#Business #Finance

Practica Publishers, Moscow Beach Club

This interview includes three separate videos and transcripts, covering Early Days in Russia; Restaurants – Uncle Guilly’s and Starlight Diner; and Finance, Voucher Privatization. The additional interviews can be accessed through the links below.

(2) Restaurants – Uncle Guilly’s and Starlight Diner
(3) Finance, Voucher Privatization

Bernie Sucher’s professional work in Russia included leadership roles in Troika Dialog, Alfa Capital, ATON, and the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. He served as a board member or advisor to Hewlett Packard CIS, PBN, Eastern Property Holdings, Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, JKX Oil and Gas, Credit Bank of Moscow and UFG Asset Management. Honored as a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute while active as a business and social entrepreneur in-country, Bernie’s affiliations included American Chamber of Commerce in Russia, the US-Russia Business Council, Dynasty Foundation, the European University of St Petersburg, the Endowment in Support of Tarusa Hospital, the Dartmouth Conference Task Force on the Russian-US Relationship, Kennan Council, Uncle Guilly’s Steak House, the Moscow Beach Club and Starlight Diners.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, so Bernie, you’re one of the well-known people in the expat community of Moscow and Russia from the mid ‘90s. There’s lots of things that I want to talk to you about of your various business interests and experiences there. But let’s start with just if you could give me sort of a brief personal background, and how you got interested in Russia, and what led you there to begin with.

Bernard Sucher: My grandmothers, their voices are in my head as I think about answering your question, because they both left Europe because of the Russians. They feared Russia. They were run out of their homes because of two wars, the First War and World War II.

Daniel Satinsky: And where were their homes, Bernie? Which countries?

Bernard Sucher: My father’s mother was living in what is now Western Ukraine, south of Lviv, a Jew. When the Cossacks came through there was one notably successful Russian general in the Czar’s service. I believe his name was Brusilov, and he had two invasions that went through the Jewish lands of Western Ukraine. And I remember my Jewish grandmother saying, “Oy, Bernard, what they used to do to the Jews in Russia.” But she told me of fleeing with her sisters in the snow from Cossacks. And they kept running, and they ran all the way to Detroit, Michigan.

And my mother’s mother was a Karelian Finn, so when the Red Army invaded Finland in late 1939 as part of Stalin’s understanding with Hitler about zones of influence, my Finnish family was in harm’s way. Unlike my Jewish grandmother, my Finnish grandmother, if we are to believe the stories, she did not run. She fought with a rifle. And she was proud of saying that as a sniper she had killed five Russian officers.

I don’t know whether these stories are true, but to my child’s mind they were very real stories, somewhat inspirational, and so I was thinking very much about the Soviet Union, Russia, in the 1960s as a little kid. And as I got closer to university, I just knew that I was going to be a soldier or a spy, and I was going to study Russian to know my enemy. So when I entered the University of Michigan in 1978 I did enroll in a Russian language program, and I did enroll in different forms of Soviet studies, and that’s what I thought I was going to do. That’s the deeper background.

Daniel Satinsky: And after you left University of Michigan, where did you go from there? Because you’re still in the early, mid ‘80s, right?

Bernard Sucher: Well, my story is a little different. In my sophomore year, first semester of my sophomore year, which was autumn of 1979, after well over a decade of what seemed to me to be a fatal curve of U.S. decline, background of everything that’s going on inside the country, Vietnam War, Soviet influence all over Africa, Central America, at that moment in time the United States supported ally, the Shah of Iran, was overthrown, and “Death to America” became not just something we’d see on our TV screens or read about in the New York Times, but Death to America came to the campus of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I mean, like literally we had what seemed to be hundreds of Iranian students or their sympathizers gathering in the famous University of Michigan Diag in front of the undergraduate library, on the steps, holding up signs, chanting through bullhorns, shaking their fists, “Death to America.” And I just thought that was outrageous.

And in part as a reaction to that, the fact that we weren’t apparently going to fight back, I quit school in the middle of my sophomore year. I bought a backpack, and I did something that I never contemplated doing. That was I flew, a one-way ticket to Johannesburg, and started basically a backpacking trip that took me around the world.

Part of the trip, which I wasn’t sure I was going to do because I was also very interested in getting involved as a fighter against communism in Africa, but one of the plans I made as an alternative scenario was to go to the Soviet Union. And it was pretty cool. I was on my way to New York City. I met a man at a place called Anniversary Tours, and I left him $3,000 in cash. Anniversary Tours was an authorized representative of Soviet Intourist. And this man was meant to craft an individualized tour of the Soviet Union for me using this cash. And after leaving him an envelope of 30% of all of the cash I had in the world, I flew to Johannesburg.

Some months later I was actually in Kenya. I got a telegram at the Kenya General Post Office — Nairobi General Post Office — with the word that this gentleman had actually delivered, and that if I showed up at the Port of Athens Piraeus in late May I could go to the Soviet Union. They had a full month trip laid on, which would start with a boat ride from Piraeus to Odessa, and from Odessa I’d fly to Moscow, I would join a tour group that would cover Central Asia, places like Dushanbe and Samarkand. Then after a visit to Leningrad, back to Moscow, I would go on the Trans-Siberian train all the way from Moscow to Nakhodka.

In fact, I made that trip. I made it in late May for a month just before the 1980s Moscow Olympics. I was one of very few Americans in the country. We were asked not to be in the country by the U.S. government, but I wasn’t listening to anybody about much of anything then, and I went and had my first experience in Russia at that time.

Daniel Satinsky: Wow. And what followed that?

Bernard Sucher: I was surprised and really confused by what I saw in Russia. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but this was the Soviet Union at the height of its power. There was the Soviet army in Afghanistan. The Russians, as mentioned earlier, their influence was felt in Central America, all over Africa. They were hosting the Olympics. They had shined up Moscow to a blinding gleam. So, I just couldn’t understand how this incredibly powerful country that was on such a roll just couldn’t feed itself properly. I was a one-man army marching on my stomach, and I couldn’t get a decent meal with my hard currency, with this special tour that had been laid on for me and managed by the government itself, except of course in Tbilisi. My two or three days in Tbilisi were a wonderful respite from scarcity. The food I remember was very good in Tbilisi in June 1980.

And the interactions that I had with people were…I mean, people seemed to be almost pathetically curious about me, intensely interested in what was going on in the world outside, how was it even that I, as like a — I had long, sunburned blonde hair back then, and my blue jeans and t-shirt and a backpack. And people were like, what are you doing here? Like who are you? How could you get here? And these interactions were almost always friendly. As I said, the thing that struck me was people’s almost pathetic curiosity about everything that I guess I represented. I had a yellow plastic Sony — what were those things called? You know, before we had cell phones we had cassette players.

Daniel Satinsky: Oh, yeah, you had a Sony Walkman.

Bernard Sucher: It was a Walkman, thank you. Sorry.

You know, like what is that? How could I have something so small that played music so well? And these interactions disarmed me, and the fact that people’s lives seemed to be so hard and so crimped, really constrained. I mean, I understood that on a theoretical level because of course that’s how I grew up and that’s what I was studying. And the actual contacts with human beings were really nice and apparently taking some risk even to talk to me. It confused me. In short, I said if I can’t get a — how dangerous can a country be if it struggles to feed itself, and the people here are so genuinely interested in a conversation with some 19-year-old — well, I turned 20, actually, in Moscow on that trip. How dangerous can it be? What am I missing here in this picture?

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.

Bernard Sucher: I left the Soviet Union after taking the Trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Nakhodka, which was an unbelievable adventure of, I believe, nine nights and ten days. And I had trouble at the border getting out. They tried to take all of my cool stuff, like my music and my diaries that… So, it was a little bit of a dramatic ending. But I took the Soviet ferry from Nakhodka down to Yokohama, and I was already thinking that maybe this soldier stuff is just not appropriate for the threat that we’re facing, maybe I’ve got to rethink this.

And that was really tough for me because, you know, if you’ve ever had a kind of north star guiding you in your life, it’s wonderfully…it has a wonderful influence on you. It’s an organizing principle. Everything else slots in around that north star. Suddenly I didn’t have a north star. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So, I carried on studying Russian, but I ended up with a business degree. And with that business degree and another trip abroad after I graduated, this time to Eastern Europe, saw kind of the other side, the Soviet empire occupying Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, places that did not want the Soviet Union there. A very interesting counterpoint to what I had experienced in 1980. So still confused.

In 1984 I moved to New York and really stumbled unwittingly, with no ambition or real understanding whatsoever of what Wall Street was, I started working on Wall Street in 1984. And while Wall Street became my life, I still started every day thinking about what was going on in the Soviet Union. I would read first the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. I’d look for articles about Russia and the Soviet Union before moving on to my real work. And this was also a time where we had quite a number of mostly Russian Jewish emigres or Ukrainian Jewish emigres working as taxi drivers in New York City, so I could practice, every couple of days, a little bit of taxicab Russian.

And when the Soviet Union entered its final phase after the fall of the Berlin Wall I was at Goldman Sachs, and I was at Goldman Sachs in London, and in Tokyo, and this idea had just gotten into my head that the greatest miracle of our time was happening. The people of the Soviet Union were largely, in a peaceful way, overthrowing their government. Like how was this happening? I’ve got to know more. I want to be part of it.

And a friend of mine, Robert Langer, got an offer he couldn’t refuse from the former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, who was then a senior partner at Chadbourne & Parke, the law firm. Edmund Muskie had agreed with Soyuz Advokatov, the union of Soviet lawyers, to set up a joint venture law firm in Moscow. And Edmund Muskie asked young Robert Langer, who had studied with me in my very first day at University of Michigan and then gone on to Tulane to study Soviet law, of all things, the senator, Secretary of State, asked Robert to go to Moscow and head up the Chadbourne end of this venture.

Robert had come through London on his way to Moscow, and we went out at a pub near my home in Hampstead in North London, and I remember thinking while I’m talking to Robert, who was going the next morning by plane, I think via Helsinki to Moscow, if this was like a hundred years ago he’d be taking a coach down to a ship in Portsmouth or something like that and getting on that ship, and sailing over the horizon, and I might not ever see him again. And I was thinking, you know, if this was a hundred years ago, I’d want to be on that ship with Robert the next morning. Like that’s all I could think about. He’s going to do something really important, and all I’m doing is going to work tomorrow to make some more money.

And at the end of 1992 I went to my bosses in Goldman Sachs, and I begged them to let me go to Moscow to open an office for Goldman Sachs. Of course, later Goldman Sachs did open an office and did very well in Moscow, but they said no to me then. And after I got paid a bonus, I resigned. Actually, I resigned before the bonus, and to their credit they paid me anyway, very well. And I went there to learn. So, my second…yeah.

Daniel Satinsky: 1992 was when you went?

Bernard Sucher: Yeah. I forgot an important point. Robert came through London. I believe that was at the beginning of 1991. And I went to visit him. I went to visit him —

Daniel Satinsky: In Moscow?

Bernard Sucher: In Moscow just before the coup against Gorbachev. So, I had gotten a second view of the Soviet Union after my 1980 experience, and that was in August of 1991. I think it was a week and a half before the coup against Gorbachev. So, to get the dates right again, Robert came through London, that was actually the late autumn of 1990, and at some point, after that he fell in love with a local girl, and they were getting married in the summer of 1991. I couldn’t make the wedding, but I came over for a long weekend just to see them anyway. And I saw how much it had already changed in Moscow in the 11 years that I had been absent. And I was just like wow, the world is changing, and it’s going to be better, and I need to be part of this.

Daniel Satinsky: And that’s what then led to your resignation and moving there. And as you were moving there — so you knew Robert, but what did you have in mind in moving there? What did you think you were going to do when you moved there?

Bernard Sucher: It’s a very good question. I think a lot of people who did leave the United States or other Western countries and went to Russia, I think a lot of them went for economic opportunity. They could see that there was great economic opportunity. I mean, I was working at the most exalted financial institution on the planet, and economic opportunity was just staying in my chair and doing exactly what I was doing.

I know it sounds incredibly naïve, but I wanted to find some way of helping. It was clear that this transition was going to be nightmarish for most people. It was clear that nothing like this had actually ever happened before, so there wasn’t even really an intellectual framework for how do you handle a transition. It’s a revolution from an autocratic, centralized, ideological nation-state — of course it wasn’t a nation-state, it was an empire, but I didn’t quite get that yet. I wasn’t…nobody had written a book for how do you go from that to something approximating a normal country, a country with an open economy, a country with a government that was in some way possibly enabling individuals to adapt to completely different circumstances in a rapidly globalizing world. So I just had this general notion that I would find some way of being helpful, that the need would be infinite, but I would play my small part and be useful.

Daniel Satinsky: So, what was your first, then — so you moved to Moscow — what was your first sort of activity, let’s say? I know that you — and we’ve talked previously, and I know that you founded a number of businesses to fill market niches that you recognized and for services that didn’t exist in the country at the time you arrived there. So maybe you could just talk a little bit about a couple of those early things that you did.

Bernard Sucher: Yeah, I mean, initially I didn’t have a specific idea. I used to laugh when people asked me what are you going to do. I said well, you know, I like my Guinness. If there’s not a bar where I can get a decent Guinness, then maybe that will be my first business idea, I’ll open a bar. And I meet Robert and Katya Langer at Sheremetyevo, and we’re driving in to central Moscow where they lived, actually, in this prestigious former Soviet nomenklatura* building in central Moscow. They were actually neighbors of Khrushchev. Nikita Khrushchev’s son lived literally in the same landing. And the first thing we were talking about is like, you know, what are we going to do tonight. And I joked about my love of beer, and they said ah, two new Irish pubs have opened this year. And I was like, well, there goes that business idea, somebody’s already on it.

But I did enjoy those pubs. In fact, I was in a place called Rosie O’Grady’s almost every night throwing darts, drinking Guinness until very late, until they closed us most nights, which was about 2:00 in the morning. And 2:00 in the morning not always wanting to go back to the Langers’ place and find my spot on the floor where I was sleeping, we looked for food. And there was no food available in Moscow at that time in the morning. And very quickly I got it in my head that we needed a 24/7 restaurant in Moscow for people like me, and to me that meant a diner. And so in the first weeks of being in Moscow I was already thinking about what became the Starlight Diner. Later, after actually starting other businesses, I ended up joining with a…finding a group of guys to get together who actually knew how to build a restaurant. In short, gave them the idea, I financed it, and we did eventually have a Starlight Diner, and then some. So that was the first idea.

But the first business, actually, was quite different. I had been introduced via a Wall Street relationship to a local doctor named Maxim Osipov. And Maxim’s childhood friend, who emigrated, had gone on to work for a famous hedge fund in New York City, met with me before I left Goldman Sachs, hearing that I was actually quitting the firm and going to Russia, and he said to me you’re going to meet a lot of people, but if you meet this one individual who’s my childhood friend, I promise you you will find in him a character that you can trust, and a person who will be helpful to you. A lot of people will not have your best interests at heart, but I pledge to you that my friend Maxim will always look after you.

So, with that very powerful recommendation, in my first few days in Moscow I dialed the phone number that I had written on this piece of paper and introduced myself to Maxim Osipov. We met, actually, the first time at a café in the Patriarchs Pond area in central Moscow. And I’m bringing that up because for people who were in Moscow in those days, they’ll remember that there was a place called Cafe Aist*. And Cafe Aist, in those days, was run by a Caucasian Mafia. I didn’t know that when I suggested to Maxim Osipov that we meet there, but it was obvious in short order that we were sitting in a place with a lot of guys with guns. And I believe it was three days later that the café was machine gunned and bombed, and that was —
Daniel Satinsky: Your timing was good.

Bernard Sucher: Yeah. But that was my introduction to Maxim Osipov. And Maxim had kind of exactly the story that I just loved, I respected, was the kind of person I wanted to help. Maxim was a doctor, and he had left Russia a few years earlier to study and work in San Francisco, and while he was in San Francisco his homeland changed profoundly. And Maxim, who had every opportunity to stay in the United States as a doctor — he had a pretty comfortable life what he was building — he decided that he would go back to Russia. And when I asked him why he said I’m a doctor, my country’s sick, this is my place. And Maxim had an idea, and his idea was that the doctors in Russia had not had the benefit of real, updated, useful, practical useful medical information for some years because of the poverty.

So, Maxim had observed that from the mid ‘80s the Soviet medical publishing industry had basically been starved of money and had not been keeping up with the latest medical advances within the country, let alone what was going on outside of it. So, while he was in San Francisco he authored a book with an American coauthor on his specialty, which is echocardiography. And his payment for the book, he insisted, would be that 5,000 copies, I think, would be printed in Russian and shipped to Moscow. And it was his intention to distribute the book for free to Soviet doctors, now Russian doctors, and he wanted to do more of this.

He wanted to find, in fact, publishers who would take well established medical reference texts—again, remember this is all pre-internet — you know, those big fat books that still populate any doctor’s shelf. He wanted to have them translated into Russian and distributed to doctors because the gap in knowledge was just getting bigger every single day, and this was his way of fighting back. So, he asked me if I would fund this business. And I said, well, what kind of business is this? You’re going to pay for the publishing rights, you’re going to God knows spend how much time and money getting these 1,000-page books translated into Russian, and then doctors in this country have no money, and nobody’s going to buy these books, you’re going to have to give them away. And I said well, I will donate the money. You can call this a business if you want, but let’s be clear I can only do this once and when you run out of money, you’re going to have to find somebody else to support your project.

That became Practica Publishers. It was the first business that I got involved in. And Maxim and I joined with four of his doctor friends who — I think I donated $25,000 to the project, which they insisted on calling a business. But these four doctors, along with Maxim, started translating like the standard English language doctors’ reference shelf. And I learned then, of course, that there’s nothing in English that would…that anything that you take in English, in Russian it would be 50% bigger, so if it was a 600-page book in English, it would be almost a 1,000-page book in Russian. But they secured the rights, they translated each of these medical references, generally finding lots of mistakes in English that the original authors and publishers had missed, and this improved version in Russian was then printed and distributed for a few dollars to doctors in Russia who needed it. Of course, this business was going nowhere until they actually prevailed upon large new Russian corporations to start sponsoring these books. And Practica Publishers is alive today.

Daniel Satinsky: Still alive, yes.

Bernard Sucher: It was never a great business, but the fact is that Maxim and his partners made it a business. They made it a livelihood. It became the quality mark in Russian medical publishing. And, I mean, literally there are people today who are publishing Practica medical textbooks, which I find astonishing. That was the first business.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And then you told me what became Planet Fitness, you also started that.

Bernard Sucher: So, I’d been working out pretty much every day since I joined the mob in Wall Street, and in those days, there were really only two gyms in the city of Moscow. It’s hard to imagine. But there were two, let’s say, international standard gyms. One was in the Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel, with a waiting list of two years, and the other one was World Class, which became a prominent, by all accounts successful chain in Russia. They had, near Oktyabrskaya, by the French embassy, they had built a gym, and also a long, long waiting list. In both of these places the most prominent members were generally gangsters. So, wanting to work out, I persuaded my colleagues from the burgeoning restaurant business, what ended up being the Starlight Diner, I persuaded my colleagues that we should open a gym. And we opened with a joke name, the Moscow Beach Club. We opened a proper small gym in the Lenkom Theater, just outside of Pushkinskaya Ploschad*. And that was the business that immediately preceded Starlight.

But the first of our restaurant efforts on the way to Starlight ended up being Uncle Guilly’s. So, we opened a steakhouse under the name Dyadya Gilyaya, Uncle Guilly’s, opposite Mossoviet, near…just off of Tverskaya, down the street from the famous Georgian restaurant Aragvi on Stoleshnikov pereulok*. We opened Uncle Guilly’s unofficially in April 1994, officially in the beginning of June 1994. I believe I invested $147,500, mostly to clean an underground space that had been one of the first Soviet approved food cooperatives. It was called Café Stoleshnikov. It was in this wonderful underground space that had served some purpose or another for several hundred years. And after a good cleaning and the addition of some Italian kitchen equipment, we were importing the best beef we could from the United States, and serving to continually full houses, steak dinners under the name Uncle Guilly’s.

Daniel Satinsky: Who was your clientele?

Bernard Sucher: The clientele was, of course, in those days, expats dominated the new restaurants. There were very few of them in the city. We thought Uncle Guilly’s was the sixth, just six—sixth restaurant in the city outside of a hotel. There weren’t many of those. Where you could count on sort of an international standard meal experience. And while the clientele initially in Uncle Guilly’s and Starlight was overwhelmingly expatriate, American and British in particular, there were already a pretty good number, and fast-growing number of local Russian clientele—businesspeople, gangsters, artists.

And it was, you know, the Russian food culture, the restaurant culture, was wonderfully creative, adventurous. There was a cultural revolution going on in the 1990s, at least in Moscow, to match all the other revolutions that were happening at the same time politically, economically. I think most of us appreciate that dynamism in the restaurant culture is something very special. And it’s endured, by all accounts, into Moscow even today. Some of the best food that you can buy you’re going to find in central Moscow restaurants.

Daniel Satinsky: Wow. And Uncle Guilly’s, again, it seems like your beginning businesses, a number of them were designed to fill the market niches that originally were created by the existence of expats in Moscow, and a more international lifestyle that you were bringing into Moscow.

Bernard Sucher: So, Dan, I was a kind of professional expat. I left the United States in 1988 and moved to Hong Kong. From there I went to London, from London I went to Tokyo. And I was part of a financial community that generally worked 24/7, a lot less play, but a lot more work. And I missed a few things from my American life, American sports above all, but American food also. And not just the actual items you eat or drink, but I missed the 24/7 service culture that New York offered. And so by the time I got to Moscow, having lived in three foreign capitals, I understood that there were simply things that I liked that I was not going to be able to get unless I did something about it, unless I built the thing that was missing.

So, the notion of a 24/7 diner was just an extension of my frustration of being an American trying to find a decent cup of coffee at 4:00 in the morning in London. You can’t find a decent cup of coffee at 4:00 in the morning in London, and if you really need a cup of coffee at 4:00 in the morning in London you’re going to be disappointed. I didn’t want to be disappointed in Moscow. I wasn’t going to waste any time. So once I understood that I was going to live in Moscow, I understood also that it certainly made sense for me from a lifestyle point of view, but that it probably made business sense to get entrepreneurial and make things happen instead of waiting for them.

And I went a little crazy from the summer of 1993 till the summer of 1994 in getting involved in half a dozen local businesses. And when I say getting involved, it was a pattern. I responded to a local who I thought I could trust, someone I enjoyed, someone I was enthusiastic about backing, and I brought my—most importantly I brought my money, because there was no capital available for most people with good ideas in Moscow in 1993.

But I had a million-dollar bonus from Goldman Sachs, and I had nine years of Wall Street experience. I had experience in different cultures and living in different environments around the world, and I was, above all, I was an optimist. This, to me, was an inflection point in history, even if it was objectively awful for the people who were living through it and didn’t have blue American passports to go in or go out at will and at their pleasure. I was confident that ten years forward the world was going to be a better place, that Russia was going to be a better place, and so I was willing to take the risk, make the bet, and do the work. I knew, just the faith of a religious zealot, that we were on the path to a better world. And my money was essential, but my superpower was that optimism.

Daniel Satinsky: And you found likeminded people that you worked with, and you just mentioned that the Starlight was a group of you—and I assume that was the same group around Uncle Guilly’s. I mean, do you want to say anything about that group?

Bernard Sucher: Yeah, sure. So, the initial connection I actually made unwittingly in 1991 when I was visiting with Robert and Katya in August of 1991. We went to a new—no, not new—the Penta Hotel I believe was put up at the time of the 1980 Olympics. But we went to the German owned Penta Hotel on the Olimpiyskiy Prospekt* for Sunday brunch. This was one of the signs to me, of course, given what I told you earlier about not being able to find a decent meal in the Soviet Union in 1980. The fact that we could go to an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch, and it was good, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner all rolled into one, just keep eating until you can’t eat anymore.

But the guy who was responsible for that Sunday branch at the Penta Hotel was Dominique Berhouet. And we had a nice chat at the Penta. He was the manager, food and beverage manager or some other officer of a company there. And when I went back to live in Moscow and I got it in my head that we had to do a diner, I sought out Dominique, and I said look, I have this idea, I have this money, I can’t build or operate a restaurant. And Dominique said, well, it’s a great idea, I’d love to be part of it, but there’s a couple of other guys that I think you should meet. And he suggested that I meet his friends Paul O’Brien and Oleg Bardeev.

And so the four of us began to—well, actually what happened was we met and I pitched them on my diner idea. I had already sketched out plans. I had even scouted a site around the corner from Rosie O’Grady’s, right opposite the big library there. And I was keen as mustard to get this diner thing going. And they said look, we actually have a project underway, we just don’t have the money. And what they were talking about was this conversion of Cafe Stoleshnikov, which I referenced a little earlier in our conversation, into some kind of modern standard restaurant. And what they were really thinking about was a steakhouse.

Paul O’Brien was the food and beverage manager at the Radisson Slavyanskaya, and Oleg Bardeev was his young Russian friend who could deal with all the local issues. Neither Paul nor Dominique spoke Russian, so they certainly needed someone who could connect easily with the local environment and bridge the gaps, the many gaps that they had with respect to business realities in the country at that time. And what they basically presented me with is we have…

Daniel Satinsky:  Look, if you want, we can stop because I want to finish with you about Starlight, because there’s still more to that story, and also about business realities of operating a restaurant, and there’s more to discuss about that. But then there’s the second part of your career in finance, which I also want to make sure we cover. So probably we, if you’re losing this, we can maybe set a date next week and continue.

Bernard Sucher: Yeah, I think that makes sense. And, I mean, we’ve gone, we’ve been talking for not quite an hour and a half, and we’re still in 1993.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
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