I'm Thankful for Today

Gorokhovaya Street and the Bars That Belong to It

Saint Petersburg's bar scene divides along a familiar axis. On one side sit the theatrical venues, elaborate cocktail programs, Michelin-adjacent credentials, reservation lists that open months in advance. On the other sit the places that belong to a street, a neighbourhood, a particular Tuesday evening. I'm Thankful for Today, at Gorokhovaya St, 24, is a casual bar in Saint Petersburg. The address itself is instructive: Gorokhovaya is one of the three radial avenues that Peter the Great's city planners drew from the Admiralty, a street with a long civilian history that cuts through the central districts without the tourist saturation of Nevsky Prospekt. Bars that land here tend to serve the people who live and work nearby before they serve anyone else.

That geography shapes what a place becomes. The neighbourhood watering hole model, in any city, in any decade, earns its character through repetition: the same faces returning, the staff learning orders before they're placed, a room that reads differently at 6pm on a weekday than at midnight on a Saturday. Saint Petersburg has enough of these places to constitute a distinct tier, separate from the cocktail-forward venues that draw visitors and critics, and I'm Thankful for Today operates within that tier. The name, rendered in English despite the Russian city context, carries a quiet defiance, an assertion of present-tense pleasure that fits the neighbourhood-bar format better than it would fit a tasting-menu restaurant or a high-concept cocktail lounge.

Where It Sits in the Saint Petersburg Bar Field

The city's current drinking culture has matured considerably over the past fifteen years. Bars like El Copitas in St. Petersburg have placed Russian bartending on international maps, while venues in Moscow such as Chainaya, Tea & Cocktails have demonstrated that the country's bar culture can operate at a globally competitive level. That recognition has raised expectations city-wide, but it has also clarified what the neighbourhood bar does differently. It does not compete on the same terms. It doesn't need to.

Within Saint Petersburg specifically, the upper tier includes places with defined programs and deliberate positioning. Bolshoy Bar and Mickey & Monkeys each occupy recognisable positions in that space. Double B and Coffee 22 operate in the daytime-to-evening continuum that Saint Petersburg does particularly well, given the city's long summer light and the culture of extended sitting that comes with it. I'm Thankful for Today sits in a different register from all of these, closer to the gathering-place end of the spectrum, where the measure of success is how well a room holds a community rather than how precisely a drink is constructed.

That distinction matters for how a visitor should approach it. If you're cross-referencing this against Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu, Jewel of the South in New Orleans, or Kumiko in Chicago, all bars operating with explicit technical ambition, you're comparing across categories. The more useful international comparison is with the neighbourhood bar that earns loyalty through consistency and feel rather than innovation. Julep in Houston and Papasha Klauss in Staraya Derevnya both point toward what a community-anchored bar can sustain over time when it commits to a local identity.

The Central District Context

Arriving at Gorokhovaya 24 puts you in a part of the city that rewards slow movement. The surrounding blocks hold the kind of Saint Petersburg that doesn't require a guidebook: tsarist-era facades, courtyard entrances, the particular echo of a city built on water. Bars in this zone function as thermal regulation, somewhere to sit after a long walk along the embankment, or to gather before crossing to the other side of the evening. The logic of the neighbourhood bar in a city this dense is slightly different from its equivalent in a sprawling Western city: you're rarely more than twenty minutes from the next option, so the decision to stay is always a genuine one.

That compression raises the bar for atmosphere. A place on Gorokhovaya holds its regulars not because there's nowhere else to go but because it earns them. The English-language name suggests a deliberate choice about register, not an attempt to signal international ambition, but something closer to a statement of mood, a reminder that the evening already in front of you is the one worth paying attention to. In a city that has, historically, excelled at melancholy grandeur, that kind of cheerful present-tense instruction carries some weight.

Planning Your Visit

I'm Thankful for Today sits at Gorokhovaya St, 24, in central Saint Petersburg, accessible on foot from both the Sadovaya and Sennaya Ploshchad metro stations, which puts it within a reasonable walk of the main hotel zones in the historic centre. For visitors using our full Saint Petersburg City restaurants guide, the Gorokhovaya address clusters well with other central options, making it a natural stop in an evening that moves through the district rather than centring on a single destination. It is walk-in friendly and open Mon to Thu and Sun from 9 AM to 11 PM, Fri and Sat from 9 AM to 12 AM.