Eating out Soviet-style, very slightly updated

Out for a night on the piss with my dear friend from Moscow and Michigan, Nastya, who took me to one of Moscow's more interesting eating places. Called Cheburechnaya Druzhba ("Mutoon pie freindship") , it is a stand-up hall where there is only one dish on sale, mutton pies, called Chebureki. This is a central-Asian-style packet of mutton enclosed in an A5-sized envelope of pastry. To drink, there is only tea, beer or vodka. Everything is sold through a hole in the wall, rather as the pub in Portnahaven on Islay used to do before the Free Church closed.

When Nastya was a girl, her parents who lived nearby in Prospekt Mira would, if they had a flat full of hung-over guests on a Sunday morning, go down there with a bucket (the menu was identical then) and buy twenty or thirty of chebureki and take them home for a communal breakfast.

Now they live in America, they stay in smart hotels when they come to Moscow and eat more refined food. But Nastya, bohemian that she is, lives in the same flat and likes to eat in this Soviet-style stolovya to this day (the interior is cleaner but otherwise unchanged, and the staff are still friendly). The chebureki cost about 50p each (25 roubles), and the company is boisterous but civilized. The place opens at 7 a.m. and closes at 9 p.m., as all good restaurants should do in these straitened times.