Uniform wine-pricing rule at the Metropol’s Boyarsky restaurant

The Uniform wine-pricing rule at the Metropol’s Boyarsky restaurant turned its wine list into a political target. Presented as a measure against privilege and speculation, it imposed a single price on every bottle of red or white wine and erased the labels that had made the cellar’s distinctions visible. Its later relaxation, following an awkward diplomatic request for Bordeaux, showed how readily the rule could yield when the interests of the state called for something the policy had excluded.

Complaint and Order

In the post-revolutionary atmosphere, an unnamed complainant argued that the existence of the Boyarsky’s wine list contradicted revolutionary ideals. The list was accused of memorializing the nobility’s privilege, the intelligentsia’s effeteness, and speculators’ predatory pricing. The complaint framed a restaurant menu not simply as a commercial document but as evidence of a social order the Revolution claimed to have displaced.

The complaint reached Comrade Teodorov, Commissar of Food. A meeting followed, then a vote and an order: the restaurant could sell only red and white wine, and every bottle had to be sold at the same price. The narrative gives no date for the decision, but places it after the Revolution and before the return of labeled wines in 1927. It does not identify the complainant; the possibility that the complaint came from a friend of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is raised but left uncertain.

Implementing Uniformity

The order changed the cellar as well as the menu. Andrey gestured toward a corner where five barrels of water stood beside a disorderly heap of labels. Ten men had spent ten days completing the task. The discarded labels made the policy’s practical effect tangible: distinctions among bottles that customers could once recognize were stripped away, leaving wine categorized in the broadest terms and sold without differences in price.

This intervention belonged to a wider period of pressure on fine dining. In 1920, after sealing the borders, the Bolsheviks prohibited the use of rubles in fine restaurants, effectively excluding most of the population from them. That earlier restriction was not the same as the Boyarsky’s later pricing order, but both made the restaurant’s operations subject to political decisions about who could dine there and what its offerings represented. The wine rule addressed the symbolism and pricing of the cellar; it did not end the restaurant’s service.

Retreat and Return of Labels

By 1927, labeled wines were again available in the Metropol’s cellar. Their return followed an unsuccessful attempt by a member of the Central Committee to order a bottle of Bordeaux for the new French ambassador. The episode reverses the rule’s earlier logic: a wine list condemned as an emblem of privilege became useful again when an official occasion required a prestigious bottle. The text associates the diplomatic request with the return of labels, without specifying the precise administrative steps that restored them.

The change becomes concrete over a meal of lamb prepared by Emile Zhukovsky. Asked what to recommend, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov names Château Latour ’99 for diners able to afford it. The recommendation relies on the distinctions that the uniform-price policy had obscured: a particular wine, identified by name and vintage, could again be offered as a choice at a price not presented as interchangeable with every other bottle.

Significance

The rule tried to make the Boyarsky’s wine cellar conform to a political language of equality by collapsing its visible differences into one price. Yet its removal of labels did not settle the restaurant’s place in post-revolutionary life. The return of labeled wines after a diplomatic request suggests that distinctions condemned in principle could be restored when they served official needs. The sequence—from complaint, to vote and order, to ten days of labor, and finally to Bordeaux for an ambassador—shows the policy as both a material reorganization of service and a reversible assertion of revolutionary priorities.