Soviet-chic restaurant favoured by KGB spies reopens in Moscow

This file photo shows a cook working in Moscow’s Aragvi restaurant. (Photo: AFP)

Moscow’s Aragvi restaurant, once the legendary haunt of KGB spies and cosmonauts, has reopened with its Soviet-era grandeur restored.

The high-end eatery on the main Tverskaya street, which opened in 1938 at the height of Stalin’s purges, has relaunched under the same name after a $20 million (17 million euros) restoration.

The restaurant opened on the initiative of Stalin’s notorious security chief Lavrenty Beria for the use of officials from his NKVD agency, the Soviet secret service later renamed the KGB.

It grew popular with other officials and later in the 1960s under Nikita Khrushchev, in the so-called “Thaw” period when censorship and repression eased, lured a more bohemian crowd of artists and actors.

The new menu includes the classic Georgian dishes that made its reputation such as khinkali (dumplings full of meat and bouillon) and khachapuri, bread topped with cheese, as well as non-Georgian specialities such as borscht and Black Sea herring pate.

The restaurant is named after a Georgian river is located inside a former hotel where Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov once stayed.

Aragvi also had a more sinister side. It was a hangout for KGB officers who used it as a spot to recruit agents and its dining rooms were wired up with hidden microphones.

“For the KGB, Aragvi was always the favourite place to recruit agents and for farewell parties for agents going abroad,” said Mr Mikhail Lyubimov, who long headed the KGB’s operations against Britain and Scandinavian countries and is now a writer.

In 1960, he recalled his KGB boss sent him to Aragvi to informally meet the new number two of his department. On another evening “with plenty of drinking, one of our men invited a beautiful woman to dance, not realising she herself was a US spy and was being tailed by the KGB,” he said, laughing.