LOCATED ON MIKHAIL LOUSKAIA SQUARE, the cellar café was opened in 1911 and closed by authorities in 1915. It was the favorite meeting spot of the city's artists, actors, writers, poets and musicians, and others who were known as "pharmacists," the bourgeois onlookers who had to pay to get in. The café regularly held poetry and prose readings, dance performances and plays. It was described as "smelling of sweating bodies and stale smoke." In February 2001 this legendary café reopened and quickly attained its former prominence.