1 · ⚑ The place existed in a song before it existed at all
Gilbert Bécaud performed in Moscow, went home to Paris and wrote Nathalie for his Soviet guide — released May 1964, lyrics by Pierre Delanoë. In it the singer walks Red Square while she explains Lenin and the Revolution, and he thinks only that he would rather be at the Café Pushkin, watching snow through the window and drinking hot chocolate. The song was a great success in France and French visitors to Moscow went looking for the café. There was none: it was a line in a lyric. Andrey Dellos built it, and on 4 June 1999 Bécaud came and sang Nathalie at the opening of the place his own song had invented. The register holds no other entry created by a work of art that described it first.
2 · What it is, against what it is called
A café by name and one of the most expensive restaurants in Moscow in fact, serving Russian noble cuisine under Andrey Makhov, on Tverskoy Boulevard by the Pushkin monument. Dellos, an artist of Franco-Russian descent, was not after a restaurant but after the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Russia — a literary myth made habitable. That is the same act as LHL-S-163 Café del Mar selling its own atmosphere back to guests as recordings, and the opposite of a hotel restaurant: here the fiction came first and the building was made to fit it.
3 · ⚑ What it cost, and the register says it
The historic city estate of I. N. Rimsky-Korsakov that stood on the site was demolished so that the new building could be raised. The house that looks eighteenth-century is not: it is a 1999 baroque construction on the footprint of a real one that was taken down. A register that recorded only the charm of the result would be a brochure. The Library records both, in the same entry, as it records the racial covenants at Pebble Beach beside the conservation.
4 · Candour
⚑ Sources give the interval between the song and the café as “more than 40 years” and “more than 50”; the song is dated 1964 and the opening 1999, so thirty-five is the arithmetic and the entry uses it. Bécaud’s guide is named as Nathalie in the song and as his Russian interpreter in the accounts; whether a specific person is meant is not established here. Nothing in this entry establishes ownership today, or what Dellos’s group holds now.