Le Chic

The team that revived the Duck now offers to you something totally different: the new Le Chic club. Le Chic tries to combine the Duck's mojo with a European style, making the place a nice contrast to the Duck's sleaziness. In other words, it's clean and the clients are quite chic.

That doesn't mean there aren't resemblences among the two. A lot of expats from the Duck also find their way to Le Chic, where the prices are equally cheap (beers are $2-3, and cocktails start at $3).

Le Chic offers a wider choice of drinks and some quality international cuisine. It's conveniently located around the back of the Lubyanka metro station. The Nikolsky Dvorik restaurant takes up the ground floor, and the actual club is located in the basement.

In addition to the fashion shows that Le Chic staged on its opening weekend, they say they plan to have male and female striptease and other entertainment.

It is more of a restaurant than a disco, but unlike Moscow's other dining clubs which normally feature live jazz and rock'n'roll, the recently opened club Mix plays goa trance and acid jazz. It's entertainment is also rather unusual: on the opening night they staged a fashion show entitled "Night on the Battlefield," a display of 20th century military uniforms, along with a live concert by Deti Vinila and Triplex techno projects.

The music is pretty quiet and doesn't drown out conversations. Beers are rather cheap ($3-5), while food is moderately expensive at $8 and up. The layout is designed after the latest fashion trends, and is a mix of weird-looking pieces of metal, built-in monitors, and bluish lighting. Overall, it looks pretty cool, yet, when ordering all of these high-tech gadgets, it seems they forgot one of the more useful items, a ventilation and air conditioning system.

Another typical opening night problem they had was the super slow coat check. It was stuffed with jackets that were all out of order, and it took fifty minutes to get my belongings.