Bar Kaliningrad

The main staircase, which is a bit dim, so don’t go there in your carpet slippers, descends to what for me was a most welcoming sight indeed, the bar itself.

Behind the bar in a Kaliningrad club — I suppose that does mean we are pleased to see you?

A second staircase takes one down to the club floor. There is no stage, as such. The performers perform with their backs to the upper deck, the small bar area, which is big enough to serve as a viewing gantry. Every inch of the club area is utilised. Including the lower staircase.

Mick Hart with the menu in True Bar Kaliningrad — Perhaps not the usual vegetarian response to pigs ears on the menu

The club seating is a simple ‘homemade’ series of backrest slat benches arranged in pairs either side of a solid table. It’s what it is; and it works. People come here for the music and the atmosphere, and, of course, to drink; everything else is secondary.

I have used the word intimate already, and it gets more so when you want to go to the toilet. I’m not suggesting that you have to share the loo, but to get there you have to single-file between two lines of people: those spread out against the bar and those leaning over the balcony. As I said, one of the leading features of the club is its unconditional intimacy.

Aleksandr Smirnov with Mick Hart and Inara Eagle at a club in Kaliningrad — It’s amazing the fun you can have with cheese straws and vodka

I wondered what the sound quality would be in the club and was pleasantly surprised. The ceiling slopes down high at the ‘stage’ end and low at the other, which is not peculiar as the club sits below a vehicle ramp. My mind kept playing tricks with words ~ it often does. Here, was the word ‘garage’, and there the word ‘music’. I got the impression that the bands were none too pleased with the Vox amplifying system, but the general acoustics seemed fine to me.

Olga Hart at Kaliningrad music club — Olga Hart: an esoteric experience

As I mentioned earlier, I had not met Andrey Berenev before and neither had I met Aleksandr Smirnov. The latter made what can only be called ‘an entrance’, when he suddenly appeared dressed in his all- leather, self-made, signature ‘chimney sweep’ outfit.

From that moment onwards, all female tats, short skirts and shimmering stockings, as questionable and nice to view in that order, were instantly upstaged by Mr Smirnov’s imaginative rig, which, I am appalled to admit, made my red cravat and waistcoat look inexcusably tame. The only other gentleman in the room whose appearance attracted attention was he who was wearing a fawn-toned trench coat, carefully amalgamated with a sharp side-parting hairstyle, sixties tie and tie-clip. It’s not every day you meet JFK’s double.

True Bar scores high on the atmosphere chart but would benefit from a dimmer switch to bring the sheen from the lighting down to a level more in keeping with its underground ethos. In every other respect, as they were fond of saying in the roaring 20s’, ‘the joint was jumping’.

From the appearance of the first band to Andrey Berenev’s song, which he had written with Aleksandr Smirnov in mind and to which the flamboyant and charismatic chimney sweep took to the floor with relish, the atmosphere was beyond electric. If you like it lively, you got it!

Andrey Berenev takes to the 'stage' at True Bar, Kaliningrad

True Bar is a true bar. Maladits! I say in my very best Russian.

4 Great Kaliningrad Bars Mick Hart’s Pub Crawl

A Boxing Day pub crawl around Kaliningrad

Published: 30 December 2022 ~ 4 Great Kaliningrad Bars Mick Hart’s Pub Crawl

Tradition has it in the UK that after spending a long Christmas Day incarcerated at home, on the day after, the theatre of overindulgence is shifted to the pub. Boxing Day might well commence with a brisk walk or some good old-fashioned fox hunting, but such exertions are principally symbolic, diplomatic token gestures intended purely for the amelioration of one’s restless, poisoned conscience for over doing it the day before, mere curtain raisers to the main event, the much-needed trip to the pub.

As a firm believer in the doctrine that the preservation of tradition is an essential prerequisite for any culture’s survival, I applaud the actions of legacy Britons whose interpretation of Boxing Day is to switch off that infernal box, which, if you have not already done so, you should really not pay a licence for, and hotfoot it down to the pub for a pint or six with your mates, where you can safely slag of the country’s turncoats, those you elected to run the UK but who are running it into the ground, without fear of detection by PC Plods who constantly monitor the Net (No wonder they call it The Net!).

Practising what you preach is not only to lead by example, but also good for the soul: Why not, I thought, why not indeed! And it was in this proactive spirit, lashed together with seasonal goodwill and the assistance of my compatriots, that we put together a British-style pub crawl coincidental with Boxing Day but adopted for Kaliningrad.

4 Great Kaliningrad Bars

From the plan’s genesis I had venues in mind, old bar favourites that you could slip back into like a comfortable pair of slippers, but a friend who had expressed an interest in joining us proffered the suggestion that I start the crawl with somewhere new, a bar that had recently opened. Game for anything, at least where pubs and bars are concerned, I couldn’t fault the logic, and this is how and why we met up in a bar which for me was virginal territory on Boxing Day at 3pm.

We would, by the time our mission had been satisfactorily completed, which concluded at 12am, sample the delights of four establishments, which I will mention briefly in this post and then cover each individually at a later date and in more detail.

Whilst we never intended the crawl to be leitmotif driven, fate, it would seem, had other ideas, and these were partially revealed to me on the occasion of the third bar which, like the previous two, had been designed around the popular concept of industrial-look interiors.

The first bar on our itinerary, where Olga and I would rendezvous with our collaborators Inara and Vladimir, was divulged to me as Morrisons. It struck me that this was an unfortunate name for a bar and try as I might to think otherwise whilst bowling along in the taxi, I could not help but cogitate on what the price of baked beans might be and, in the process, distress myself with visions of jostling trolleys and moody faces at checkout tills. Rest assured, however, that the Morrison Bar has nothing to do with supermarkets. It is, in fact, eponymous with, and pays tribute to, the one and only Jim Morrison, who was never accused, as far as I know, for including among his many addictions an inveterate baked bean habit but who left his mark on the world as the impetuous, bold, ill-fated lead vocalist of the 1960s’ rock band Doors. Yes, but why and why now in Kaliningrad? You might just as well ask, why not?

4 Great Kaliningrad Bars

Morrisons (There I go again!), correction Morrison, is a basement bar, the interior of which closely follows the popular trend for artistic degentrification.

The crux of this design concept is Victorian iron and rivets in both execution and effect. Out with the suspended ceiling, the boxed and cased in beams and pipes, the trunking that hides the wires. The bones and sinews are there to be celebrated not covered up and occluded. Nuts, bolts, wires, vents, pipes, warts and all are left exposed to the naked eye. Rooms are effectively skeletised, even to the extent of eschewing plaster and panelling. Neglect, decay and degeneration replace conventional virtues of maintenance; revitalisation is quashed and in every aspect and every facet the old becomes the new.

Towards this end Morrison has got everything going for it, from shattered ceiling to paint-pealing walls, but, as the chrome-glistening Harley Davidson in the entrance hall denotes, everything that is distressed in Morrison’s shines with the lustre of a bright new pin, which is hardly unexpected as it is one of Kaliningrad’s most recent contenders on a bar circuit already unique, and the polish and varnish is not yet dry.

4 Great Kaliningrad Bars Mick Hart Morrison Bar — **Mick Hart in the entrance hall to Morrison Bar, Kaliningrad**

Morrison, which is a café, bar and music venue combo, has some nice touches to it, which I will reveal at a later date, and since no one had cause to complain about the food and as I enjoyed my ‘pint’ of Maisel’s Weisse and as the seats were comfortable and the place had atmosphere, the newly incorporated Morrison Bar receives the Mick Hart Seal of Approval.

From Morrison we set off for? Where would it be? The Sir Francis Drake, which was not a million miles away, was suggested first, but as we had been there recently, we decided to detour to a bar which when my younger brother visited me in the summer of 2019 became an absolute favourite of his; and that bar is the Yeltsin. No prizes, I’m afraid, for guessing the namesake of this establishment.

Boxing Day night was a filthy night, a term which I appreciate will have different connotations for different kinds of people but which I shall disappoint you now by saying that in this particular context means that the evening was wet and cold.

Huddled beneath our umbrellas, we hurried across the railway bridge to a bar which cannot so much be called industrial by design as designed in a previous lifetime for industrial purpose. It occupies the tail end of a behemoth of a building, which gives every indication of having once been emphatically industrial and which today still houses, as far as I can tell, a jamboree of workshops and small commercial units.

Walkers to the Yeltsin should take note that the pavement rises at the front of the Yeltsin building as the lie of the land and the road atop ascends to the height of the railway bridge.

This geographical tilt requires all prospective patrons to stray from the straight and narrow using the concrete steps provided. The Yeltsin, therefore, is not strictly speaking a basement bar as such, but one whose entrance is to be found located at lower ground level. (Talk about nit-picking!)

The first thing noticeable about the Yeltsin’s interior is that it is not a shabby chic makeover; it is genuinely shabby and basic and has ceilings as high as a kite. There has been no need, or should I say no apparent need, to create atmosphere in the Yeltsin, as whatever it was before it became what it is today (which is sublime) it was already infused with atmosphere and when whatever it was went away that atmosphere forgot to go with it.

4 Great Kaliningrad Bars Mick Hart in Yeltsin Bar Kaliningrad — **Mick Hart propping up the bar in Bar Yeltsin, Kaliningrad**

My brother liked the Yeltsin for its fantastic range of beers, and what dyed-in-the-wool beer drinker wouldn’t? But I am also attracted to it by the way that its easy down-at-heel character brings back affectionate memories of student union bars, two bars in particular: one, the London College of Printing as it was in the 1980s and, two, Southbank University bar, which back in my drinking-studying days were conveniently placed in staggering distance.

(If I was to say ‘corrugated metal sheets’ and ‘Pizza, beans and chips’ and you were to recall these bars respectively, then you must have been around in the days when I was frequenting these drinking holes.)

There is certainly a lot more that can be written about the Yeltsin, and I will try to get round to that, but, for the time being, let me just say for the record that on this auspicious Boxing Day visit, it was my privilege to enjoy an exceedingly nice ‘pint’ of Fruit Beer there, the OG of which weighed in at an impressive 6.3% and which cost somewhere in the vicinity of 350 roubles.

The unifying quality of good beer and a positive drinking atmosphere prevailed on me to stay, but the first law of pub crawling is that you must get off your arse and walk. Fortunately ~ fortunately that is for the integrity of the crawl ~ we were enticed to do just that, following a recommendation from one of the bar staff. No, not the one ‘get out you’re barred’, but from his giving us the name of and the directions to a bar that was so near that had it been any nearer the need to leave the Yeltsin would have been superfluous. Apprised of this piece of news, we were up on our feet and away!

In the drinking interlude that we had spent within the Yeltsin, the weather had grown more foul, and so it was with great relief that we discovered that, true to the barman’s word, the next port of call was upon us before we had time to button our coats.

This third place on our adventurous itinerary is called Forma in Russian, which in English translates into ‘Form’. (Cuh, there’s nothing to learning the Russian language, is there!)

Forma Bar in Kaliningrad — **Across the outside drinking and smoking area to the front door of Forma Bar, Kaliningrad**

It was Form that alerted me to the second theme of our evening, namely that all three bars we had visited were either subterranean or housed at lower ground level. Like Yeltsin, to get into Form we had first to cross a small enclosed and hard-surfaced forecourt, just the ticket for good-weather drinking and the perfect place to corral the once glamorous, now social pariahs, who, flying in the face of every public health warning going, still refuse to kick the tobacco habit.

Who would have believed but a few short years ago at a time when every bar in the world, between the ceiling and the floor, was hung with a film of blue-grey tobacco smoke that in order to pursue your vice you would one day be expelled, forced to huddle in the cold and rain just to drag on a fag? I shudder to think of a future in which bottles of beer bristle with health warnings and drinkers are forced to drink in closets and legally made to drink alone so as not to subject tea-totallers to the risks of passive drinking! Oh Brave New World that has such restrictions innit!

As the only good weather this evening was whether we could get in out of the rain quicker than Liz Truss left Number 10, we did not stop to answer the question from those not there to ask it: “Have you got a light?” Sanctimoniously: “No!” But hurried from the shadows into the sanctuary of the bar.

Form was the third venue to receive us this evening, and the third bar to give more than a passing nod to the conceptualised industrial look. Without going into too much detail in this post, I will merely mention plain concrete floor, a screen made from hollow section con blocks, rudimentary wood panelling and the sort of serving area that looked as though whoever made it had DIY skills in common with mine, except here I mean to be complementary, which for honesty’s sake I certainly could not be had it really been my hand working the carpenter’s tools.

4 Great Kaliningrad Bars

Whilst Morrison occupies the high end, the aesthetic end, of the industrial look, and Yeltsin is baptised by an effortless urban chic, Form possessed a distinctly vintage feel. Indeed, if you were to situate in the centre of the room four or five rails of clothing, unusually small and occasionally mothed ~ bingo! You would think you were in the right place to get yourself a pair of those as-scarce-as-rocking-horse-sh*t men’s trousers, the high-arsed ones which have braces buttons on the outside waistband. Guess whose got two pairs of those!

It is a well known fact, well known amongst the drinking fraternity, that both beer and pub-crawling can make you hungry (sounds suspiciously like a public health warning). In the Yeltsin we had addressed that problem by indulging in corn chips and cheesy strings. Now, it was the turn of a large dish of olives, easily and eagerly washed down with a delicious white wheat beer.

As with the Yeltsin, the range of beers on offer left nothing to the imagination. Frank Sinatra could have danced all night, and I could have drunk at Form all night and ‘still have begged for more’, but duty has a way of calling and, before the night was over, we had one more stop to make.

The bar, which was to become the last bar on our picaresque adventure, was divorced from the other two and required first that we tackle the appalling weather and second that we hop on board one of Kaliningrad’s new trams. What a treat! There’s a first time for everything and this was a first for me!

Fortunately, the walk from the tram stop to our final bar this evening was relatively amenable, which was fortuitous because I would not want to ask the way to a bar that goes by the long-tail, provocative name of Your Horizon is Littered. I joke ye not. Let’s play that again in Russian: ‘У вас горизонт завален’. Does that make it any easier for you?

4 Great Kaliningrad Bars Your Horizons are Littered — **Gentle illumination in the Kaliningrad bar ‘Your Horizons are Littered’**

Having already littered my horizon with empty beer glasses, I decided to do it one more time (It’s strange how ‘once’ can sometimes multiply into ‘twice’ without awareness informing you that the multiplication is taking place.)

The name of the bar may have come as a surprise to me, but that it was a basement bar did not. As I said earlier, all of our haunts this evening had a subterranean theme. However, that’s where the similarity ends. Your Horizons are Littered was not littered with even the slightest allusion to industrial chic. It is, in comparison to the three bars visited earlier, easily the smallest of the three and has a low-lit, cosy, comfortable, laid-back feel to it, qualities which, at the end of a long drinking day, are exactly what you want and when you want it most.

Horizons (let’s abbreviate it a little) does not serve tap-dispensing beer, so I had to make do with bottled, which was no hardship since they do stock Maisel’s Weisse. On the scale of one to 10, Horizon effortlessly scores maximum points on the snug and relaxation chart, an attribute attested to by Inara and I staying on, after the others had thrown in the beer towel, just for a nightcap ~ or two. That two could easily have turned into a nightcap and three had we not been so mature and with it wise and sensible and besides we had run out of time. Unbeknown to us, lulled into a sense of false security by the combination of good beer and a complementary atmosphere, closing time (thank you Tom Waits) had slipped behind the bar and quietly switched the barman off. No ‘Last Orders!’ here.

There was nothing for it now than to litter our horizons with the cold, the rain and the hope of a taxi. But, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca who consoled himself with the thought that they would ‘always have Paris’, we would always have Kaliningrad (apologies to the Czechs) and the memory of our Boxing Day crawl.

As Bogart never said, but would have done had he been with us today, ‘Play it again, Sam’ ~ soon!

The main thing

Morrison Bar
10A Chaykovskogo Street, Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, 236022
Tel: 8 (401) 250-52-22
VK account: https://vk.com/morrisonbar_kenig

Opening times
Mon~Thurs:12pm to 12am
Fri~Sat: 12pm to 3am
Sunday: 12pm to 12am
Note: Hours might differ for Russian New Year

Yeltsin Bar (Bar Yeltsin)
2-2а Garazhnaya Street, Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, 236001
Tel: 8 (401) 276-64-20

Opening times
Mon~Fri: 4.20pm to 12am
Sat~Sun: 2pm to 12am
Note: Hours might differ for Russian New Year

Forma
2 Garazhnaya Street, Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, 236029
Tel: 8 (981) 476-64-21

Opening times
Mon~Thurs: 2pm to 12am
Saturday: 2pm to 2am
Sunday: 2pm to 12am
Note: Hours might differ for Russian New Year

Your Horizons are Littered
(у вас горизонт завален калининград бар)
6 Kommunal’naya, Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, 236000
Tel: 8 (921) 005-19-69

Opening times
Mon~Fri: 6pm to 12am
Saturday: 6pm to 2am
Sunday: 6pm to 12am
Note: Hours might differ for Russian New Year

Kaliningrad Bars

😊Badger Club Kaliningrad
😊London Pub (Pub London) Kaliningrad
😊Premier Cafe Bar Kaliningrad
😊Dreadnought Pub & Music Venue Kaliningrad

Badger Club Kaliningrad a Bohemian Night on the Tiles

I wasn’t Badgered into going enough!

Published: 8 December 2022 ~ Badger Club Kaliningrad a Bohemian Night on the Tiles

My wife, Olga, went to a concert recently (see the photos below). I know exactly how my eloquent and highbrow musician friend in the UK will respond when he attempts to equate ‘concert’ with the images from that evening: “WTF?! Let’s go there!”

Now I am not the world’s most mainstream guy, but I have to admit when I saw the photos and heard an account of the evening, which did not happen until the following day because my wife rolled back at some ungodly hour in the morning, they made me feel positively ~ as the American author Henry James might say ~ ‘Ground into the mill of the conventional’.

It is not clear from the photographs whether the establishment is cavernous, but it certainly looks covenous ~ all that dim lighting, candles, hanging masks, dolls, natural-wood sculptures, enchanting (and possibly enchanted, Gothicised cabinets), and, moreover, wild and whacky costumery! Right up my surrealist street!

The top hat and tailed gentleman, the owner of the club, Aleksandr Smirnov, is obviously a ‘quick-change’ expert ~ one minute impresario, the next an updated rock-star figure from the minds of the Brothers Grimm. He, I am told, is a chimney sweep, only he isn’t, he is an accomplished and original artist who produces highly detailed bronzed relief plaques (apologies if I am slightly less than accurate, but I am having to base my opinion on mobile phone snaps) and, as you will see from the photographs, is also a bit of a wizard in the costume creation department. That’s him in the photo with his chopper in his hand. I’ve never seen one as big as that before; and me having been active in the antiques and militaria trade!

Choppers aside, this particular evening was dedicated to accomplished musicians and good music: There was a soulful and original indie art-folk band, Sfeno, first-rate singer guitarist and a young lady violinist, a virtuoso of her craft, who was on the fiddle a lot that evening. Vodka was not rationed, people got up and jived and my wife, much to her great surprise, if not unalloyed delight, was both chatted up and propositioned, which is always good for the ego (I’ve lost count of the number of times that the same has happened to me (you wish!)). The location, in fact the whole evening, was so spellbinding that it reduced Harry Potter to as much comparative magic as a meeting of the Women’s Institute at the local village-hall on a wet afternoon in the 1930s.

***Indie Art-Folk Band, Sfeno, on YouTube***

Never one to moralise, even when occasion justifies, whilst all this frivolity was going on in Kaliningrad’s answer to Alice’s Wonderland, I was at home with the cat, genning up on Königsberg and the history of East Prussia by reading (both the cat and I) that excellent publication Legends of the Amber Land, by Andrey Kropotkin.

Although I must say, with my wife rolling in at some unseemly hour of the morning ~ we won’t say when! ~ I would have been quite within my conjugal rights had I demanded of her, “And what time do you call this then!?” or have cast myself in the role of the heavy-handed Victorian husband, with “Why, you dirty stop-out.” But I contented myself with the elevating thought that if I have learnt one thing and one thing only in my brief visit to this muddled world, it is reflected in my born-again status as a stay-at-home Captain Sensible. Stout fellow that I assuredly am: resisting the lure of the bright lights nightlife in order to set the perfect example of how people of a certain age are expected to, and should, behave.

Thus, by the time my wife had sneaked in from her evening of ‘reasonable refreshments’ ~ making it difficult to imagine that she had been brought up in the social climate of anti-decadent Soviet-Russia! ~ I had read my book, patted the cat, drunk my cup of cocoa and with teddy tucked snugly under my arm had taken myself to bed: zzzzzzzzz.

Have you ever had the feeling that you are missing out on something?🤔

**Made in Kaliningrad: Exclusive Badger Underpants**

Badger Club Kaliningrad — **Aleksandr Smirnov introduces singer guitarist Andrey Berenev**

Olga Hart with Impresario Aleksandr Smirnov Badger Club Kaliningrad — **Olga Hart with** **Aleksandr Smirnov**

Olga Hart Bader Club Kaliningrad — **Olga Hart in the Badger club**

Band Sfeno performing at Badger Club Kaliningrad — **Band Sfeno performing**

Andrey Berenev Badger Club Kaliningrad — **Andrey Berenev**

Olga Hart in esoteric surroundings — **Olga Hart surrounded by the esoteric**

Olga Hart Fairy Tale Furniture made by Chimney Sweep — **Olga Hart with vintage oil lamp and fantasy fairy tale furniture made by ‘Chimney Sweep’ Aleksandr Smirnov**

Inara horny in Kaliningrad — **Inara looking horny**

Man with big chopper in Kaliningrad — **Confronted with a large chopper**

Additional Information

Badger ( Barsuchek) Барсучёк club
Sverdlova, 33, Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, 236006
Tel: +7 909 777‑97-75

Aleksandr Smirnov
By all accounts*, Aleksandr (Chimney Sweep) Smirnov is an artist, costume designer and consummate wizard at conjuring up interior design of a distinctly unusual and exotic nature.

Able to work with all kinds of material, including wood and metal, much of what you see in the photographs in terms of fixtures and fittings are said to have been made by his hand, the same hand that has orchestrated the natural, historical and decorative elements that set apart the club’s interior from any other you may have encountered. The syncopated fairy tale feel that you get from all of this is no coincidence. A little fairy tells me that he writes fairy tales as well.
*Дом трубочиста или выходные в сказке (turbopages.org)

The Badger club, Kaliningrad
The Badger club has a dedicated clientele who value not only the décor and entertainment but speak with great warmth and affection about the club’s welcoming ethos and its friendly, inviting atmosphere. Why not go and see for yourself? You may just become a regular in the process?!

Links to bars, restaurants to visit in Kaliningrad

Upper Pond, Kaliningrad,Garden Cafés (Soul Garden)
Café Seagull by the Lake, Kaliningrad
London Pub (Pub London), Kaliningrad
Bar Drednout [Dreadnought], Kaliningrad

Café Seagull by the Lake Kaliningrad is hard to beat!

Good location, Good Cuisine, Good Service

Published: 21 August 2022 ~ Café Seagull by the Lake Kaliningrad is hard to beat!

As summer peters out, it’s time to take every opportunity available to sit outside and enjoy a beer. The problem in Kaliningrad is that everybody appears to be doing just that. Consequently, bars, restaurants and cafés with outside seating areas are heavily subscribed to. It is always refreshing, therefore, when supply is overstretched by demand, to discover something new.

Recently, we discovered Кафе Чайка у озера (Café Seagull by the Lake). The café’s terrace is small, but, as English estate agents like to say when advertising properties, it is ‘well-appointed’. The terrace and the restaurant windows look out over Kaliningrad’s (Königsberg’s) Upper Pond, which was created in 1270 by the knights of the Teutonic Order as a repository for fish farming. Today, fishermen sit patiently by the water’s edge hoping to get a bite, but they share the recreational space with non-fishing Kaliningrad citizens and visitors to the city for whom the pond, paths and parkland surrounding it are a convenient natural habitat for walking, cycling or simply relaxing.

Café Seagull is an excellent place for simply relaxing; thus, if you are walking or cycling around the pond you could always make it your destination or a halfway house on your journey. On the afternoon that I visited, I was doing neither. I had purposefully gone there with my wife’s family to enjoy the view from somewhere new, have a ‘pint’ and a bite to eat. I was not disappointed ~ nobody was. The menu is varied, interesting and offers something for every taste, even strange vegetarian tastes like mine. The beer, which is a tad higher in price than I would normally want to pay, was nevertheless just what the doctor ordered, or probably wouldn’t, although my UK doctor might because he likes a beer or two as, come to think of it, does my gastroenterologist in Kaliningrad. Reassured by this twin prescription, I could sense that the afternoon had all the makings of a guilt-free one. Today’s choice, therefore, was Maisel’s Weisse, a German wheat beer with plenty of flavour, more so and especially if you opt, as I did on this occasion, for the brew’s unfiltered version.

Café Seagull by the Lake Kaliningrad

Inside, the café is bright, airy, unpretentious and welcoming and, as I have said (you were listening, weren’t you?), offers a pleasant view of the Upper Pond from an elevated advantage.

View of Konigsberg cobbles and pond — **Königsberg’s cobbles and Upper Pond from the terrace of the Seagull by the Lake Café in Kaliningrad**

Two large, framed prints on the walls, one of a cabbage and the other a rear view of a rather well-built seated lady, invite speculation as to what the symbolic connection might be, but are too thought-provoking to cogitate on at length when all you want to do is relax and sip your Maisel’s Weisse.

Fortunately, that’s all there is to puzzle over. The cuisine, both in terms of presentation and taste, received top marks and the service could not be faulted. The young staff are helpful, polite, attentive and, most importantly, resoundingly cheerful. They are a credit to the restaurant and thus a valuable asset.

Waiter Café Seagull by the Lake Kaliningrad

If my posts on bars, restaurants and cafés in Kaliningrad included a rating system, it would be difficult, if not impossible, not to give Café Seagull 10 out of 10. What we can say with impunity is that Café Seagull by the Lake is highly recommended and a venue you should bookmark under ‘I must definitely visit’.😊

Essential details:

Café Seagull by the Lake (Кафе Чайка у озера)
Verkhneozernaya, 16A Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad region, Russia 236008

Tel: +7 921 711 71 80

Opening times
Seven days a week: 0800 to 2200 (8am to 10pm)

Note: Takeaway service available

Out and About in Kaliningrad (see links below)

🙂 Mama Mia Restaurant
🙂 Premier Café Bar
🙂 Kavkaz Restaurant
🙂 London Pub

London Pub Kaliningrad Best Pub not in London

Mick Hart reviews the London Pub (Pub London) Kaliningrad

Published: 14 August 2022 ~ London Pub Kaliningrad Best Pub not in London

My first encounter with the London Pub, or Pub London as it is known in Kaliningrad (note the crafty way the Russian language confuses us!), took place in the summer of 2015. Let me say from the outset that I was not attracted to it just because I used to live in London and it calls itself the London Pub.

Thankfully, whenever I visit a foreign country the need to hotfoot-it to the nearest British themed bar to cry wistfully into my beer in demonstrative affection for the native land I have left behind ~ even though I may only have left it yesterday ~ is a failing I have yet to cultivate, and one I suspect may forever remain a singularly Irish phenomenon. For wherever you go in the world, you can always be sure to find, usually when you least expect or want to, shamrock, porter and diddley dee.

No, what appealed to me about the London Pub, forgoing for the moment the historic building in which it is housed, was the layout, interior décor and the atmosphere bestowed by both; a combination which was “a tad unfortunate” as this entry in my diary, dated 8 March 2020, shows: “upon our arrival [at the London Pub] we found that it had undergone a complete and startling refit.”

Incidentally, on that day, which would be the last day I would drink at the London Pub until the ‘all-clear sirens’ sounded on the two-year coronavirus blitz, we got our first glimpse of the new-look world. For it was in the London Pub that we were introduced to what was destined to become that global, or rather globalist, absurd coronavirous fashion accessory, the never proven to be effective but still mandatory mask.

The London Pub staff were wearing their new regulation uniforms ~ black waistcoats, bow ties and black bowler hats (and other things, I hasten to add) ~ which were excellent in themselves as they suited the London Pub ethos ~ but teamed with coronavirus muzzles?! Laugh, of course we did, little knowing at the time that this sinister remake of Clockwork Orange was a prelude to our future.

Right>>: London pub staff kindly poses for our camera. This photo taken in
May 2022, post-coronavirus mask era >

When I say our future, I mean to imply the world in general, as Olga and I only ever wore masks in situations where we had no choice, such as when travelling on public transport or shopping in the supermarket. As soon as choice resumed, off the silly masks came.

We returned to the London Pub in May this year (2022), which is when the photographs used in this post were taken. The observations, however, have been borrowed from my diary, written on the day when we discovered that the London Pub had been dramatically refurbished, which was 8 March 2020.

Above: Mick Hart enjoying a ‘hair of the dog’ at the London Pub, circa summer 2015

The London Pub that is not in London

The ground floor of Kaliningrad’s London Pub, accessed as it is by a flight of steps, is effectively an elevation above street level. It consists of a large room divided in two by a crook-shaped bar, which is a copy, albeit an inaccurate one, of the ubiquitous horseshoe bar with which many a London Victorian pub is typified.

To the right of the bar, at the point where the loop curves, the narrower portion of the room no longer imitates the British convention of pubs divided into two social halves, the ‘public’ and the ‘lounge’, where the public bar was often more basic in fixtures, fittings and furnishings and the lounge, as the name implies, more comfortable and upmarket, attracting, in terms of class taxonomy, a better clientele. The old London pub was never exactly this, but I think it is fair to say that one side of the room, the narrow side, was less cushion-filled, textile based and given to reclining in than its more spacious counterpart.

Before the refit, the bar area was furnished with an assortment of tables, each seating between four to six people, some of which were separated if only to a symbolic degree by the inclusion of chest-high snob screens. The dominant colour, not just of the bar area but the entire pub, had been mid-blue; in keeping I suppose with the contemporary trend in British pubs for light and pastel painted interiors

Above: London Pub bar-side, circa summer 2015
Below: London Pub as it is today (photos: May 2022)

London Pub new look refurbishment Kaliningrad

To justify the London Pub’s eponymous connection with England, stenciled references to traditional English idioms, well-known sayings such as ‘My cup of tea’ and the ‘Apple of my eye’, guested on the beams and walls together with quotes from British literary figures, men of letters and arcane wit, such as the famous and equally infamous Oscar Wilde with his ‘Moderation in all things, including moderation’.

London Pub Kaliningrad

From the looks of things, it appeared that whoever masterminded the pub refurbishment had borrowed from Oscar’s irony, since no moderation was apparent neither in the extent nor dramatic character of the changes.

Gone are the high stools in the alcoves, the circular tables and padded bench seats. The minimalist wall décor and the traditional British slogans have also been axed, substituted by an enormous profusion of curios, collectables, memorabilia, vintage and retro items of an exceedingly English nature. They proliferate on walls where no expense or imagination has been spared in the interest of procuring that tatty-torn, disheveled look which aspiring interior designers and Sunday-magazine supplement editors like to call ‘distressed’.

I wrote about distressed décor in my piece on the Georgian bar Kavkaz but the effect therein is far more restrained than it is in the London Pub.

The London Pub employs the same ageing technique of peeling wallpaper and fading paint. Like Kavkaz it seeks to create the impression, and succeeds, that fragments of old wallpaper and patches of former paint schemes are seeping through more recent layers, but the mat green and dull orange hues favoured by the London Pub are hauntingly subtle and a few extra trowels worth of rough-surfaced rendering spattered with differing tones conveys an authenticity that enticingly raises the question why if neglect is so deucedly comfortable should we ever go out of our way to improve on its virtue?

British memorabilia in London Pub Kaliningrad

Above: How to make a wall distressed and then scatter it with memorabilia

The alcove to the customers’ right of the bar has been taken a step further into the world of designer neglect by plastering various parts of it with three or four scraps of newspaper, all belonging to bygone eras and which, by their torn, wanting and dog-eared state, pass as having been stuck to the wall for years rather than the few weeks it has taken to present them.

On top of this imaginative scheme of fading colours and random pages torn from British newspapers (By the way, The Three Kings pub in London’s Clerkenwell Green also favours newsprint walls.) no restraint has been exercised in turning back the clock to earlier times in Britain: framed prints of 18^th century classic architecture, silk cigarette cards, film advertisements, decorative wall plates, pictures of celebrities, brassware, hunting horns and you name it and you’ll probably find it have found a home on the London Pub’s walls.

On the pier between the windows behind me hung a vintage English naval jacket with corresponding visor hat next to a British army officer’s cap and dress jacket. Other uniform combinations of a British military nature adorn the walls on the opposite side of the room; all familiar items to us, as many passed through our hands whilst running our vintage and antique shop in England.

Vintage British uniforms in Kaliningrad bar

Above: Vintage British military uniforms adorning the ‘aged’ walls of the London Pub

Each of the London Pub’s window piers have been fitted with a shelf enabling all manner of collectable items shipped to Russia from England to accumulate ‘naturally’ in a perfectly haphazard way. Neither my memory nor my imagination struggled with this concept, as the clutter and its variegation closely resembled a place I once called home, where junk and I co-existed in harmonic correlation.

Some of the London Pub’s shelves have become resting places for old books, diverse in topic but indefatigably English by origin, their covers turned to face the room for all the world to see. For example, behind me there was a book on the Royal Navy and at the other end of the same shelf one about Queen Elizabeth II (Gawd bless ‘er!). On other shelves nearby there was a book on England’s Home Guard (WWII) and a second on the Royal Navy but harking back to a different era. Above these books hang two ancient tennis rackets both constructed of good honest wood ~ none of your carbon-fibre nonsense here! ~ obsolete in themselves but appearing even more archaic slotted inside their square wooden braces.

Vintage English tennis rackets in Russia

Above: Clutter against its natural backdrop

Looking back from the bar towards the entrance of the London Pub it struck me that something rather exciting, even magical, had happened since I last drank here. The door surround had turned into a Tudor-Bethan fantasy. Thick, curved oak pilasters ~ or so we are led to believe ~ stepped cornices profusely carved and scrolled, rise above an elaborate entablature to an impressive second tier containing a grand, baroque, armorial crest, which speaks to us in medieval tones of the dynastic power of barons and earls, whilst a couple of coal buckets either side of the uprights speak in brass of a giant fireplace. Whatever you want it to be, it is only disappointing when exiting under its lordly lintel, the fantasy dissolves and you are back on the streets of the 21^st century. And yet it could be worse, much worse, for at least the 21st-century streets on the other side of the door are not the ones that the Pub, if it was in London, would put you out on ~ streets that you walk in fear and at your peril! But you should have stayed for another pint, so it jolly well serves you right!

London Pub Kaliningrad baroque fantasy entrance

Above: The coal buckets on either side imply exiting into the real world via the fireplace

In the old London, the London Pub before the refit, we would have been sitting on plain, high-backed bar stools. Now, we were sitting on not-so-plain new-old bar stools, in other words stools antique in appearance but not so antique in age. At first glance, every other glance and a prolonged unfaltering stare, these ‘prop you up at the bar’ devices have more about them than just a touch of Louis. They have near heart-shaped backs and deep blue silver-trimmed frames. They incorporate a classical shell motif. Their front legs are sweeping sabres; their back legs pad-feet cabrioles. They are, of course, like the fireplace door, strictly fantasy pieces.

The bar top, which was rather plain before the refit, is now a satin polished light wood with a feature-distinctive grain. The choice of seats, either open armchairs or rectangular tubs, has been rescinded, replaced with the accent on uniformity. The new kids on the block are back-to-back button-down leather-look seats capable of accommodating six people comfortably around rectangular tables.

London Pub Kaliningrad refurbishment

The opposite side of the pub has also undergone a startling transformation. Gone is the design concept of no two seats or tables the same, and out with the low (far too low for comfort) chairs, which either put your knees around your ears or rested your chin on the table ~ an anomaly in restaurant seating that may by its regular recurrence be construed as peculiarly Russian. Gone also are the open-backed sofas sprinkled with various cushions that started off as comfy but at some point during the evening slid quietly and unreasonably away, off out through the latticework backs. In their place the same pitch-black, button-backed vinyl seats lining the walls and sitting at right angles to the windows in the ‘bar’ march along the room like two brigades of German stormtroopers. Whilst these seats might work in the smaller area as space-saving maximisers, they do not work for me in the larger portion of the room. They are much too regimented and just too much. It is hard to imagine any true London pub trying to get away with this, although put such seats in an American diner and Bob’s your uncle and Earl’s your aunt, no question!

Above: Seats very plush but also very regimented. However, also very comfortable

As I mentioned in my piece on the Kavkaz Restaurant and in my article Kaliningrad Art Exhibition, lighting is everything. The old London Pub could not be faulted in this respect and neither can its newer namesake.

Lighting in the London Pub Kaliningrad

About an hour after we had taken our seats at the bar, because every other seat was reserved (more about that at the end of this article), the lights went down a notch causing everything around us to turn seductively atmospheric. I had already noted that in the bar area a series of ceiling-recessed spotlights shone down on the mosaic floor, forming round circles of slowly changing colours. These had worked well when the lighting was up, but seen in the muted half-light are really quite spectacular.

The wall lighting bar side is augmented by long-reach Anglepoise lamps bolted in series along the wall. As my photos taken in 2015 reveal, similar lamps existed in the London Pub’s previous life, but they have multiplied since then and the poles on which they are mounted allow in addition to the angling of the shade a retraction or extension option. Smaller lamps of a similar type have the practical advantage of directing the light on the walls to illuminate the wornout theme and the eclectic items that live there. Taken together in sequence, the lamps add a touch of steampunk to the London Pub’s unique aesthetic.

Staying with lighting, in the old London, there had been a hanging structure, a sort of raft framework suspended from the ceiling on which lights were attached and sundry knick-knacks supported. This feature has been retained but cased inside a decorative unit, its segments of coloured glass echoing the stained-glass mosaics popularised in Victorian pubs. The glass work is predominantly green, profusely decorated with stylised floral motifs and geometrical patterns in pink and blue. The dimmed light shining through the casework receives a second tonal effect, a lightly suffusive overlay. The mood-conditioning aura that this creates is repeated in the curved translucent border that runs around the wall’s perimeter at the point where wall and ceiling meet. It is a continual convex band of Tiffany-patterned, luminous coving, which is subtle and highly effective.

Above: Uniforms, angled lamps and an illuminated coving screen of exotic abstracts

The London Pub’s lighting mix is such a fabulous orchestration that it is difficult, virtually inexcusable, to single out a centrepiece, but should I ever be pushed to do so I would probably opt for the pendant lights that float around the bar and dangle from the ceiling like so many gossamer Chinese lanterns. Large, floaty, bell-shaped silken balloons that would not be out of place in Alice’s Wonderland, these extraordinary, extravagant lamp shades are infinitely more fascinating than the screen of your mobile phone and make excellent, in every sense, dreamy light diffusers.

Above: Forget about the telly! Look at those delicious lanterns!

I liked the old London Pub, but I did not like it any better or any worse than the new one. Admittedly, before embarking on what must have constituted a not inexpensive design programme, the proprietor of the London Pub could have consulted the idiom ‘If it ‘aint broke don’t fix it’, but had this been the case we would have been deprived of the current iteration and forgone the concept of culture-linked vintage as a versatile, and if I may be so bold as to say not entirely conventional, idiomatic design approach.

There is no doubt in my mind that refraining from fixing unbroken things should have been the lesson taught to those corporate young men in suits employed by Britain’s breweries, who shoulder much of the blame for vanadalising and continuing to vandalise British pub interiors, showing scant regard for history and even less appreciation for atmosphere and taste.

Have you booked?

If I have one criticism of the London Pub ~ and to be fair, this is something that you come across in various Kaliningrad drinking establishments ~ it is the ‘all the tables are reserved’ trick.

Our visit to the London Pub in 2019, the day when I wrote the notes for this post, had been the third time we had stopped for a drink there in as many weeks, and each time we had been turned away as we had not reserved a table. On that occasion we were allowed to drink at the bar, although had we not explicitly asked to do so, we would have been asked to leave.

Above: It’s the only way they’d let me stay. I hadn’t booked a table.

We sat and drank in the London pub for over an hour, during which time five tables in the bar area became vacant and three of the reserved tables remained unoccupied. Being told to leave when you have not reserved a table, seems to me bad business sense. Surely, if a table is reserved for, let’s say 9pm, and someone without a reservation comes into the pub at 8pm, would it not make sense to permit paying customers to use that table for the duration that it is empty?

The psychology behind repeatedly turning people away who have not booked in advance might be that they will book in future and, if they have taken the trouble to book, will prolong their patronage throughout the evening.

If so, then this is a fallacy. Turning customers away results in resentment not patronage, and I can think of no pub in London that would entertain the notion. I am not suggesting that the London Pub or any other drinking/eating establishment in Kaliningrad try to emulate the ‘stack ‘em high treat them cheap’ model adopted in UK city pubs, pampering the customer never hurt anyone, but it is advisable to remember that modern-day Kaliningrad hosts an awful lot of competition, which is growing all the time, and that customer loyalty is predicated not only on atmosphere and commendable service but also reliability. Not everyone wants to plan ahead, and regular casual trade, ignored, deterred, is money lost to somebody else’s bar till and customer loyalty possibly lost forever.

Here endeth the lesson.

Having got that off my chest, I can say without fear of contradicting myself that the London Pub continues to be one of the most atmospheric, ingeniously designed, relaxing drinking and eating establishments that anyone could wish for. In fact, I am prepared to go so far as to say that any guide to Kaliningrad’s bars that does not include the London Pub in its ‘best of’ top-10 line-up either does not know his quality from his dross, is mathematically challenged or both. It really is that simple.

✔ The London Pub, probably the best London pub not to be found in London!

‘Gis a job’

The London Pub in Kaliningrad, Russia, is a unique and charismatic venue vying for top place in Kaliningrad’s bar, restaurant and entertainment scene. It bills itself as a ‘real English pub’, and I have to admit it comes very close. Boasting a choice of 35 draft beers, if you can’t find something to suit your palate at the London Pub then you should urgently switch to drinking something else. As with the interior décor, ambience and beer selection, the menu is varied, surprising and reputedly tasty. Something that I have not touched upon in my review is that lurking below the London Pub there are two extremely atmospheric late-night/early morning music clubs called, respectively, the ‘City Jazz’ and ‘Piano Bar’. I can reveal that I have frequented both, but since they are endowed with their own distinctive ambience, they deserve to be treated separately from the assessment of the public bar and restaurant. Hopefully, we will get together soon and chat about them at our leisure.

The London Pub website: https://www.londonpub.ru/

Drinking Beer in the Premier Café Bar Kaliningrad

A review of the Premier Café Bar Kaliningrad by Mick Hart

Updated 20 August 2022 | First published: 25 April 2022 ~ Drinking Beer in the Premier Café Bar Kaliningrad

After a two-year coronavirus hiatus that, give or take the odd sortie, dissuaded me from drinking in bars, I allowed myself to be willingly seduced into returning to my sinful ways. The establishment we visited recently is not entirely my sort of place. It is a modern café-bar, all plate glass and open-plan, but as it is one in Kaliningrad that I was unacquainted with, and a place dispensing beer, to resist would have been inexcusable if not altogether futile.

The Premier Café Bar (aka Prem’yer Minstr Kafe Bar Magazin), Kaliningrad, is located inside a substantial building with the main entrance off Prospekt Leninskiy. It divides neatly into two parts: one side functioning as a ‘liquor store’ (they like this Americanisation in Kaliningrad); the other as a bar.

The off-licence facility (English off-licence sounds so 1950s’ corner shop, don’t you think?) has an impressive upmarket feel about it. Behind the low-level counter, the custom-made floor-to-ceiling shelves are stocked with an astounding array of imported spirits, including Jim Beam, my favourite bourbon, but in a series of flavoured variants of which my palate is virginally ignorant. In fact, many of these exotic imports I had never heard of and might not try for some time to come, considering the average price per bottle is a budget-busting 30-quid.

This disinclination to shell out unreservedly on something the price of which others might willingly accept may have its origins in my youth. There was a time in England when we could buy Jim in half-gallon bottles from the Yanks at the local airbase on a bartered goods and ‘at cost’ basis. In comparing the prices today, and taking into account the diminutive size of the bottles, I realise nostalgically that far from living a mis-spent youth, I had lived a youth well-spent or in the last analysis was a youth who knew how to spend well.

In addition to the well-stocked top-drawer spirit brands, Premier also boasts a regiment of chilling cabinets, which contain more varieties of beer than Russia has sanctions, if that is feasibly possible, and hosts a good selection of quality wines from vineyards around the world.

Premier bar

The other half of Premier is where the bar hangs out. It is a proper bar, with wooden stools lining its front and opposite a conforming row of fixed seats and tables, markedly similar in style to the sort of thing you would expect to find in a 1950s’ retro diner.

As I come from England (note, I never say from the UK because that would be too shameful), I have a natural predilection for bars which actually have bars in them, as opposed to bars where there is no bar, only table service. I liked this bar because it had a bar, and it had one with Premier written across it, which is something that I also liked because it helped to solve the mystery of where I was, as I had missed the name of the premises when we entered the building. It also had something unusual going on at one end of the bar, the leading end: an inbuilt feature resembling a truck or trolley. The significance of this embellishment was something that escaped me then and continues to elude me now, but as bamboozling as it was, it did not prevent me from liking it.

The big, old wooden beam above the bar, which acts as a suspended lighting console, and the ceiling-mounted wagon wheels in the room opposite, also have quirk appeal, but by far the most interesting and memorable difference that Premier bar possesses is that at the end of a long wide corridor, lo and behold there’s a bike shop! Now, this is a novelty, to be sure. Consider the possibility: one could stop at Premier for a bevvy or two, buy a bike and cycle back home. And I bet you’ll never guess what ~ this is precisely what I did not do.

Perhaps I would have felt more adventurous had I not been so busy admiring the chevron-tiled floor and, where retro posters are not covering it, the good old-fashioned brickwork. These accentuated traits compensate a little for Premier’s lack of old worldliness, which given the choice is the kind of environment in which I really prefer to drink and where once I am inside it is virtually impossible to prise me out.

Generally, Premiere’s décor both in the bar and off-sales, eschews the modern industrial style. The absolute connection between wagon wheels, hanging beams, rusticating trolleys, exposed ventilation tubes, art gallery sliding spotlights, exposed brickwork and retro posters may not be immediately apparent and may remain that way forever, as the Premier name offers no clues, unless, of course, it has something to do with what is invariably touted as the greatest invention of all, the wheel ~ as in wagon wheels? trolleys on wheels? Premier meaning first? Perhaps not.

To add to its collection of ideas, Premier fashionably utilises a range of different light fittings which flaunt the latest trend in visible filament bulbs. Who would have thought even a decade ago that the humble pear-shape light bulb with its limited choice of white or warm glow would morph so quickly and so dramatically into the numerous shapes, sizes and colours available today and all with their once latent elements proudly on display?

Visually, the Premier has more than enough going for it to fulfil the need for an interesting dining and drinking backdrop, which is good as it offsets the dreadful din clattering out of the music system. To be fair, this obtrusive and perfectly unnecessary adjunct is by no means exclusive to Premier; most bars seem compelled to inflict this modern excuse for music on their unsuspecting and long-suffering customers with little or no regard for conversation or atmosphere.

Of course, the problem could lie with us. After all, we are not in the first flush of youth. But call us wrinklies with hearing intolerance or people of discernment fortunate to have been born in and therefore to have lived through the age of pre-mediocrity, the fact remains that boom, boom, boom and lots of squiggly noisy bits iterating repetitively at ‘What did you say? Speak up!!’ volumes are more annoying than a slap on the arse, if not infinitely less surprising. Eventually, one of our august company, ex-Soviet Major V Nikoliovich, marched across to the bar and asked for the racket to be turned down. Oh, he can be so masterful!

He also evinces considerably more trust in fate than I could ever muster. For example, another of Premier’s novelty features is the under-floor display unit, containing various curious and random artefacts. The glass panel at floor level is something I carefully avoided, whereas VN exhibited an almost perverse and mischievous delight in deliberately perching his weight on top.

Where our paths, VN’s and mine, do converge is that we like to sample different beers. Today we were on the Švyturys, a once renowned lager first brewed in Lithuania by the Reincke family at the latter end of the 18^th century but which in more recent times has become part of the Carlsberg stable, one of those foreign breweries that perfunctorily closed its doors in Russia after the sanctions had bolted. I’ll lay odds on favourite They Wished They Hadn’t.

As we had already eaten, I cannot comment on Premier’s cuisine, although a quick whizz round the internet reveals that Premier receives consistently good reviews for its international fare and its excellent pizzas. My friends ordered some light snacks, which they seemed to enjoy, and although forever conscious of the need to prioritise volume for beer, I did permit myself to nibble upon a couple of cheesy balls, which seemed to go well with Švyturys.

Throughout our stay at Premier, the staff were attentive and accommodating, but why did I have the impression that they were on the verge of crying.

I forgot to look back when we left the cafe to see if the sight of a bunch of old farts who routinely complain about tasteless ‘music’ exiting the premises had wreathed their faces in much-needed smiles.

Had we have been in the States, crying or not, we would still have received a white toothy grin and a just as fictitious ‘Have a nice day’, which of course we wouldn’t have wanted and of course we would not have appreciated. C’est la vie, I suppose!

Essential details

Prime Minister Café Bar Kaliningrad
Prospekt Leninskiy 7
Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast
Russia, 236006

Tel: +7 963 738 77 76

Opening hours
Monday to Sunday 8am to 4pm

Cuisine speciality
European, Italian, Japanese

More places in Kaliningrad
Dreadnought Pub & Music Venue Kaliningrad
Kavkaz Restaurant Kaliningrad
Mama Mia Restaurant