Holidays in the capital
Bribed by the fact that the hotel is quite modern, it began to receive guests in 2016. The reception is located on the 5th floor. Security here is at the highest level, each guest passes through a security post.
A pleasant lobby with sofas, an ornate staircase in bright colors, which has already become a star of social networks, and polite staff. They deal with the check-in issues quickly enough, the luggage is also lifted into the room, and here we are.
We had a Family room in calm colors and with a beautiful view of the high–rise building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kiev and Smolensk squares and the domes of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The laconic but comfortable design gives the room a special charm.
The hotel has a spa and fitness center. The latter, by the way, works 24 hours a day! InBalance Spa by Novotel fits perfectly into our vacation schedule.
Relaxation is what a resident of a megalopolis dreams of! And here there is a huge 17 m long swimming pool, a children's pool, as well as a sauna and hammam. The hotel's spa complex combines aesthetics and style. Such a rest awakens special emotions inside — you feel serenity and happiness. A massage room is also available for hotel guests.
Dinner is served!
You won't have to look for a place to eat here. There are so many great places nearby with a high rating and an excellent menu that it is better to decide earlier. To begin with, we went to the Gourmet Bar, which is located right in the hotel. Evgeny Brodnikov, the chef of the restaurant, has been working in the best hotels in Moscow for more than 12 years, including the Accor brand.
The menu includes both traditional dishes, for example, rich borscht or hearty dumplings from three types of meat, and with a delicacy – pike perch with onion sauce and new potatoes, stewed veal cheeks with mashed potatoes and young spinach. It is also worth trying steak and chopped steak, they are cooked perfectly here. Well, those who decided to just have a snack are offered a large selection of snacks and pizza for every taste – from Margaritas on thin dough to a dense cheese pie. You will also be pleased with the dessert card – handmade sweets, beloved by many "Honey Cake", as well as the Black Forest cake, chocolate tart and fondue with ice cream. It's not easy to resist these temptations!
By the way, in the morning the restaurant serves breakfast, which is full of variety.
Alexander Rappoport's Almond restaurant has recently opened within walking distance from the hotel. Stylish oriental interior with some incredible relaxing effect.
It seems that the place became popular quite quickly, full boarding on Friday evening. The cuisine here is South Azerbaijani and Persian, yes, you still need to look for one in Moscow! But let's run ahead and say that although the dishes differ in their original names, they are quite understandable and perfectly adapted to our taste buds. The salads here are all juicy and fresh, the tomatoes are really pink and delicious from Baku, there is no doubt. There are gourmet dishes among the snacks, for example, chicken liver pate with rose petal jam. It looks elegant and tastes like tenderness itself. Among the hot snacks, kyukyu looks original on a clay frying pan with dried tomatoes and cheese.
And what to take for hot is difficult to advise, the choice is huge. For pilaf lovers, there are as many as five types, Persian, which is cooked with nuts and lemon zest, is very interesting. Kebabs and kebabs occupy a place of honor on the menu, this is understandable, the entire duty set is presented here from chicken to sturgeon with a variety of accompaniments. But it's worth coming here not so much because of the intelligent atmosphere and the sweet oriental flavor, but because of the contents of the wine cabinets. Just ask and they will tell you a lot of interesting things about Azerbaijani wine, which is also served in incredibly beautiful bottle jugs.
For walks, it is good to walk along the Borodinsky Bridge, admire the views of the Mother See, and go towards Smolenskaya Square, where many more gastronomic discoveries await both residents of the capital and tourists. One of these cafes, which we found very interesting, is Oh my toast.
It has already been loved by bloggers for its unique interior, created with love and irony. Panoramic windows overlooking, by the way, the Foreign Ministry, Zeus punching a wall with a golden shawarma, columns with fur upholstery, a huge mirror, oh, how wonderful it is for pictures of your loved ones, a shiny wall with the inscription "Better ashamed than never." You can come in here for a snack, or you can stay for lunch or dinner. The menu includes salads and snacks, shrimp with wasabi is considered a bestseller here and that's right, and there are also a lot of delicious sandwiches. The name of the cafe justifies its name: a roll with shrimp and chili sauce, pita Classic of Greece, pita with grilled chicken brioche with salmon and cream cheese.
This is just a small excerpt from the menu. There are also several options for hearty breakfasts, which everyone can choose at their discretion. And, of course, coffee, it is prepared using grains from Rockets Coffee Roasters, offering popular classics like cappuccino and latte, including alternative milk. In the evening, the cafe looks even more stylish and pleases that the bartender did his best and prepared more than 35 types of cocktails. So you can hang out until three in the morning, on weekends there is such a schedule.
Right there on Smolenskaya Square, we visited another institution – the restaurant #SibirSibir, a project by Denis Ivanov. Those who have been to Siberia, I personally went to Tyumen, there I also went to the restaurant of the same name and it delighted me. Everything about it was interesting and thought out to the last detail. There are window frames painted white on the ceiling, carpets on the walls somewhere, birch trees somewhere, as well as paintings based on Ermak's campaign. There is such a restaurant in Novosibirsk, which, by the way, is the founder. The Moscow restaurant #SibirSibir is a continuation of the story that began in the eponymous and first restaurant opened just in Novosibirsk. It is also cozy and comfortable here.
The interior actively uses the attributes of traditional Siberian life: samovars bought at flea markets, antique window frames brought from Altai villages, felt boots, whole walls of birch and pine trunks, cedar, pine and fir cones, jars of pickles and carpets on the walls. The menu is full of Siberian delicacies: they offer indigirka and stroganina from muksun, cold smoked omul, smoked nelma and dried venison, pickled fern with seasonal mushrooms, elk hunting riet with bread from the oven and pine nuts. We explain that indigirka is something like a salad with pieces of frozen fish, caviar and finely chopped cucumbers, a very interesting taste that cannot be compared with anything. Ferns in Siberia have long been harvested in the forest. Interestingly, although it grows almost all over the world, but only in the Far East and Siberia can cook fern and harvest it correctly. In a Moscow restaurant, traditions are honored, and therefore the dish turns out to be somehow
A whole section of the menu is occupied by a section with game, they offer a stewed boar with beans for 12 hours, a deer tenderloin with wild cherry and fern, a moose burger and even moose lips. And for lovers of sweets, it's just a paradise here. It seems that this place will give a head start to many pastry shops in terms of the beauty of desserts! These are real works of art: rye honey cake in chocolate glaze with sea buckthorn sorbet, Siberian bear made of cedar milk, which has long been a hit of the institution, fondan Emelya and others.
What to do
Right from the window of our room, I saw the Moscow transport pavilion, where we went with the child.
But as it turned out, there is an exciting adventure waiting for not only children, but also their parents. The pavilion interactively tells about the routes of Moscow rail transport, modern urban transport, eco-friendly trips around the city, modern trains, payment methods and services for passengers. Here you can try yourself as a subway train driver, create your own train design, try to control the railway, look from a height at large transport facilities, play kinetic sand, draw. In general, the child eventually went there twice!
Go shopping right five minutes from the hotel. The hotel itself is located inside the building, where there is the Kievsky shopping center, in addition, the European shopping center is very close, so what a vacation without shopping! There are a lot of shops for every taste. Besides, the kids also have something to do. The Joki Joya amusement park with a variety of attractions operates in the "European".
Where else can I walk? On Europa Square, it is worth paying attention to the fountain "The Abduction of Europe", designed by the Belgian sculptor Olivier Strebel. The fountain consists of five bowls, which are arranged one inside the other and cascade down from the central sculpture of intertwined metal pipes.
From Europe Square, you can walk along the Berezhkovskaya embankment to the Kiev pier. From here, many motor ships and river boats depart for a walk along the Moscow River throughout the day. Ukrainian Boulevard, connecting Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya Street and Kutuzovsky Prospekt, is a pleasant square decorated with monuments and fountains by sculptor Alexander Burganov. The most elegant are two bronze female figures: "Allegory of water" in the form of a winged girl on a horse with a fish tail and "Allegory of air" depicting a goddess with a wreath in her hand, sitting on a granite pedestal. It's a pleasure to walk here in good weather!
However, autumn can scare you with rainy weather, which means it's time to go to the sauna. In the "Firebird" on Nizhnyaya Maslovka there is a two-storey building of public baths with male and female categories, as well as a common SPA hall and conceptual VIP apartments with steam rooms for companies of up to 15 people.
The heart of the bath complex is, of course, the steam rooms: large–scale, spacious, with huge fifty–ton furnaces, and in the women's room there is a public steam room and an individual one for beauty treatments, which is very convenient. How wonderful that there is more here
a variety of fonts, heated tables for soap massages and peels, pouring tubs and even a snow room. The presence of a common SPA room made my husband and me very happy. You can spend time together here. Finnish sauna, hammam, red Himalayan sauna, white salt grotto, room with relax feather beds - dry floating – and 3D projections of the starry sky for total relaxation and immersion, massage rooms.
By the way, the program of public aromatherapy for the day includes 13 sessions: herbs, berries, dried flowers, root vegetables are brewed in the "Firebird" every hour so that guests can enjoy a rich variety of vapors. Lovers of baths are waiting for taiga (coniferous), Karelian (berry), Kamchatka (salty), Altai (herbal), Crimean (lavender) and other couples! And you won't stay hungry here either. Special attention was paid to nutrition on the territory of the complex. The menu of the sauna complex was created by the brand chef of Alba Group Sergey Otdelnov, who used native Russian motifs and dishes and snacks characteristic of the bath theme as inspiration. It surprises with its scale – especially for the bath complex: from kaza, crayfish and fried smelt to veal in morel sauce with crispy potatoes, trout with bulgur and tarragon and chopped Serbian cutlet.
