A few years ago I read an article investigating the origins of ‘raf coffee’ and discovered that it’s apparently named after Rafael, or Raf, a regular customer at one of Moscow’s first contemporary coffee shops for whom the drink was originally created in the 1990s. Featuring coffee, cream and vanilla sugar, it soon gained popularity and eventually became part of the regular drinks menu at many other cafes around the city and beyond.
In Dagestan numerous coffee shops offer a local interpretation — raf with urbech, the regional speciality paste containing crushed nuts and seeds of various types. The cafe Papakha situated in a calm and peaceful street in the centre of Makhachkala is no exception. I found out that both the cafe and the restaurant of the same name less than a mile away belong to Khabib Nurmagomedov, the former MMA champion. By the way, the word ‘papakha’ stands for the traditional Caucasian wool hat, in which Khabib would famously walk to the octagon before a fight.
