BBC News (Purveyors of Propaganda In Ordinary to David Miliband Esq) state this morning that a cup of coffee in Moscow costs five pounds and nineteen pence - which is 238 roubles at today's r.o.e.  Not "a cup of coffee in the most expensive clip-joints known to mankind" - this is, apparently, the price of coffee for the common Ivan Ivanovich and his comrades.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/companies/7522544.stm

I read this here in Moscow on my little Nokia internet gadget (N800) as I was having a cup of coffee across the road at Chocoladnitsa, after an early-morning bike ride down to the River and back..  catching up with the UK News over the internet and a cup of coffee is my little morning routine.

So anyhow, I paid my 79 roubles for my coffee, and went home.  Chocoladnitsa isn't the most expensive of the "Seattle-style" places in town, but it's a long way from the cheapest, and they have free wi-fi and a nice line in world music over breakfast. And you get Nezavisimaya Gazeta ("The Independent Gazette", Russia's equiv of the Grauniad) for free with breakfast before 10am.  Sometimes I break my cycling routine and come back via the Respublika All-Night Bookstore, where a coffee in the shocking-pink Cafe upstairs might be as much as 120 roubles, and no free newspaper.

Even next door to the Conservatoire, in the favoured hanging-around-between-gigs cafe of lounge-lizard musos, a coffee is only 165/R,  and brought to you by charming staff while you idle in enormous leather armchairs or rattan loungers,  just 500m up the road from the Kremlin.  (Plus the feelgood factor that the profits help keep the Conservatoire open).

I wonder if someone should let the BBC know any of this? (The coffee-prices, I mean - not my cycling habits).

It rather cuts the legs from the veracity of other "facts" one reads on Auntie's pages

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC:

One of my disappointments of Bucharest was the coffee at breakfast, ie Nescafe to which I added boiling water from the urn myself.

Cafes were not much in evidence in the city, either.

I often wonder why the British are incapable of producing the hot, black, heart-stopping stuff which is produced on every street corner in France and Italy, except with a pretentious franchise.

The Greek Cypriots and the Turks may sell foul Nescafe, but they are capable of producing the hard stuff.  Although why there are three (count 'em, three) branches of Starbucks in Istanbul is beyond me.

What is the coffee like in Moscow, however many roubles and kopeks it puts you back?

Serbia may be the Balkan caffeine paradise exception that proves the rule.  The Serbs like their espresso ("What, there is another kind of coffee? Are you sure?") thick and treacly in the bottom of a demitasse...  it must be the residual influence of the Ottoman occupation (but don't tell them that).   And in fact Croatia,  and my beloved litle Makedonia also have nice coffee,  most usually made arab-style over hot sand.   This is also found in Georgia and Armenia, but never, ever, ever, ask for "a Turkish coffee" in Armenia.

Coffee in the Soviet Onion was a sad and miserable experience - grim instant that floated in sulphurous islands in boiling water, if you could get it at all.  These days Moscow is awash with "seattle-style" coffee-shops,  which have had to restyle themselves "kaffeinaya" to distance themselves from memories of the grim stuff served in "kafes".

Some of them are quite chic. Here is our favourite pre-/post-concert gathering hole...  click on the open door to go inside and have a 360-degree look around.  The observant will spot Alexander Trostyansky (with fiddle case) gazing longingly at the patisserie counter...

http://www.coffeemania.ru/eng

Blimey! I kept looking for Niles Crane in there. 

But where are the ashtrays??