One woozy bar matron and a waiter of indeterminate origin came at me sideways as I sat in Bunker, handing down table-sized menus and tightly wrapped napkins stuffed with obedient knives and forks, to wait while I mentioned that I wanted beer. The closely-cropped waiter's head nodded, a pencil tip behind the left ear alternately aiming at me and the picture-framed wall at my back. The bar matron smelled of cough syrup and a lit cigarette. She swept away crumbs from the earlier diners and placed salt, pepper, various salad oils, and bread at the center of my table.

Where the waiter disappeared to I did not see as my attention was kidnapped by the sound of four cell phones being slapped down at the next table over. Around them, four young women in various stages of weight loss were flapping their wings and splashing loudly as they again palmed their individually expressive handsets and sat down.

My beer came and together with an American businessman dragged timidly to my table for conversation and an opinion other than my own, I took a small sip. The chicken wings looked good, he mumbled toward the hazy waiter, and alongside a curiously spelled quesadilla we made our appetizer orders. Again, the pencil threatened me with its nubbed graphite barrel.

Bunker is underground and a venue for live music. The food is inexpensive, as are the drinks, and there is usually a cover charge upstairs to get in. The cashier and bouncers standing at the Tverskaya entrance have been genetically bred not to smile, but in any case are equipped with the opposable thumbs and rudimentary understanding of arithmetic needed by those who make change for a living. The waiters, bartenders and bar matrons are human and fallible, yet manage to interrupt their important conversations to serve you promptly. This evening Detsky Panadol was costing 120 rubles a person and the show, when half finished, was half empty.

But before that the appetizers came. More accurate a description of the appetizer's arrival would be that before the bass-heavy musical stylings of Moscow's only half-American hip-hop band even began, the miniature replica versions of the appetizers came. Six miniature chicken wings flecked in a sticky red tar with translucent chunks of chopped and tasteless garlic dwarfed by a large lettuce leaf wetted down to tame its natural curls (90 rubles) came to rest on our knee-high table. An already small half-tomato again sliced into quarters garnished the plate.

The other half of the tomato had been economically redistributed to my miniature quesadillas (80 rubles), where it lolled shyly in the plate's center like a fat sixth-grader afraid of crushing his classmates at dodgeball. The four slices of my doubled-over tortilla sported a surface area larger than the chicken wings, and though the insides contained a melted cheese product along with what I perceived as mushrooms but might as well have been any other Moscow basement fungus, the result was only tasty as long as it stayed warm. A dollop of red ketchup shone from the middle of each slice.

By now our American voices, loud and shallow, had drawn notice from the four young women next to us. In their Russian, transparent and inescapably fluent in my ears, I listened as they discussed us.

‘Why do they drink their beers like that?' asked a big-hipped blonde with a small pearl-colored telephone moving its way back into her lap. ‘Is it some kind of sexual metaphor?'

‘It's strange, I know. But they can sit there for hours and just pull on them,' said a tall brunette whose mobile phone battery she coolly slipped in and out of its clicking cradle. All of them giggled and sipped from their glasses of tea.

I sighed and took an overly large gulp of my now-tepid Baltika (40 rubles a half-liter, 25 rubles for 250 ml) to deafen the women's monkey chatter. Out of nowhere the waiter reappeared when both my drink and appetizer finished and I absently ordered an ominous sounding French Pork Surprise (150 rubles). The businessman made a cheerfully artless attempt to pronounce the Russian syllables for Caesar salad (120 rubles). And another beer, please.

An opening band with a horn section completed its empty set of vapid Russian pop songs, mercifully failing to pause long enough for their tuneless sting to set in. A television set for no good reason broadcast their noodlings above the bar. Other tables were filled with young post-soviet orphans in decorative eyeglasses and bared, tattooed mid-driffs. At the next table the heaviest of the young women leaned far enough forward that the blouse she wore buckled underneath her breast, exposing flesh that failed to arouse but nonetheless made me grab for my alcohol.

Her phone was big and black with a long strap slung securely around her chubby wrist.

Then the meals came. A cost-benefit analysis of the Caesar salad showed clearly that it was, even by shady Russian accounting standards, a bargain. A large, generously provided-for portion; chicken slices at nearly each forkfull; its application of egg and anchovy paste slathered and unsparing. My visually unarresting french surprise was merely a slab of white cheese melted over another slab, this one of grey pork, topped with more indescribable basement fungi. It was good tasting though, and I held my knife and fork undaintily and right-side up as I transported it off my plate.

Simultaneously the women next to us were brought their order as our elusive waiter enlisted the arms of the woozy bar matron to assist in carrying them their meal. To make room they circled their phones around the salad oil and napkin boat, taking care to keep the dialpads face up.

"Chicks next to us all got the same thing," said the American businessman chewing, as four more caesar salads floated their way back into the food chain via the young womens' upside-down and crosswise held knives and forks.

"It's strange, I know. But they can sit there for hours and all eat the same thing," I said in loud, catty Russian. "It must be a sexual metaphor."

The redhead who up until then had kept her back to me swiftly turned around and met my eye. Her red cell phone was illumined in a shade of lime green and chirping its first tinny bars of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."

BUNKER
12 Tverskaya Ul.
Metro: Chekhovskaya
Tel: 200-1506