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

by Jay Rayner

  No, the last real eater in the Kremlin, the one who would have understood our eagerness to get moving, was Putin’s predecessor. Boris Yeltsin apparently liked a bit of food with his vodka. He was a man of prodigious appetites and he often liked to satisfy them at Tsar’s Hunt; photographs of Yeltsin and Jacques Chirac eating like tsars hang on the walls. If it’s good enough for two presidents, it must be good enough for us.

  When it first opened, Tsar’s Hunt sat alone with only the trees for company, a faux hunting lodge in a perfect setting, but development is fast out here, and now it is adrift on a tundra of tarmac, with a shopping development on one side of the car park and an apartment complex across the road. Inside, though, the fantasy is intact. There is a waterwheel and a babbling stream that you cross on a little bridge. There is, naturally enough, a wishing well, and the walls are hung with animal heads and antlers and furs, because many creatures had to die to furnish this place.

  Everything is panelled in dark wood, and the waiters are dressed as Cossacks, which I find unnerving. Once I became a father, my wife would often suggest we go camping. She was sure the kids would enjoy it, and I was sure that I wouldn’t. I told her Jews didn’t do camping, that the last time my people had camped was when they were fleeing a pogrom and that, if ever I found myself under canvas, I was sure the Cossacks were coming. I thought this was very funny.

  Now, though, I am being served by a bunch of them: big, stern men, with short-cropped blond hair, solid brows, and smile-bypasses. I decide it is best to get the orders in quickly in the hope that they might go away. At Katya’s insistence we avoid the £50 ($100)-a-head buffet, and choose instead some zakuski (from the Russian verb zakusit, “to take a little bite”), the Russian “tapas” that traditionally start every meal. We order a plate of sliced pig fat, and another of Russian charcuterie, which is almost the same thing. We have assorted pickled mushrooms, a basket of uncut vegetables (starring a whole skin-on onion), and another of bread, including toasted borodinsky, a coal-black rye bread with heavy molasses flavors which Katya tells me to rub with a cut clove of garlic. I do as I am told.

  It is only when this food arrives that Katya lets me know that she actually hates it all and that she merely wants me to have an authentic experience, which seems like a victory for hope over expectation in this pelt-heavy room.

  “Nobody ever cooked in my house when I was growing up,” she says, picking at the mushrooms. “It was all these little plates of . . .” She hesitates, hunting for the right word . . . “Stuff,” she says dismissively, waving at what has been assembled before us. “It was not real food. I always wanted proper plates of things.”

  In response to my panic about wine prices, she orders a bottle of vodka—“In Russia, vodka is still cheap”—and insists we toast each other over the pig fat and raw garlic tang. Behind us a fire burns fiercely, filling the room with the smell of wood smoke and rendering animal fats. The meat menu is solid and masculine: There are lots of things on it that needed shooting before eating. There is slow-roasted brown bear with turnips. There is wild boar with a pomegranate sauce.

  Then there is what I order: the back of dappled deer, roasted on a brazier. What arrives is just a couple of chops with a dark slick of a sweet reduced sauce made from local berries. It comes away easily from the bone and is, praise be!, one of the best pieces of venison it has ever been my pleasure to eat: intense, deep with the flavor of an animal that has lived a good life high on the windswept hill. More than anything, it is a surprise. Granted there’s nothing ambitious going on here. It’s barely a dish, more a thing on a plate. But here in Moscow, surrounded by wishing wells, under-floor sturgeon, and fake-nineteenth-century mansions, I had begun to despair of ever having a good meal, or even a good course, yet here it was: two pieces of deer, roasted to perfection. Sure, these two chops, dispatched in four mouthfuls, had cost more than £20 ($41) but, compared to the play food at Café Pushkin, it felt worth it. Despite the best efforts of the Russian president, the great Arkady Novikov had managed to feed me well.

  The next day I go to eat sushi with the man who had given me his suite. Alexander Wolkow has invited me to lunch at the original branch of Sumosan in the Radisson-Slavyanskaya Hotel and, this being Moscow, lunch is at 3 p.m., and he will not be eating. The Radisson is notorious in Moscow because, in 1996, its American co-owner, Paul Tatum, was shot eleven times in a nearby metro station, in what was assumed to be a Mafia hit. It was widely known that Tatum had been in dispute with his Chechen business partners and, at the time of the killing, he was wearing a bulletproof vest. It was assumed the killer was aware of the precautions he was taking because every shot was fired either to the neck or head. In the early days the lobby and restaurants of the Radisson had swarmed with gold-encrusted “businessmen” and their bodyguards, and there had even been a shoot-out inside.

  It was sitting in that same hotel lobby with his daughter in the late nineties that Wolkow had decided to open Sumosan. At the time he was an executive with the energy company LUKOIL, working mostly in Kazakhstan, with a taste for fine Japanese food that he felt could not be satisfied in Moscow. “It was Janina who said I should open a restaurant here. So I did,” Wolkow says.

  A varnished wood picket fence marks off the section of the lobby set aside for Sumosan, which stretches away via a fairy-tale wooden bridge over a stretch of dry marble floor into a set of private rooms at the back. Wolkow orders me a plate of his reassuringly expensive sushi—£12 for two pieces of tuna nigiri—and he sits watching me eat while he chain smokes.

  I cannot argue with the quality of the fish in the beautiful lacquered box in front of me. I had been told that much of the cheap sushi served in Moscow arrived presliced and frozen, which sounded like a recipe for the worst sushi in the world. They might as well have put the poor fish up against the wall and shot it. This, though, has that reassuring bite that speaks of freshness. The knife work is also exquisite, the surface of each lozenge of fish delicately marked with the finest of lacerations to create a greater surface area for the tongue. Each piece of sushi is beautiful to look at, even through the ribbons of tobacco smoke that slip around me, and I realize I would prefer to study my lunch than my host. I feel like I am looking upon a tiny patch of purity, in a city that is seriously short of it.

  That, I decide, is why Muscovites so love sushi, why it must be on the menu of every restaurant, regardless of what other food they serve. The city is a place of barely concealed chaos. Bad things happen here all the time, and not only to bad people. Sushi is anti-chaos. It is order, fashioned from raw fish and rice. It is tranquillity in a box.

  I find it curious that my host should be so in love with sushi, because he doesn’t look a particularly tranquil chap. Wolkow is short and round and improbably hairy—even the backs of his hands could do with a comb—and I find the thought that I am now sleeping in his bed troubling. Despite the fact that he has given me his hotel suite, he seems less than eager to indulge in pleasantries, as if it would be undignified for a Russian to indulge a Western European with politeness.

  When I ask if he had found it tough getting top-quality ingredients into Moscow, he snorts with derision. “It was easier than bringing them into London,” he says. (This I know to be rubbish; every other restaurateur has told me about the red tape they endured when importing ingredients.) I ask if the Muscovites had needed educating about quality sushi. He takes extravagant offense. “Russian people are gourmets, probably much more so than in France. You eat in France and you don’t remember the tastes. And in England there are too many tourist restaurants. There, the food is not for eating.”

  Feeling guilty for hurting Wolkow’s feelings, I swallow hard on my foie gras sushi, which is no better here than it had been in London. I ask him where he got the idea for foie gras sushi. “Some ideas, they come at night,” he says, and he sucks another cigarette down to the filter. I prefer not to think about Alexander Wolkow at night.

  Finally after three days of phone calls an
d waiting and more phone calls, I am invited to meet Arkady Novikov at a restaurant he would soon be opening opposite the Defense Ministry. “My guests will be the General Staff of the army,” he tells me through my translator, and he looks very pleased at the thought of all the military men he might soon be feeding. He is a small, tidy man, with tiny feet and close-cropped graying hair, who is wearing a dark blazer over jeans.

  The new restaurant, which is on the third floor of an anonymous building, will be called Next Door. As he leads me around, it is not entirely obvious whether Novikov has decided anything else about it. I ask after the menu. “There’s kind of a menu,” he says, without looking at me. “It’s French. Sort of French. Not really French.” It will probably include arugula salad with Parmesan and shrimp. I look around. It’s dark and subdued in here, almost funereal, and not just for Moscow. This would be funereal for anywhere, including a funeral.

  Though the restaurant is a few weeks from opening night, Novikov has insisted not only that the tables are in place, but that all of them are laid. The restaurant is set for over 300 nonexistent people—glasses, napkins, cutlery—as around us carpenters fix wood batons to the walls and electricians fiddle with spotlights. Various Novikov assistants—young, thin, taller than him, and female—wander about looking busy and willowy. “I want to understand how this dining room will be. I want to see how it works,” he says, when I ask about the ghost table settings. “You need to feel the colors.” In this dining room there are no colors.

  Looking for a way to compliment him, I say, “Your restaurant is big.”

  He says, “I like money.”

  Eventually after fifteen minutes of a curiously random guided tour, as though he is reacquainting himself with a house he used to visit as a child, he sits down and, fidgeting with his mobile phone, agrees to talk. He describes his early culinary training in the Soviet period and how there was never any point worrying about the quality of the ingredients because often there weren’t any. He talks about setting up Sirena and, when I ask where he got the idea for putting sturgeon under the floor, he shrugs. “Oh, you know. I have so many ideas”—like we all might think of building a restaurant on top of a giant fish tank. He tells me that Muscovites like sushi because it is “exotic.”

  What about the Mafia? Did he have problems with the Mafia? He leans toward me and solemnly knits his fingers together. “Yes,” he says. “I did have problems with the Mafia.” I am excited. I am going to get something of substance from this man. I am hoping to hear about threats and danger and bribes.

  His mobile rings. He takes the call and sits bolt upright. “Mrs. Putin is here,” he mutters. “I must go.” He darts from the room, barking instructions to his assistants as he runs. Ten minutes later the doors to a lift at the far end of the room open. Inside are Novikov and a small, middle-aged woman dressed in a brown A-line skirt and a bulging brown Pringle sweater. “It’s her,” says my interpreter, with a mixture of wonder and disgust. I had been told about the connections between restaurateurs and the political classes. On the way out of the Radisson, for example, Wolkow had made a detour simply to shake hands with the brother-in-law of Moscow’s mayor, a major power in the city. The president’s wife is a much bigger catch. Novikov is clearly not just connected to the Kremlin. He’s hardwired.

  Behind Novikov and Ludmilla Putin is her bodyguard, a tall man with chiselled features, a blond flattop and, trailing from his crisp white shirt collar, a curly pig’s tail of cable going to an earpiece. For the next thirty-five minutes, we watch as Ludmilla Putin is shown every single detail of the restaurant, her bodyguard never more than a few steps behind, scanning the embryonic dining room for threats (or admiring the understated interior design; who’s to know, with an Easter Island expression this impassive?).

  Ludmilla looks at every piece of crockery and cutlery, at every architectural flounce and flourish. I ask an assistant why she is here and I am told it is because she has an office nearby, which doesn’t quite explain this level of interest. She looks like she’s thinking of buying the joint. I ask if she has money invested in the business. Novikov is known only to put up a small amount of the capital for each restaurant—usually less than 10 percent—raising the rest from investors who know that his name alone is enough to bring in the crowds and guarantee a return. Nobody here seems to know whether the wife of the president of Russia has a financial stake in what’s going on here. Or if they do, they don’t want to talk about it.

  All I know is that once again the first family has contrived to derail my plans. A few nights ago I was late for dinner because of the president of Russia. Today, because of his wife, the time I had in which to speak to Novikov is gone, and I definitely don’t want to be late for my next appointment. Novikov may be a restaurant mogul. He may be Ludmilla Putin’s go-to guy for tips on cool modern interior design. But the next man on my agenda is the chef of a restaurant that celebrates an organization famed for its involvement in persecution, repression, torture, and murder. That demands a little respect, not to mention punctuality.

  The Shield and Sword is named after the emblem of the KGB and, fittingly, is located just up the road from the Lubyanka, where the state’s feared security service was based and which is now home to its successor, the FSB. Inside there is no doubting the restaurant’s commitment to its theme. The walls are crammed with portraits of the great leaders of the Soviet Union and of the KGB, including Beria.

  There are medals under glass and a large statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, the Soviet Union’s first secret police force. On a television old films of great Soviet military victories play. Apparently many former members of the KGB like to come here to eat the house speciality of meat solyanka, a thick, spicy, and sour soup, and to talk about the old days.

  We are led through the restaurant and into the office of the head chef, Nikolai Morozov, who was head chef at the Kremlin for thirty years during the Soviet era. Morozov, now in his seventies, sits stiffly behind his desk staring straight ahead, wearing one of the tallest chef’s toques I have ever seen. It is at least two feet tall. He has a big solid face, held down by luscious white bushy eyebrows, as though he had inherited them in Leonid Brezhnev’s will. More intriguing even than the chef is the wall next to him. Arranged neatly in an arch are photographs of those he served, and the heroes of the Soviet Union who preceded them. Here, indeed, is Brezhnev. Here is Khrushchev, here is Andropov, and here, in pride of place, is a picture of Uncle Joe Stalin.

  I ask about the pictures. “These are all the people I worked for,” he says proudly. “Apart from Stalin, but I was lucky to be the successor of the people who cooked for Stalin.” I ask about all the delicacies he cooked for these great men. He shakes his head. “If you looked at the menu of what they ate and what a regular Soviet worker ate, you would see it was just the same.”

  I am surprised by this. I had read an interview with Mikhail Zhukov, another senior Kremlin chef, who had rather different memories. “We worked like crazy under Brezhnev,” said Zhukov. “We cooked for congresses, for meetings, we cooked for him at his private residence, we literally worked nonstop. Back then, we were asked to prepare a lot of whole suckling-pigs, whole sturgeons, whole partridges, whole crabs.”

  Morozov is having none of it: “It was simple food. Nothing special.”

  I push him. Surely there must have been special occasions, banquets perhaps, or state visits? Morozov fixes me with a glare, as if he thinks I am trying to catch him out. “They ate exactly the same as everyone else,” he says. “Only presented a little more beautifully,” and he pushes across the desk an album of photographs. Inside are pictures of whole sturgeon baked in pastry, the golden shell decorated with a lattice of mayonnaise. There are boned suckling pigs, glazed in aspic with cherries for eyes. There are watermelons hollowed out and filled with fruit.

  There is a hedgehog fashioned from chicken liver pâté and a giant golden melon carved to look like a swan. “I have worked for fifty-two years,
” Morozov says, nodding at the photographs. “All this beauty is the treasure of our country. What the guest first sees is the table and how the table looks reflects the importance I associate with your visit. Nowhere in the whole of Moscow is there anywhere doing food as tasty and beautiful as mine.” He pauses. “I am the last of them.”

  What immediately strikes me, looking at this gallery of food sculptures, is that I was completely wrong about Café Pushkin. I had laughed when they had brought out the salmon dish with the head of a shrimp and the tail of mange-tout. But now I could see there was a direct line between the Soviet-era creations in the photo album in front of me and that mutant fish at Pushkin.

  “Only God knows how long I will go on cooking,” Morozov says. “And as long as I have the energy, I will continue passing on the information.”

  He tips his head on one side, to consider the picture we are looking at. He nods slowly. “You can do amazing things with a melon,” he says, and he sounds sad and wistful.

  I am convinced now that the most outrageous, lunatic, and completely over-the-top restaurant in Moscow is Café Pushkin, the one I had visited on my very first night in town—apart, that is, from the restaurant right next door to Café Pushkin. Turandot, which cost $55 million to build, is probably the single most expensive restaurant in the world. It opened in December of 2005 and, like Café Pushkin, is owned by Andrei Dellos. It is more outrageous, more lunatic, more over-the-top.