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The food — Italian and Russian — is delicious. The service, attentive and professional. But what distinguishes the Writers' Club from the growing ranks of quality restaurants in Moscow is its exquisite and evocative interior.

In few other places can a diner be so richly steeped in the dramatic vicissitudes of recent Russian history. This stately turreted mansion was built in 1889 in a pseudo-medieval style for Prince Svyatopolk-Chervertinsky and later the same year was bought by Countess Alexandra Olsufyeva.

Its main Oak Hall, a spacious room paneled in that wood also features a massive oak staircase built without nails. The stairs lead to the balcony and to sitting rooms hidden behind beautifully carved wooden grilles that allowed privileged guests to spy on those below.

A Moscow legend has it that the Oak Hall sheltered an influential Masonic lodge for the cream of Russian nobility. There is no doubt that it was the scene of the most spectacular Moscow high-society balls. Attending one such gathering, Czar Alexander III stumbled walking down that staircase and broke his ankle.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, the mansion served as a shelter for the homeless until 1934 when Stalin turned it over to the recently formed Union of Soviet Writers (USW). The Oak Hall became the most coveted, élitist and inexpensive restaurant in the country. Stalin himself visited on occasion, but it was a regular haunt for Lavrenti Beria, his secret police henchman notoriously given to perfidy, cruelty and lust.

He would dine in one of the hidden rooms upstairs and choose his next female victim from among those in the dining room. The count's bedroom across the lobby from the Oak Hall became the USW party committee room, where many a writer was read trumped-up charges before being shipped to the camps or expelled from the USW.

The entire history of Soviet literature played out in the Oak Hall, where loyal literary functionaries and dissident writers ate, drank and often fought. It was there that foreign VIPs were brought to rub shoulders with selected members of the intelligentsia. At the height of Gorbachev's perestroika in 1988, U.S. President Ronald Reagan met there with dissident Soviet writers.

With the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the USW, the restaurant went through several hands before being bought by entrepreneur Andrei Deloss, who refurbished the Oak Hall. Now the fireplace still blazes cozily, a quiet piano sounds by the entrance and the former bedroom-cum-committee-room is available for private parties. Beria's sinister apartment upstairs has become a cigar saloon. The restaurant is still called the Writers' Club, but as a friendly waiter explains: "Poor writers now stay at home; rich ones come to us." 50 Povarskaya Street; tel: (7-095) 291 1515

• YURI ZARAKHOVICH
• A delicious treat for Russian history enthusiasts