Moscow has plenty of restaurants, most with the exact same menu: beef cutlets (for Soviet nostalgia), sushi rolls (Muscovites are mad—and frighteningly indiscriminate—about sushi), Caesar salad. Luckily, it’s also home to tucked-away kitchens serving some of the world’s most obscure cuisines.— Alexei Munipov, deputy editor, Bolshoi Gorod
The Interesting
ALROSA
4 1st Kazachii Sidestreet
Possibly the only restaurant to feature the food of Yakutia, a region in Siberia. Things to try include fish soup made with milk and vodka.
CHITO-RA
10 Kazakova
Moscow’s gourmands worship khinkali—large Georgian dumplings filled with meat, cilantro, and scalding broth. The cult’s epicenter is this shabby shack behind the Kursky railway station.
JERUSALEM
6 Bolshaya Bronnaya, Building 3
An unmarked restaurant atop a synagogue. The food is, remarkably, Azerbaijani, albeit kosher. In the summer, when it puts tables on the rooftop, Jerusalem quietly acquires one of Moscow’s best city views.
The Weird
EKSPEDITSIYA
6 Pevcheskii Sidestreet
Putin and Medvedev celebrated their 2008 election victory at this hunting-themed fantasia: A glassed-in “mountain river” flows under the diners’ feet, and you can take your meal inside a real Mi-6 helicopter.
22 Bolshaya Yakimanka, second floor
A spectacularly ill-advised marriage of restaurant and nail salon, serving lots of smoothies. The target audience appears to be concubines.
TURANDOT
26/5 Tverskoy Boulevard
A triple fake—a 2005 construction pretending to be a czarist-era palace pretending to be eighteenth-century French pretending to be Chinese. When it opened, this restaurant bested even jaded Muscovites’ notions of garish folly.