It should be really written in upper case, as PECTOPAH, to match the cyrillic letters better :)

> For those who can't read any Russian

That's Cyrillic alphabet, not Russian. Cyrillic is used in other languages as well. I was born in Serbia (which also uses Cyrillic) so I understood the punchline, even though I would hardly say I "read any Russian". It's more of a south and east Slavic thing than it is a Russian thing.

The reason it drops the T is that the word came to Russian from French (as did so many other words). And the French word "restaurant" is pronounced with a silent 't' at the end, in the typical French way. So the cyrillic rendering of that sound ends up without a 'т' on the end.

Yeah, thats the pun - sorry for not being clear with my intention! Same idea applies for many words or names where the cyrillic characters have close resemblance with some other latin characters ("Hatawa is a popular russian/slavic girl's name" - of course properly it should be translittered as Natasha...)

Wouldn't this be a word made up in the early 20th century? Many Hebrew words were created pretty much from nothing at that time to revive an ancient language into modern use.