Like Spike the bulldog in a Tom and Jerry cartoon I have taken to roaming the streets of St Petersburg by night chasing cats to satisfy my hunger pangs.
One tantalizingly waved a paw at me from a street sign outside Mayakovskaya Metro station and another ostentatiously displayed an overflowing glass of beer from a banner facing Nevsky Prospect. I followed them both to their dens.
The Cat Restaurant is the younger, but bigger, brother of the Cat Cafe. Guests of both establishments are greeted at the entrance by photographs of Mayor Anatoly Sobchak and his wife Ludmilla Narusova carousing at the dinner table.
At the Cat Restaurant they caroused in the presence of celebrities Mstislav Rostropovich and Alla Pugacheva. In case either of these noted musicians felt compelled to start a sing-along, there was a piano in the corner.
Alla wasn't around to play us "Throw Your Cigarette Away" or any of her other hits when my fellow gourmet and I ate in the Cat Restaurant, but we were entertained for a few minutes by a pianist who improvised romantically in the style of the Grand Hotel Europe bar.
The music was really more suited to the discreet Cat Cafe and its suave black decor than the party atmosphere of the bright green and white restaurant.
The food is virtually identical at the cafe and restaurant except that in the restaurant the prices are higher and the portions are smaller. A Cat speciality is mushrooms in sour cream, which slide sumptuously down the throat but do not go very far towards filling the stomach.
In the cafe you get two small scoops of mushrooms for 21,000 roubles, and in the restaurant one scoop for five "conventional units," calculated at 4,750 roubles each, making the price 23,750 roubles.
A television with the volume turned down is the only element of the Cat Cafe which distracts from an otherwise pleasant conversational environment. On the evening of our visit we were also guaranteed a sober conversational environment, as there were no spirits available and the only beer was non-alcoholic, although we did get hold of a bottle of Sovyetskoe champagne for 50,000 roubles.
On paper the menu in the cafe was impressively long and catered for the inevitably fishy taste of most cats, offering pickled sea-snake for 19,000 roubles and shrimp dumplings for 28,000.
As was explained apologetically in the restaurant, however, the majority of the dishes were temporarily unobtainable on Cat premises because of the New Year holiday. In the restaurant the waiter directed us towards only two main courses, the most expensive ones, fillet of beef and sturgeon, at 38,000 roubles each.
We chose the beef, which was served with french fries, peas and carrots. No hidden surprises there, but no complaints, either. Less enjoyable was the price of the French white wine -- also 38,000 roubles for a 200 gram glass.
My drinking partner settled for apple juice at 4,750 roubles. In the cafe our main course was a warm, rather than piping hot, chicken Kiev with the same garnish that we had with the beef, for 28,000 roubles. We didn't feel overfed after either of the meals and were keen to try the Cat Dessert -- no such luck.
We suspected that the fate of the Cat Dessert was somehow linked with the fact that the plants in the restaurant were growing out of an unidentifiable colored jelly substance but the waiter would not confess to anything.
To avoid further embarrassing enquiries he brought us pink sugar-coated biscuits with our coffee. This took our minds off the missing sweets and our curiosity led us back to cats. Where were the boozing cats in bow ties whose images were everywhere?
The waiter said that while the restaurant did own one real cat, there was more to the cat name than met the eye. Cat, transliterated as "ket" in Russian, is not only a furry feline with a penchant for shrimp dumplings, but also an acronym for "kommertsiya, ekonomika, turizm" (commerce, economics and tourism). I always knew cats were crafty characters.