Word: kropotkinskaya
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...Moscow, he made 190 rubles ($304) a month even if no one came to dinner. "I didn't care if we had customers or not," he says with a shrug. "I didn't care if the service was good." Two years ago, he started his own now popular bistro, Kropotkinskaya 36, just off Sadovaya Ring Road in the Soviet capital. Fedorov pays himself about 850 rubles ($1,360) a month, nearly four times the average Soviet salary. But he works twice as hard as he ever did as a government employee. "If I don't have customers," he says...
...hour before opening time. Already the queue at 36 Kropotkinskaya Street extends around the corner of the elegant green-and-cream 19th century building. People are waiting patiently for a chance to experience one of the first visible signs of economic reform, a free-enterprise restaurant. "We've got a big problem here," Manager Andrei Fyodorov says. "Too many customers...
...Moscow's first such venture last March. He and his seven partners, most of them experienced cooks or waiters, are investing in a business that will prosper -- or fail -- without government interference. "We never imagined we would do this well," says the energetic, chain-smoking co- chairman. Cafe 36 Kropotkinskaya, as they named the restaurant (bureaucrats wanted it to be called Cafe Cooperator), is a consequence of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms legalizing small-scale private enterprise. One of the goals is to improve the country's service sector, and nowhere is improvement needed more than in Soviet restaurants, which...
...Kropotkinskaya Cafe is already competing is by serving the rarest thing in the Moscow restaurant world: courtesy. Customers are greeted by a courtly doorman who apologizes for the delay. The waiters startle women by holding chairs for them. In the evenings two Moldavian musicians serenade diners with folk and gypsy tunes. Fyodorov strolls among the tables greeting customers and topping up glasses of chilled fruit juice. The restaurant so far is nonalcoholic, but the partners hope to obtain permission to serve wine. The menu, chalked on a blackboard, offers hors d'oeuvres of cold tongue, crudites and home-pickled vegetables...
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