right in seventy-four years of trying. From Stalin through Khrushchev, most building was done in the style of TragiComic Classical. The architectural forms of the ancients were reproduced in badly poured concrete and gross-out scale. Thus, poky offices are entered through arches more fit to be sitting at the end of the Champs-Elysees, and nasty warrens of slum housing are fronted with Ionic pillars as wide as tennis courts. The city’s main streets are so broad that you can’t hit to the far curb with a three wood. Driving anywhere in Moscow is a half-day excursion because the streets were laid out, not with a view to getting anywhere, but according to what made the best parade routes. And traffic signals are timed to let three battalions of crack airborne troops and a hundred missile launchers through before the yellow caution light comes on. At least now there’s something to do while you’re waiting to cross the street. You can have dinner. Moscow is engorged with good places to eat. I spent my first night in the Hotel Metropol’s restaurant, a Kubla Khan’s worth of stately pleasure dome with a fountain in the middle and enough space to fly a radio- controlled model airplane. A full orchestra was playing (among the selections: an instrumental version of Billy Joel’s “Honesty”). You have heard of Tiffany lamps. The restaurant at the Metropol has what looked to me like an entire Tiffany ceiling. The cooking was French to such an exquisite degree that the garlic breath from my escargots melted a hand towel when I got back to my room. The next night I went to Uncle Gillie’s, which had California cuisine in perfection. My chicken had not only been allowed to range free, it had been given aroma therapy and stress counseling. The night after that, I went to Il Pomodoro for Italian food authentic enough to satisfy the Corleone family, Russian versions of which were eating at several other tables. Then there was the Starlite Diner, built in America and shipped in modular sections to Russia. Here even the water was imported from the States. Great burgers—and it is the world’s only diner filled with Republicans. International bankers in pinstriped suits crowded the booths, drinking milk shakes and bobbing up and down to the Four Tops. “Tomorrow night I want caviar, blinis, and borscht,” I said to my dinner companion, Dmitry Volkov, correspondent for the Sevodnya daily. “Where’s a Russian restaurant?” “There aren’t any,” said Dmitry.
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