Friendly, Smiling Siberia

Next time you find yourself in Irkutsk, the former administrative capital of Siberia, one pit stop should be high on your list: Café Fiesta, tel: (7-3952) 20 30 33. For a start, customers enjoy free wi-fi access. Add to that friendly servers (by local standards), ease of ordering (just go to the counter and point at the dish you want) and comfortable banquettes for snuggling away from the cold, and you’ve found the sweetest spot in the town center—especially if you’re a non-Russian speaker.

The café’s menu consists of salads, pizzas and—unusually for a place in this neck of the woods—sushi. It’s all of a serviceable standard, but Fiesta’s young, cosmopolitan atmosphere, the weekend DJ nights and the opportunities for people watching through expansive windows overlooking colorful Uritskogo Street—one of the city’s main shopping drags—add plenty of seasoning. An added bonus is Arbatskii Dvorik, the cozy restaurant located upstairs from the café, which is named after the Arbat, a famous street in Moscow. As well as English menus, you’ll find some decent wines there—a big plus in a country where “wine” tends to mean a cloying beverage that’s almost unbearably sweet. The food is superior too: the chef delivers a genteel take on Russian home cooking. For sending e-mails over a cappuccino, or grabbing a bite after a day spent touring the historic timber houses that characterize Irkutsk, Fiesta and its upstairs neighbor are about as tourist-friendly as provincial Russia gets.