The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner

by Jay Rayner

  Back at our table we are presented with the menu. It is long. Not just, “Gosh, what a lot of choice there is” long. Not even, “My, how busy the kitchens must be” long. It’s long as in, “If I read all of this, will I have any time left for dinner?” At Pushkin there are forty starters, not including the pies and pickles (and in a Russian restaurant, one must always include the pickles). There are twenty-nine main courses, thirty desserts, and twenty-one honeys, should you want twenty-one honeys, and I wasn’t sure I did.

  There are also twenty-four waters. At Pushkin they not only have mineral waters from the usual suspects—France and Italy—but also from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, and Wales. I had flown for nearly four hours, queued for forty-five minutes at passport control for the pleasure of being stared at as if I were attempting to import anthrax, had been driven through Moscow’s evening traffic jams for double that length of time and, living dangerously, walked for thirty minutes through the city’s streets only to be offered mineral water from a country so close to where I live, I make a point of never going there. I considered ordering it, and then noticed the price. At Café Pushkin, water from Wales—where it is either raining or about to start raining—costs almost £10 ($20) a bottle. Perhaps it had flown business class to be here. Instead I ordered a Russian mineral water at a mere £8. It was wet and had bubbles.

  The water prices, however, were nothing compared to those on the wine list. It wasn’t just the big-ticket Bordeaux and Burgundies, the prices of which often read like telephone numbers in whatever currency they happen to be expressed. It was all the other stuff, the bottles that were meant for the civilians like me. Not for the first time I felt like a fraud, an impostor who has pulled up to the table on false pretenses. I simply couldn’t afford this restaurant, not properly.

  The food wasn’t (and never has been) the problem. It is always possible to find out in advance how much a menu is going to cost, and there has never been any shame or embarrassment in not ordering the most expensive dishes or set menus (however much I might yearn to do so, and I always do). As long as you do your research properly, the food could generally be regarded as a fixed cost, which, poor cooking and gastric distress aside, was unlikely to throw up any terrifying surprises.

  The wine list, however, was—and always has been—a different matter entirely.

  COSTING A BUNCH OF GRAPES

  For years in London, while eating on my newspaper’s not unlimited expense account, I had wasted little time studying what was actually in the restaurants’ cellars, putting my energy instead into looking at the numbers in the far right-hand column, in pursuit of something that I knew would be acceptable, if only to the accountants signing the checks. As a result I had become a connoisseur of wine lists, though not of the wines they contained.

  I had come to hate the ones that, quite logically, arranged their bottles according to region so that the cheaper (read cheapest) bottles would be scattered randomly across the pages, and hard to find. Conversely I came to love those that began with a “house selection” (translation: “a few cheap bottles for those schmucks who shouldn’t be here”).

  I had also become geographically savvy, focusing on parts of the world that could be relied upon to be cheap—Argentina, say, or Croatia—and then despairing when the caprices of fashion served to make what had once been a bargain-basement wine producer suddenly achingly hip and therefore wallet-punishingly expensive. In the mid-nineties, for example, Australia had been my wine country of choice, always good for a wide selection of bottles in my price range. I had drunk gallons of huge, oaked chardonnays, wines that left you feeling like you’d spent the evening sucking tree bark, not because I had a particular weakness for tree bark but because I could afford them.

  Then, bang!, Australia was declared the land of quality wines and it was out of my price range. New Zealand fell next, then South Africa. The way things were going, I’d soon be drinking the wines of Moldova or Tajikistan and praising their youthful vitality and power. Certainly, with years of practice, I had managed to make ordering the second-cheapest bottle on the list look like the decisive act of a man who knew his own palette.

  At Pushkin the “second-cheapest bottle on the list” act wasn’t going to cut it. That cost nearly £50 ($100). Before I arrived I had read that Moscow was now the world’s most expensive city—23.9 percent more expensive than New York, apparently—but as I lived in one of the other top-five cities and always managed to find something in my price bracket at home, I had not taken it seriously. Friends had also told me that the prices were only punishing if you tried to live like one of the oligarchs, the hyper-rich Russian industrialists who had come to wield power over the Russian government; that, otherwise, prices—rents, transport, meals—were perfectly reasonable.

  The problem was that in touring the world’s high-end restaurants, I really was attempting to live like an oligarch, if only for a few hours at a time. I was at the restaurant with my newspaper’s Moscow correspondent, who had made huge if fruitless efforts to get media accreditation for me from the Russian foreign ministry so I might visit the Kremlin kitchens. (Official response: “A restaurant critic? I don’t think so.”) Tom spent a lot of his time in godforsaken corners of the Southern Caucuses, a long way from the nearest restaurant, and I wanted to show him a good time. The least he deserved was some wine, but this list was the enemy.

  I knew that for sure when, thinking I had finally found something I could afford—it was the ruble equivalent of £30 ($60)—the waiter leaned over and, in hushed but clipped tones said, “You do realize that’s a half bottle?” I settled on a rosé Côtes du Rhône at a mere £45 ($93) and tried to pretend it was worth it even though I knew that, in France, it would retail for less than a fiver.

  The wine pricing was a particular issue because, even on my brief acquaintance with this restaurant, it was clear to me that the food would best be enjoyed drunk. Modern Russian apparently means complicated and architectural: Every dish looked like something a small mammal could nest in. We had starters of smoked eel and rare, thinly sliced lamb, and both came in rings around the plate, surrounding huge, carousel-like flounces of salad or pickled vegetables that rose at the center to volcanic peaks.

  Tom ordered a main course of salmon that was arranged to look like some mutant sea creature that had swum too close to the outflow of a nuclear plant: a tail of mange-tout, the head and arms of a crayfish and, between them, a half cylinder of crisp (and inedible) salmon skin shielding the body of salmon beneath. Mine read like three dishes in one: confit rabbit leg wrapped in slices of slab bacon and baked in the oven with a paté of rabbit meat in a box of puff pastry, raspberry sauce, baby vegetables, cream and morels sauce. Fresh raspberries sat on top of the whorls of claggy rabbit paté, making it look like the onion domes of St. Basil’s Basilica, realized in food, and not very good food at that.

  These dishes were to subtlety what Paris Hilton is to chastity. It was pantomime food, slapstick modeled in protein and carbs. Around me large tables of American men, in white shirts and red suspenders, clanked bottles of wine into ice buckets and laughed loudly at one anothers’ jokes. Almost everybody here seemed to be anything but Russian.

  As I paid the bill for nearly £200 ($400), for a meal that in London would have cost perhaps a third of that, I brooded on the artifice around me. Of course, high-end dining in Las Vegas had also been constructed around artifice, but it was artifice with its own internal logic, built partly on the lack of context of a desert town created from scratch, and partly from the worship of mammon. Nothing was out of place because it had no place in which to be.

  Moscow was different. Tom told me that the capital’s restaurants were currently in the grip of an outbreak of nostalgia for food of the Soviet era, which was apparently now more popular than sushi, though I doubted what we’d eaten had borne a resemblance to anything served under communism (save for a bowl of pickled cucumbers). This was a city wallowing in history. It was drowning in the stu
ff. And yet the “historical” restaurant that Moscow had taken to its heart was such a weird, modern caricature that surely only Walt Disney could have been proud of it. It was clear to me that I needed to get to grips with what had gone before. I wanted to trace the journey from the communist restaurant table to the fiction that Pushkin never wrote. And I knew there was only one place to start: the restaurant that Stalin built.

  In 1950 Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong marked the birth of the People’s Republic of China by signing a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance. Naturally, to celebrate this bond, work began on a new restaurant, the first Chinese in the Russian capital. The Peking, inside the Peking Hotel, on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, was decorated in shades of imperial red and gold, and in the dining room the pillars were painted with oxblood. The hotel was a gargantuan building, which, for the short period before the completion of the Stalinist-gothic superstructures known as the Seven Sisters—huge multitiered, multispired edifices that ring the city—was Moscow’s tallest building.

  It was so tall that Lavrenty Beria, the founder and head of the KGB, and the man who oversaw the latter stages of Stalin’s purges, was said to have a glass-walled office at the very top from where he could keep watch on the city below through binoculars.

  The Peking is not the only example of a Moscow hotel or a restaurant created in this way. For the political strategists in the Soviet-era Kremlin, restaurants weren’t places to go for dinner; they were a means by which to express solidarity with their allies. Moscow is littered with hotels and restaurants named after both the republics and capital cities of the Union. There’s the Hotel Ukraine (which occupies one of the Seven Sisters). There’s the Prague and the Warsaw and the Budapest. Each has its restaurant.

  As I learned about this I became rather fond of the old Soviet Union, or at least the idea of it. Who could not love a political system that didn’t merely see restaurants as places in which to do deals, but as a means by which to express social and economic progress? The obvious answer is the poor, benighted citizens of the Soviet Union, most of whom were never allowed access to those restaurants or who found few menu items available if ever they did make it inside. The premise, though, was a great one. If the British government had scrapped the lousy notion of a Millennium Dome when it was on the drawing board and instead had spent the better part of £1 ($2 billion) billion on a gastro-dome, packed with the very best restaurants the world had to offer, I for one would have welcomed the twenty-first century with open arms, and lent the Labour Party my unstinting support forevermore.

  Of all the politically motivated restaurants in Moscow, the Peking (never, it seems, to be renamed the Beijing) was the most intriguing because it depended for its success on chefs supplied by China. As a result the fortunes of the restaurant came to mirror those of Sino-Soviet relations. During the 1950s the Peking thrived, and became regarded as the height of fashion: party apparatchiks couldn’t get enough of their sweet-and-sour pork and their spring rolls.

  In the 1960s, however, when ideological differences between China and the Soviet Union led to bloody territorial disputes, all the Chinese chefs were called home to be replaced by Russians. For years afterward the Peking Restaurant served cabbage and Russian sausage, though diners were given chopsticks with which to eat them. There were décor problems, too: The walls were decorated with murals of Stalin and Mao meeting in hearty handshakes of mutual admiration, and they regularly had to be doctored to keep pace with political change. After Khrushchev denounced him in 1956, Stalin was painted out. Mao went a few years later.

  It took twenty years, and the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership, for relations between China and the Soviet Union to begin a long thaw, the impact of which was not lost on the city’s Chinese food lovers. “Some people say that when they ship in a good Chinese cook to the Peking Restaurant,” The New York Times reported one China watcher as saying in the spring of 1985, “that will be a sign that things are really beginning to change.” Little has altered in the way the Russian government works despite the end of communism. In 2006, when relations between Russia and Georgia soured, the Moscow authorities knew exactly what to do. They closed down all the Georgian restaurants, claiming they had breached hygiene codes.

  Elsewhere in Moscow during the Soviet period, the ability to eat out was dependent simply on status. There were restaurants, but some were open only to Communist Party members. Others were located in the headquarters of the various trade organizations—the Union of Writers, for example, or the equivalent unions for actors or filmmakers—and you had to be a member or related to one to book a table.

  Stepan Mikhalkov was one of those who could always get a table. Mikhalkov, now in his forties, is as close to cultural nobility as it comes in Russia. Both his father and uncle are film directors who either won or were nominated for the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film. His mother is a famous actress, and his grandfather wrote the lyrics to his country’s national anthem not once but three times, changing them when Stalin was denounced and, again, as an old man, when a new version was needed to mark the end of communism. Mikhalkov met me at his restaurant Indus, where Indian food by the highly regarded London chef Vineet Bhatia is served, but stripped of all its grace and power because the Russians have no palate for spice. They like the blander, softer concoctions, of the sort that Mikhalkov got to eat as a child because of his family connections.

  “I always ate well,” Stepan says, recalling his visits to the Union of Writers. “But for seventy years all the menus in the restaurants were exactly the same because there was only one cookbook, the state cookbook.” There would always be a version of Salad Olivier—cubed chicken and vegetables bound in a slick of mayonnaise—named after Chef Olivier, who owned The Hermitage restaurant in Moscow in the 1860s. There was smoked fish, and the vivid beetroot soup borscht, and a remarkable selection of very different but surprisingly similar types of stuffed dumpling, be they boiled, baked, or fried: There were pierogi. There were pelmeni. There were varenyky. Whatever they were called, it could all be guaranteed to be heavy food with its own gravitational field. “It was homely food,” Mikhalkov said, picking at an emasculated samosa.

  When communism ended in 1991 and the Soviet Union collapsed, many of these old restaurants closed, unable to cope with the demands of the market. Many of the new ones that opened soon found themselves the focus of the Mafia gangs that proliferated in Moscow in the early 1990s. At one point it was estimated there were 8,000 different criminal syndicates working in Russia and more than 100,000 people claiming allegiance to them, and many of those ran protection rackets of one kind or another.

  In the years before he came up with the idea for Café Pushkin, Andrei Dellos was running a club in Moscow. “Twenty times a day I received threats and promises and from very serious people,” he told one magazine journalist. “Soviet people were peaceful, educated and nice-looking and then suddenly from the depths of the earth came these mafia demons. I didn’t sleep because I was so afraid.” Eventually a number of the criminal syndicates took to running their own restaurants so they had somewhere to meet and launder money, though they rarely lasted long. Either there were shoot-outs inside, which forced the police to close them down, or they withered for lack of investment.

  In the early days, what the restaurants were not about was the food. Often it was simply about the ability to have money and to spend it as one wished. In her book, Sale of the Century, about the rise of the oligarchs, journalist Chrystia Freeland describes the scene at Serebryany Vek, a grand restaurant in a converted bath house not far from the Bolshoi Theatre. There, Moscow’s newly emergent demimonde would gather nightly beneath chandelier-encrusted ceilings to gorge on “mountains of caviar.”

  One popular event at Serebryany Vek was the auction every night of a single red rose, which began at midnight. There was nothing special about the red rose—stem, thorns, petals—save that it was for sale to the highest bidder. On the night Freeland
went, it was sold for $110. “It could have been a nauseating moment,” she wrote. “But there was something glorious about it too. The man in the suit that was a little too shiny and the tie that was a bit too wide bought that rose just because he could. Because there was no central planner, no head of the factory communist party cell, no stern censor of morality in the workers state, to tell him not to.”

  In time the determined restaurateurs, the ones who knew how to work the system and get for themselves the necessary krysha or “roof”—patronage of the right people, be they politicians, businessmen, or hairy-knuckled Mafia hoods—were able to prosper. Andrei Dellos, for example, was soon launching Shinook, a re-creation of a Ukrainian farmhouse, complete with live animals, separated from diners by a glass wall, and a lift so that the horse could be exercised in the street outside. Nobody I spoke to about Shinook had much to say about the food, but they all talked about the animals and the happy horse. It was the same as the sale of the rose. They appreciated the right to spend their money on it, however ludicrous and bizarre it might seem to others.

  What of the Peking Hotel? How had that fared in the transfer to a market economy? It had not been without its troubles. In January of 2002, Konstantin Georgiyev, the general director, was gunned down—one shot to the chest, another to the head, bang, bang, in classic hit style—while leaving the orthopedic clinic where he was being treated for injuries incurred when he was run over by a car a few months before.

  In 2004 control of the lower floor s was sold to Storm Entertainment, a casino company and, by the time of my visit, the renovation was all but complete. Richard Kveton, the casino’s food and beverage manager, took me into what was once the Peking Restaurant. Kveton, a Canadian who has been in Moscow for more than ten years, looks like something out of Martin Scorsese’s movie Goodfellas. The day we meet, his hair is slicked back. He is wearing a sharp suit with a pinstripe of crimson and, beneath it, a crisp shirt in a matching shade of pink.