Baku to the future

When last year Lonely Planet put Baku at number eight in a list of "the world's top cities to party the night away", I confess I was sceptical.

But having spent a weekend in this remote former Soviet republic, a five-hour flight from London, it turns out that the claim is founded — Baku is booming, its oil revenues a staggering $7 billion last year (not bad for a nation of 8.6 million people). And its beau monde likes to celebrate.

Hence the opening this month of Chinar, a huge Asian-themed bi-level restaurant-cum-club run by Gordon Ramsay's former restaurant director Jean-Baptiste Requien, with a kitchen brigade recruited from London's Hakkasan, DJs from St Tropez's Les Caves du Roy and Paris's Buddha Bar, and a soigné crowd with an appetite for
bellinis and beluga.

Not that it's the only magnet to which Baku's beautiful people flock at night. We may not have made it to Face Club or Stop Club but we spent a diverting hour or two at Jazz Center, the Caspian answer to Ronnie Scott's, listening to a rather stern — though equally wonderful — chanteuse sing impassioned standards in Russian.

The next act was more experimental: two unaccompanied drummers, whose relentless improvisation finally drove us away. But by then we'd fallen into conversation — tourists being a rarity in Baku, Azeris being friendly by nature — with a local keen to show us Opera Lounge.

Nothing to do with opera, as it happened, but a super-stylish lounge bar furnished with boxy sofas arranged around large flat-screen televisions, like little domestic living rooms, where glamorous night owls smoke shisha pipes and drink vodka into the small hours. No longer did the idea of A Hedonist's Guide to Baku — a book of that title is published in May — seem far-fetched.

Certainly the shops opening along the sweeping Bulvar, the wide esplanade that runs along its Caspian shoreline (where Baku's most famous son, Gary Kasparov, learned to play chess on the chequerboard tables), suggest there's a burgeoning market for high living and top-end luxe.

Almost every major label is represented, from Armani to Zegna by way of Tom Ford, who recently opened a flagship in a 19th-century mansion, site of a war-time summit between Stalin and de Gaulle, opposite the city's most famous ancient monument, the Maiden Tower.

Along with a medieval multi-domed hamam, the imposing 11th-century Muhammed Mosque and the immensely beautiful Palace of Shirvanshahs, the tower is a highlight of Baku's walled Old City, a labyrinth of winding alleys that has been a Unesco World Heritage Site since 2000, even though — ironically — it was placed on the World Heritage in Danger list three years later. Hence the restoration of its windswept honey-coloured sandstone streets which is now ongoing.

But it's a pleasure to wander in, nonetheless, its thoroughfares free of the recklessly driven Ladas that swarm elsewhere, pausing occasionally at a former caravanserai or inn — I liked Karvansara on Qala Küç — for a glass of smoky black tea and a saucer of home-made cherry jam that you eat with a spoon.

There are numerous galleries too, such as the verging-on-surreal Museum of the Miniature Book, an unexpectedly engaging exhibition of 6,500 Lilliputian volumes in myriad languages that was praised by Boris Yeltsin.

By contrast, the Azerbaijan State Museum of Art is what you'd expect, a sprawling collection of western, Russian and local paintings, the highlight of which is a small Kandinsky (one of eight) of a top-hatted woman on a rearing horse.