Medved

A closed room with the atmosphere of a society club, a long bar counter, and objects from St. Petersburg archives — that's what the space looks like that the Goose Goose team built not from inspiration but literally from documents. Inventory ledgers, historic photographs, pre-revolutionary newspaper clippings — all of it became the foundation of the interior. The magazine "Petropol," which preserves the city's early-20th-century chronicle, passed on to the bar genuine objects from that very establishment: dinner plates, Christofle silverware, original menu cards, and a postcard. At the Udelny flea market, a reprint of a menu form from the restaurant "Dacha Ernest" turned up — a document linked to Ernest Igel, the imperial restaurateur who founded "The Bear" in the late 19th century.

Our restaurant guide's team finds "The Bear" one of the most atmospheric bars in St. Petersburg: the cocktails are precise, the kitchen holds its own, and the staff never pushes.

The ideologue and architect of the cocktail menu is Pavel Shitov, head bartender of the restaurant community italy. His list, titled "Three Centuries of Cocktail Culture," is split into three chapters, each reflecting its own era — the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. There's also a separate vertical-tasting format: one cocktail served in three variations, one for each era. Among the drinks: a rhubarb-and-nettle spritz, a white Americano built on vermouth with sage and Duchess pear, a St. Petersburg punch with cherry and spices, a buckwheat-parmesan margarita, and a barberry sazerac. It was right here, in a bar from 1905, that Petersburgers first saw a bar counter and tried alcoholic mixes over ice — that's where cocktail culture in Russia began.

The archival work turned up unexpected finds too. Among the documents in the St. Petersburg State Archive, the team discovered that the writer Alexander Kuprin was a regular at "The Bear" and once got into a brawl there over an actress. And the officer's memoirs of Yuri Makarov captured the feeling of a first visit to the bar: climbing onto a tall stool at the counter, getting a glass of ice and "a very tasty, very potent concoction" — and feeling one's spirits lift. It's precisely that spirit — of easy, sociable pleasure — that today's "The Bear" tries to capture.

The kitchen side was developed by Goose Goose's chef, who turned to 19th-century classic literature as a culinary source. On the menu: Olivier salad with beef tongue, quail egg and quail, Pozharsky-style cutlets, a fish pie in an enriched loaf with cod and trout, pelmeni with crab and broth, tartines with lard, sprats and pâté, and small rasstegai pies with oxtail, potato and mushrooms. All of it dishes that at various times appeared on the tables of exactly this kind of venue.

Before becoming a permanent project, "The Bear" existed as a pop-up — and the response was strong enough that the bar earned a permanent home on the ground floor at the same address where the original historically stood: Bolshaya Konyushennaya, 27.