Epilogue to a Travel Blog IIII: Rose-Tinted Favourites
Image belongs to author.
Having spent six months in Russia’s second capital, Alexandra Jarvis takes us on a tour of the best (and the rest) of the cafés of St Petersburg. In their column, we will get tips on which joints to visit, what to order, and how to navigate the joys of Russian hospitality, all this advice peppered with anecdotes about the chaos that defines these institutions.
Across the (half-)year I spent in St Petersburg, I constructed a patchwork of blue and green pinpricks in my Google Maps, winding from the Admiralty in the north, across the river to the Island; then south, snaking fingers on Nevsky and Gorokhovaya and further. Three all-time favourite cafés present themselves for their sheer comfort factor; the Mer Kaffe on Vasilievsky, settled under the yellow arches across the prospekt from the Cathedral of Andrew, all peach plaster and frosted frills; Coffee 22, far closer to home, tucked down Kazanskaya and bristling with dark wood and multi-coloured moss decorations; and Cake & Breakfast, the sugar-sweet rest-stop off Nevksy, just opposite the gym I never quite got round to joining.
I was introduced to Mer Kaffe quite early on by a Cambridge friend from another flat who had recommended it for a morning coffee-and-catch-up. They did one of the best meals I ate in Russia; a grilled cheese sourdough—either half or a whole sandwich—served up with some kind of fish paste (I never did work out what it was). I came here with no voice, rattling away with a rasp simultaneously indecipherable and far too loud for the gently-studious café interior. I organised my banking here with a helpfully-Russian-speaking friend, my stressy jabs at the banking app assuaged by the company and bucket of raf’ I had at my elbow. Sometime later, even after the snow flurries had begun to build up, I wrote outside one evening at a rickety metal table beneath the arched overhang, my flatmate and I having been handed thick blankets for our laps.
I spent hours and hours nestled in the narrow laptop zone in Coffee 22, and not just because it was so close; it was warm and familiar, besides. I wrote here with friends, drinking too-hot coffee and letting the waves of inappropriate indie rock and bright lights wash over me. This place features as much in my story-writing as I do; this was where tentative character studies and far-too-realistic emotional scenes took shape against the backdrop of the fake plants. This was also where the majority of the second iteration of my flat converged to plan the next half of the year—when we were moving in, and all the rest. This was before I pulled the plug on January entirely, returning to the lukewarm UK for the Russian New Year festivities in a wave of exhaustion. Not that this change in plans mattered, as our initial meeting consisted happily of many anecdotes from volunteering at a cat shelter.
The conversations I had in these places stick with me still, punctuated by the various fights we had with the waitstaff about our (unacceptable) UK vaccine cards. They only ever relented at the presentation of a valid PCR. Besides that, there was always a number of tables branded with the little NO LAPTOP stickers, forcing us into slim study sections, upstairs, or another place entirely if they were full. I was only ever turned away from Cake & Breakfast, and this was because it was brimming with customers. I once came here on a date, each of us with steaming bowls of lavender raf’, discussing life in the dormitories, Erasmus Students’ Network events, and everything in between. I also worked here with a new flatmate, her orange hat a splash of colour against the grim streets, scraping my pancakes from the bottom of my sugar-encrusted plate as we perched at the little bar-stools downstairs.
These moments—and the ones I’ve described before—were a blessed relief in a less-than-stellar reality. They became important to me as the year abroad was far from incredible; it’s a contender for the worst year of my life, as opposed to the best...and yet. At risk of having this year branded into my personality for decades to come, there was a great deal that left me a completely different person in July 2022 than I was back in August, sat in a hotel in Hounslow and waiting for my 1st of September Helsinki-bound flight. Our arrival and departure from the flat were vastly different; on that final morning in February, I was too preoccupied to look up Gorokhovaya and take in the street that had become so familiar. I didn’t think of what we were leaving (my surplus possessions abandoned in the flat aside), only that we were desperate to be gone. Now, with some distance, I can safely say I’ll be thinking of St Petersburg for some time yet, together with its tempestuous past, snow-dusted façades, and the bizarre, brilliant cafés that litter its streets.