He made millions in Yeltsin’s Russia, then fled Putin’s Russia for Mayfair. After setting up the ‘best wine shop in the world’, Yevgeny Chichvarkin now aims to do the same with food
“You know,” Yevgeny Chichvarkin tells me, “people hear that a Russian opens a wine shop and a restaurant in Mayfair and they say that we serve novichok in golden glasses, or something. They make headlines out of us selling a bottle of cognac for £200,000. But that is not all our business. We also have wine in the shop under £30. We have Laurent-Perrier non-vintage cheaper than Tesco…”
Chichvarkin is explaining this over lunch at a window seat in Hide, his extraordinary three-storey, glass-fronted restaurant on Piccadilly, which opened with considerable fanfare, and a little sneering, in April. A tall, heavyset man of 40, his joints are a bit stiff from a game of polo yesterday – his first of the season – and as he talks, he occasionally rolls his shoulders and stretches out his legs.
When I see Mr Corbyn saying he wants to move to socialism, I think these people should go and live in Russia in the 70s
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