On peering through the dim and gloomy doorway, it appeared instead to be a particularly desolate-looking cellar.

There were old barrels and boxes about, an expanse of general dusty mystery and, in the dingy distance, a flight of ladder-like steps leading upwards to a faint light.
"It's one of Dickens' impossible stage sets come true!" I exclaimed.
"It looks as though it might be a burglars' den or somebody's back yard, but anyway, it isn't a restaurant!" "It is too!" came back at me triumphantly.

"Look at that sign!" By the faint rays of a street light on nearby Sixth Avenue, I saw the shabby little wooden sign, "The Samovar." This extraordinary place was a restaurant after all! We entered warily, having a vague expectation of pickpockets or rats, and climbed that ladder--I mean staircase--to what was purely and simply a loft.
But such a loft! Such a quaint, delicious, simple, picturesque apotheosis of a loft! A loft with the rough bricks whitewashed and the heavy rafters painted red; a loft with big, plain tables and a bare floor and an only slightly partitioned-off kitchenette where the hungry could descry piles of sandwiches and many coffee cups.

And there in the middle of the loft was the Samovar itself, a really splendid affair, and one actually not for decorative purposes only, but for use.

I had always thought samovars were for the ornamentation either of houses or foreign-atmosphere novels.