#6043
[Second Issue of the Day]
#8
Washington Post
January 27, 2002
Russian Evolution
Hip dining in Moscow? We had reservations.
By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
The spaghetti topped with green apples was a final confirmation.
After months of silky sushi, sleek hors d'oeuvres and freshly squeezed juice, we'd already suspected that Moscow was not the Soviet-style culinary wasteland of our collective nightmares.
Of course, the city's restaurants still boast far too many mystery meat cutlets and lumpy potatoes, stinky cabbage and sour cream. But the green-apple-butter-brown-sugar-and-spaghetti concoction at Leonardo -- delicious, by the way, if better offered as dessert than appetizer -- served only to affirm that Russia's capital has become Europe's unlikeliest new center of culinary innovation.
My husband, Peter Baker, and I didn't think it would turn out that way when we arrived last year to start a three-year tour in The Post's Moscow bureau. After all, on our first scouting trip here, the only places where we'd managed to eat were the Starlite American diner and Pizza Express, a British chain. Both are perfectly fine restaurants, and we're now hooked on weekend brunch at Starlite, the only real place in Moscow for Belgian waffles on a Sunday afternoon. But we weren't optimistic about our other prospects, beyond expecting some overpriced beef Stroganoff and chicken Kiev.
Our first hint that Moscow offered a stunning range of food came at the end of our first week, when some new friends suggested we go out for Mongolian barbecue. Soon, we were casually picking between Uzbek and Azerbaijani for dinner, deciding that Tibetan was really just a synonym for excellent Chinese and marveling at the profusion of sushi bars. Even the local Bulgarian restaurant turned out to be a place worth returning to.
But eating out in Moscow today isn't just about new adventures in mid-priced ethnic dining. The city is also home to innovative Asian, Continental and Russian cooking at a handful of restaurants that would be stars in any city but are made uniquely so by being in Moscow, formerly known for its surly Soviet service and absence of choice.
Most of these restaurants, which have opened just in the past few years, reflect how far the city has come from the early glitz yet uncertain quality of the capitalist 1990s. This next generation of Moscow restaurants, while still expensive, appears to be concentrating more on the cooking and less on the conspicuous consumption. Even longtime Russophiles who've been visiting the city regularly during its decade of transition profess amazement at the quality and variety of Moscow's restaurant life compared with just a couple of years ago.
Consider Uley, which opened last year and is arguably the hippest restaurant in Moscow, as well as being among its best. In introducing Asian fusion to the former Soviet Union, Uley looks like a place airlifted from Los Angeles, with stripped wood floors, velvet draperies and Hollywood-looks customers. Even if some of its early conceits were not all original (e.g., listing desserts first on the menu, putting goldfish instead of flowers on the table), the restaurant, under the direction of a tattooed Culinary Institute of America graduate, succeeds primarily because the food is so good.
Appetizers are particularly well-executed; favorites include a spicy Thai chicken salad with grilled prawns and moo shu duck pancakes. Main courses include one of the only really rare tuna steaks in town, an excellent duck breast and sushi worthy of the name. Among the irresistible desserts on Uley's menu are the homemade terrine of sorbets and anything with chocolate in it.
If Uley is cutting edge, Pushkin Cafe is a reminder of Russia's past culinary glories -- and also of its current glamour, which is now half the fun of eating out in Moscow. Housed in a three-story building made to resemble a pre-revolutionary mansion (though it opened for business just two years ago), Pushkin is the place to see and be seen by Moscow's political, business and media elite. Befitting the hectic pace of power brokers with a whole country to reinvent, Pushkin is open 24 hours a day.
Given such gilded surroundings, the food could easily be indifferent or mediocre and the service snooty or remote. But they are neither. Instead, the kitchen delivers Russian food the way you've probably never had it: light pirozhki (filled dumplings) alongside the soup, wild game such as boar or deer dressed up in sprightly sauces, perfect blinis with caviar. If you must have beef Stroganoff on your trip to Russia, this is the place to order it (it's even an unlikely bargain at $10.50). One final tip for a status-conscious place: If you don't want to end up dining in Siberia, request a table on Pushkin's private club-like second floor.
Another restaurant at the top end of the new food chain is Scandinavia, a Swedish refuge of calm in a courtyard just off Moscow's busy Tverskaya Street. It serves warm and wildly addictive black bread, innovative starters such as a shrimp and avocado "ceviche" and frothy corn and black truffle soup, and upscale comfort food like grilled salmon on a skewer with a pea puree and a potato and goat cheese timbale.
Any food tour of Moscow, however, must also include a sense of the Soviet past and how it is being remembered and reimagined in the Russian present. That's why a stop at Pushkin Cafe should be balanced by a visit to the humble but hip Club Petrovich, a basement restaurant set up to look like a Soviet communal apartment of the Brezhnev era. Russian yuppies exclaim over the memorabilia of their youth -- ironically placed Lenin medals, cheap housewares in awful colors -- and share typical Russian zakuski (appetizers), like small round plates of sausage and cheese and pickled garlic.
Moscow's best combination of eating and Soviet-era kitsch is surely to be found at Beloye Solntse Pustyni (White Sun of the Desert), an Uzbek theme restaurant based on a cult film of the same name (think "Lawrence of Arabia" meets the USSR), with belly dancers and food that transcends the fun but tacky surroundings. The catch is the eyepopping price tag, which made the place popular with Russia's nouveau riche "oligarchs" when it opened in 1997. Outside, a reminder of the net worth of the diners inside, there are invariably hordes of security men guarding Mercedes-Benz jeeps and other status cars.
The main event here is the $60-a-head set menu that starts with an appetizer buffet (everything from marinated salmon to an array of salads, the best of which is tomato and avocado), then moves on to Uzbek plov, a steaming hot plate of rice pilaf with lamb and fresh-cut tomatoes and onion served on the side. Piles of round, hot Uzbek bread and your choice of main course (we invariably go for the assorted shashlik, or grilled meat) follow, then a groaning dessert buffet.
Several other restaurants also offer a chance to see the unique combination of neo-thug and Armani suits that is found wherever Russia's magnates meet. The latest such power lunch spot, just opened this summer, is Cir (Cheese), complete with a big hunk of faux yellow cheese on the roof and an open-kitchened Mediterranean interior. But the menu extends well beyond dairy products, starting with the complimentary tomato bruschetta on the table and on through well-executed pastas and other Italian staples.
This leads to the question of whether it's really worth going to non-Russian restaurants on a trip to Moscow. Certainly, there are other good Italian and French restaurants to recommend here -- places like the innovative Leonardo, of green-apple-spaghetti renown, or Kumir, a new franchise of French three-star Michelin chef Michel Troisgros, who aspires to collect Russia's first star and makes duck so well that it may be only a matter of time before he does -- but there's only so much ogling at oligarchs that can justify such restaurant bills.
Perhaps the one exception is Japanese food, which has swept the capital in the past year as the ethnic cuisine of choice and as such might be worth a stop for the sheer counterintuitiveness of eating raw fish in landlocked Moscow and not dying for your trouble. The top end is represented by Izumi, which boasts that it's the only restaurant in town to serve fugo fish and 16 different kinds of sake but has prices that would put Tokyo to shame. But sushi has become so universal here, it's served basically everywhere now, from the Planet Sushi chain to supermarket kiosks.
What is more unique to Moscow is every Russian's favorite ethnic food: Georgian. The tiny, troubled republic in the Caucasus may be independent now that there's no more Soviet Union, but in the Russian capital its cuisine remains a synonym for good eating. Even if they aren't centers of culinary innovation, Moscow's many excellent Georgian restaurants shouldn't be missed.
Like Middle Eastern food, Georgian food stresses simple grilled meats and makes appetizers the stars of any meal. The most irresistible is khachapuri, a hot cheese bread. Other must-have appetizers: lobio, a red beans and cilantro dish served in a clay pot, and tsatsivi, a dish of cold chicken or turkey in a walnut sauce. For main courses, shashlik of either lamb or pork is standard; another good choice is chicken tabaka, a heavily garlicked fried chicken.
Veteran Muscovites claim that the greatest mystery about Georgian food is that it is seemingly price resistant. In other words, it tastes just about as good at the cheap places as at the expensive ones. We tend to agree. Our two favorites represent both extremes: the cheap but cute Dioskuria and the expensive, slightly over-the-top Kavkazskaya Plennitsa (Prisoner of the Caucasus). Dioskuria, in a cul-de-sac just off the neon-pulsing New Arbat Street, has especially good khachapuri, though its live music can occasionally be overbearing. Prisoner of the Caucasus, another film-themed restaurant from the owners of Beloye Solntse, has an outdoor garden for summer eating and food good enough to make you overlook the Disney-does-Georgian aspects of the place.
We also can't resist U Pirosmany, whose main asset is a fairy-tale setting across from the gold-domed Novedevichy Convent. U Pirosmany was one of the first private restaurants allowed to open in Moscow. Its food today may not be as good as its competitors, but its location alone invariably draws raves from Russia first-timers.
Soon after we arrived, our Russian teacher Sveta told us a sad story. Most Americans who visit Moscow, she said, invariably have one question for her when it comes to food: Where can I find that famous McDonald's?
She directs them to Pushkin Square, where the lines are no longer out the door for the privilege of downing crispy fries and using a clean public restroom. But she always shakes her head. "These are people who wouldn't eat dinner at McDonald's at home," she said. "But they think this is the only place to have a decent meal here."
Like us, they were wrong.
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