USA | Charlotte's VVeb

Moscow 57 To Open Russian Central Asian Restaurant in NYC

04/02/201417/10/2016 by Charlotte J

Moscow 57, a New York City-based hospitality and entertainment company, founded by Ellen Kaye and her partner, Seth Goldman, are opening a Russian Central Asian restaurant on the Lower East Side of NYC on February 5^th.

The entertainment will feature guitarist Tony Romano and jazz vocalist Cleve Douglass, two regular performers at the company’s M57 Pop Up Urban Salons, as they prepare to tour Russia in support of the new album, Desert Flower. Ellen Kaye will host and perform with Ethan Fein and the Moscow 57 Band.

Kaye’s family owned The Russian Tea Room from 1947 to 1996 and this restaurant will draw on influences from Russia, Georgia, Belorussia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

The opening night’s event will be a tribute to guest chef, Don Boyd, New Orleans’ restaurateur and slow food activist. Proceeds will go to the New Orleans Musicians Assistance Foundation. Boyd can be credited with spearheading the brand’s decision to launch a permanent venue for Moscow 57. For the last two years the company has hosted M57 Urban Salons, evenings of music, food and art, in New York and across the East Coast.

168½ Delancey Street, New York, NY 10002 USA

Moscow57.com

KGB Restaurant Las Vegas

19/07/201106/03/2017 by Charlotte J

I’ve got to say, Las Vegas is not really my kind of place. However, I was interested to recently read about the KGB gourmet burger and vodka bar at Harrah’s that opened last summer.

Vision 360, a Dallas-based architecture and interior design firm, were the guys behind making celebrity chef, Kerry Simon’s vision a reality. Simon wanted a sexy, hip, fun and energetic vibe and I think Vision 360 did a good job achieving that.

The 156-seat restaurant served lunch and dinner, seven days a week. Design highlights include a 10 ft long vodka bar made of ice, a hammer-and-sickle chandelier and custom artwork.

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The Soviet Dream – Lev Danilkin, Francis Spufford & Orlando Figes

31/03/201106/03/2017 by Charlotte J

I’m personally quite excited about this… This April Southbank Centre in London will mark the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight with a talk exploring the Soviet Union of the 1950s and 1960s featuring three writers – Lev Danilkin, Francis Spufford and Orlando Figes (a personal favourite).

The Soviet Dream will look into how the Soviet Union attempted to implement a planned economy that would outstrip capitalism, making communism the economic model of the future. Lev Danilkin is Yuri Gagarin’s official biographer, and has edited several key reviews of contemporary Russian literature. Francis Spufford’s book Red Plenty is part novel, part historical investigation of the communist dream and the key characters within it. While Orlando Figes, one of the most distinguished historians of 20th-century Russia and author of Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, will chair the event.

The Soviet Dream, London’s Southbank Centre, 13 April 2011, 7:45pm

Click here to buy tickets and find out more

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Meet The Cancelled Czech: A Biography of Dan Havlena

22/10/200918/10/2016 by Charlotte J

Dan, the son of a diplomat, was born into an affluent Czechoslovak family in 1922. The early years of his life were filled with extraordinary events including meeting Stalin and sitting on his knee, and watching the Germans test jet engine prototypes prior to World War II. However, both of these incidents are eclipsed by his remarkable and desperate escape from Communism.

Having obtained an engineering degree and wishing to embark on a career in the international oil industry, Dan earnestly sought a means of escape from Communism. He considered trekking over mountains and swimming across rivers in order to avoid frontier controls. However, ultimately, he decided on hijacking an aeroplane. On the 6th of April, 1948, Dan, the leader of seventeen determined Czechs (three members of the crew, including the pilot, and fourteen passengers) seized a commercial aeroplane at gunpoint and flew it to the United States-controlled zone of Germany. The Czechoslovak National Airlines aeroplane was flying from Prague to Bratislava when the hijackers tried to divert the aeroplane to London but, ultimately, landed in Munich. Despite being given a chance to escape the poor living conditions and oppression within Eastern Europe at that time, only three other passengers grasped the opportunity to flee Czechoslovakia.

czech-map

Unfortunately, the plot to hijack the Czechoslovak National Airlines aeroplane had dire consequences for Jan Masaryk, the son of Tomas Masaryk, the founder and first President of Czechoslovakia and founder of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Jan Masaryk held the position of Foreign Minister for Czechoslovakia between 1940 and 1948. He was supposed to join the hijackers but had died, falling out of a window, on the 10th March, 1948 at his Czernin Palace apartment.

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Russia and the West: A New Cold War

24/03/200917/10/2016 by Charlotte J

I wrote this piece for the April issue of Anglomania. Unfortunately, they credited it to someone else who is called Olivia, which was rather annoying but there should be a correction and apology in the May issue.

Russia and the West: A New Cold War

This year, Germany and most of the world will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Built in 1961, the wall became a physical symbol of the very real socio-politico-economic and ideological divide between East and West during the Cold War; the West was capitalist, while in the East, political regimes, labeled as communist, held control. However, it is important to remember that the term was merely a label. In reality, what actually existed were dictatorships of a new, emerging elite rather than of the proletariat. Moreover, the struggle between East and West had little to do with ideology, particularly as time progressed. Instead, between 1945 and 1991 the Cold War proved to be no more than a period of competition between the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States of America, for world domination and superiority, masked in the guise of ideological rhetoric. However, due to the closed borders and limited flow of knowledge in both directions, citizens in the USSR and the West truly believed that ideology was the basis for the struggle.