Lifestyle - Moscow relishes its new outdoor cafes

MOSCOW: Fat raindrops slid down the vinyl sheeting that partly sheltered the café table from the downpour that was just letting up. Water sluiced across the sidewalks, and cars spewing leaded gasoline spattered the curbs as they drove through grimy puddles.
But the woman at the front table gazed out at the street with an expression of dreamy bliss.
"Summer in Moscow is only two months," said Nargis Gulyamova, 40. "We don't often get chance to be outside."
Finding a glimpse of human-scale beauty - a patch of green in a courtyard, a 19th-century gargoyle - can be a challenge in this city of monumental architecture and busy construction sites, especially in winter when no one wants to linger on the street.
So it takes more than rain for Muscovites to give up one of their rare chances to relax outdoors, Gulyanova explained.

"To find 15 or 20 minutes to sit down outdoors, it's a big gift," she said. "Today I saw it was raining and I almost didn't come. But then I thought I have to use this chance."
On Friday, with the temperature hovering around 15 degrees to 18 degrees Celsius - in the low 60s Fahrenheit - and heavy rainstorms rolling across the city, the outdoor cafés that have become a Moscow summer tradition did brisk business, built as they are with awnings and roofs for just such a contingency. In the narrow strip of park between the two lanes of a central boulevard, couples sat placidly on benches under the drizzle, holding umbrellas.
When it comes to enjoying the outdoors, Russians have always been adept at taking what they can get: sunbathing standing up beside frozen rivers, or growing a year's worth of vegetables at their country houses in the short, bright summers.
But outdoor cafés have taken on a special importance in Moscow, where over the last decade people have slowly colonized street spaces that once offered little in the way of coziness. Cafés have filled in the architectural nooks and crannies away from the city's wide avenues - behind apartment houses, in park outbuildings. Some Moscow diners happily sit outdoors next to 10-lane avenues.
Prices aren't cheap: It's common to pay the equivalent of $4 to $8 for a cappuccino. Yet popular chains like Shokoladnitsa (Chocolate Girl) and Kofe House offer an accessible treat to the growing class of urban professionals who cannot afford the luxury goods marketed to the richest Russians but have made a little extra money from the country's oil-driven consumer boom.
The sprucing up of Moscow's streetscapes and parks - pushed through by Mayor Yuri Luzhkov - and the growth of cafés have also taken the edge off what Gulyamova, sipping her espresso on Pushkin Square, called problems with the government, like the increasing limitations that have been placed on her journalist colleagues.
"If, with all our other problems, we couldn't have cappuccino, then it would be totally bad," she said.
Every spring, restaurants and cafés hammer together wooden terraces that they call, in honor of their short window of operations, summer cafés. On summer nights, sunset lingers past 10:30 p.m, and days are often sunny but not hot.
"If you don't have an outdoor café, in the summer, you might as well not open up," said Nathan Dallimore, an Australian who is one of the two imported foreign chefs at the Denis Simachyov Bar, a café attached to a high-end fashion designer's boutique.
Its busy summer café juts out into Stoleshnikov Pereulok, a cobblestone pedestrian street near the Kremlin. Vitaly Karpov, 32, an architect, and his wife Olga Neronskaya, 29, who were visiting Moscow from Tyumen, in Siberia, smoked and drank espresso. Rain spattered the potted hedges behind them. They were disappointed to find Moscow colder than their home town, but, Karpov said, "We have to maximize our enjoyment."
At Venezia Trattoria, a restaurant with outdoor tables in an apartment building courtyard a few blocks away, Aleksei Bartomevich, 69, and Lena Kaichenko, 56, art historians, had just finished their mushroom soup and were waiting for his tortellini as the rain steamed up the vinyl flap that sheltered their table.
Colleagues at the nearby State Institute for Art Studies, they eat nearly every day in a café, rain or shine. She works three academic jobs at once and he works two, partly so they can enjoy such restaurants, where main courses can cost more than 400 rubles, or about $17.
Karpov recalled the Soviet days when cafés were so scarce that their doormen demanded bribes. "If you had told me then that almost every day I would be going to a restaurant, I would not have believed it," he said.

Outdoor cafés underline the growing gap between rich and poor, though. Nastya Fomina, 18, smoking with four teenage friends at Prime Star, a deli-like café on Kamergersky Pereulok, another pedestrian street near the Kremlin, said it disturbed her when passers-by asked for money.Though the restaurant's food is simple, featuring premade wraps, turkey with cranberry sauce, and shrimp - along with Russian soups like borscht, a lunch can easily run to $20. Fomina said allowances from their parents enabled her and her friends to go there every day. "It's our tradition," she said.
People who cannot afford cafés find their own ways to take advantage of the summer. Around 10 p.m. one recent night on Tverskaya Boulevard, nearly every bench was occupied by a group of people drinking beer, including Aleksandr Mikhailovich and three friends, all immigrants from Kyrgyzstan.
Mikhailovich, 31, said he made 19,000 rubles a month, or about $816, working 11 hours a day as a janitor. He can't afford a beer or a coffee in a café, he said. But he had bought Old Windmill beers for 30 rubles apiece, or $1.28.
"After working so long, you want to come and sit outside a bit, and meet people," he said as his friend nuzzled the neck of a girlfriend. Orange sunset light reflected off the mare's-tails clouds in the blue sky and on the golden onion dome of a church at the end of the park. That part was free.