by Jay Rayner
Here, the theme is the chinoiserie style of the eighteenth century. At its heart is an enormous eggshell-blue dome, crusted with gold-leaf detail. It looks like something the producers of the movie Les Liaisons Dangereuses would have rejected as a location for being too ornate, just too damn gilded. There are cherubs and faux Chinese figures in relief around the fringes of the dome, and songbirds and tendrils of wispy plants, much of it created by the scenic designers at the Bolshoi Ballet.
Around the huge, galleried circular dining room are intimate private salons, and in the middle of the ground floor a string quartet plays Mozart, wearing period costumes and high, white, rococo wigs. It is both intoxicating and far too much, the visual equivalent of eating a whole box of Turkish delight.
For the food, Dellos took his cue from the word “chinoiserie” and hired as his consultant the London-based Chinese restaurateur Alan Yau, who has two Michelin-starred Chinese restaurants, Hakkasan and Yauatcha, in the British capital. Yau happened to be in Moscow when I was there, so we met for tea one afternoon at Turandot and it quickly became clear that he was not happy with the way things were going.
The first time he had worked in Moscow, he said, it had been under duress. “I was approached by some Russians who said they had a restaurant in Moscow called Shatush, which they admitted was a blatant rip off of Hakkasan. Now they wanted the food to go with it and wanted to know if I would help. At first I refused. I kept turning them down. But eventually I gave in.” It was after the Shatush experience that he was approached by Dellos, who said he’d been working on Turandot for six years and had a team of eighteen craftsmen on full salary, creating the interior. He needed the food to match the ambition of the building.
“But it wasn’t easy,” Yau said. “Chinoiserie is Chinese-ness based on French attitudes. It’s a parody.” To reflect that Asiatic theme they wanted both a Japanese kitchen—“because all Muscovites love sushi”—and an Imperial Chinese kitchen. “A lot of the food here is what I call classical chop suey,” he said, with little enthusiasm.
The real problem was getting the staff. Turandot has eighty chefs, of which fourteen are his people—expatriates from Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong—though he’d already been through two teams and was about to move on to a third. “It’s very hard working here. The weather is appalling. There’s also the Soviet mentality, which still holds on. Here the chefs aren’t allowed the keys to the storerooms because of the old Soviet fear of the staff stealing from the management.”
I told Yau that I had heard Russians didn’t have much of a palette for spicy food. Some had even told me spice was actively hazardous to human health, which told me everything I needed to know about Muscovite attitudes to eating. He nodded sadly. “It’s true. Wait till you see what they’ve done to my food.”
The dishes I eat that night, in the company of Katya Dovlatov, are much better than I had been told to expect, though the chili heat that I am familiar with from Yau’s restaurants in London is indeed completely absent. It is as if a whole color with which the kitchen can paint has been removed from the palette. The reds are gone. There are flavor s, but they have no depth or clarity.
The most reassuring thing we try is a platter of dim sum, and I find it reassuring because it is familiar to me from home. Alan Yau revolutionized Chinese food in the British capital by insisting that dim sum didn’t just have to be daytime food. He said it could be eaten anytime, including the evening. Then he employed chefs who did dim sum better than almost anybody else: The slippery, rice flour casings were lighter than anybody else’s, the seafood with which they were filled was fresher and more skillfully seasoned.
Clearly, whoever is in the kitchen at Turandot is from the same school of dim summery, for here comes the prawn dumpling with chive, and something with scallop, and something else with unctuous minced pork in a savory sauce, and it is all lovely. The food at Sirena had reminded me of home in a bad way, the carp in the Jewish style leading me toward uncomfortable truths about my origins.
The dim sum here at Turandot are reminding me of home in a good way. What is not reminding me of home is the waiters, because, as far as I can recall, there is no Chinese restaurant in London that insists the men wear knee britches and the girls wear huge, shiny taffeta ball gowns, in shades of ivory and amber. If there were, they would be laughed first out of the dining room, then out of town, and finally out of the country. This, though, is Turandot, where dinner for two costs £300 ($600) at least, and all of these things are being taken terribly seriously by the moneyed New Russians who fill the tables crowding the gallery.
It strikes me that for this place to work, for any of it to make sense, this restaurant would actually have to be rather more decadent than it currently is, not less. If I were told there were orgies going on in the various anterooms ringing the rotunda, that the diners were first eating dinner and then one another, perhaps while snorting arm-lengths of cocaine off sliver platters, proffered by bare-chested dwarfs wearing brightly colored turbans, it would all be totally of a piece—and not just because I have a sordid imagination. Instead, it feels like a stage set filled with actors who don’t yet know their lines, and are awaiting direction.
This is partly due to the ham-fisted service. Faced by noodles and steamed rice and dumplings, Katya becomes the New York girl through and through and insists, as I do, that the dishes are just placed on the table so we can help ourselves. This is what we do in Chinese restaurants and it makes no difference to us that we are in a Chinese restaurant in Moscow.
We gently shoo the waiters away whenever they attempt to serve us. The waiters, in turn, look completely flummoxed, as if we have disenfranchised them cruelly. One girl, apparently searching for something, anything to do, takes it upon herself to refill our water glasses if we take the slightest sip. The same happens with the wine. We are no longer being served. We are no longer being looked after. We are now being stalked. Sip, fill, sip, fill, sip, fill, it goes, until we start muttering to each other about how much effort it would take to tip the poor woman off the gallery and into the musicians below, where she might be speared on the powdered peaks of their white wigs.
To subdue our homicidal thoughts we turn our attention back to the food. We try jasmine tea–smoked ribs, which taste exactly the same as the ones in London, though they are much fattier. For some reason this doesn’t surprise me. On Yau’s recommendation we order the long-braised beef ribs in red rice sauce, which has a tiny echo of chili heat. Finally, they bring us a dish of steamed king crab legs in black bean sauce, which costs £45 ($92). I have seen king crab on the menu in many of the restaurants I have eaten in, and it seems to me now the quintessential Moscow ingredient. It is like the huge four-wheel drives that any businessman worthy of the name has to drive in this city. The king crab is huge, unmissable, and bloody expensive. You order it not because you particularly have a taste for king crab, but because its appearance on your bill says something important about you, which is: I can afford it. At Turandot it comes in a light black bean broth which, combined with the briny flavor of the crab itself, makes for a salty plateful.
After puddings from Turandot’s French patisserie kitchen—a silky crème brûlée, an assiette of lovely chocolate things, scattered with fragile curls of gold leaf as though the décor had fluttered away from the ceiling—we escape the waiters to do a little window shopping. Downstairs, in the colonnaded lobby of Turandot, there are a set of jewelry and antique shops, placed there, Katya tells me, “So that stupidly rich drunk men will come out and buy their girlfriends presents.”
It is close to midnight but, seeing us staring into the shops, a woman appears and opens them all. We wander from one to the other, making what we hope are the appropriate noises.
“A girlfriend of mine was actually given a ring by her boyfriend, which he had bought here,” Katya tells me. “The next day she brought it back to exchange it for the cash and discovered it had cost $12,500. She was outraged.”
Of course,
I say. I can see she would be.
“Yeah,” says Katya, deadpan. “It was the cheapest in the shop. She was really pissed off.”
Back in the bar of my hotel a slender Asian woman—Korean, perhaps, or Vietnamese—is singing power ballads to a computerized backing track. It is late and the few men watching her are drunk, as indeed am I, on a heavy-bottomed tumbler of Russian Standard vodka. It is not helping my mood. Before I left London, a colleague, who reported from Moscow for many years, had described the city as being “full of bitterness and anger and undiagnosed psychosis,” and I am coming to agree with him.
The restaurants here do not feel like somewhere you go to eat, not even the ones like Tsar’s Hunt, where the food can be better than average. They feel like a redoubt, one built against a surfeit of politics and history at the door. In the restaurants of Las Vegas the fantasy was by turns charming and ludicrous, but never sinister. At the end everyone went home. Here, the fantasy restaurants feel necessary, a place of escape and therefore a vital resource for those who can afford them, and that in itself is troubling. No one cares about the food. Just as in Soviet times, they only care that they are part of an elite who can visit them.
Or maybe it is just that I am reminded too much of my own family’s history by being here. Maybe I was never going to be happy in Moscow.
I wander downstairs to the wide-open hotel lobby, vodka in hand. In one corner is a model of the next project by the Kempinski Hotel Group. It is called the Emerald Palace Kempinski and, when it is completed, will occupy a prime site on a set of man-made islands now being built in the shape of a palm tree off the coast of Dubai. The model is very detailed. It shows the hotel’s two main buildings, with their shiny sea-green windows and, in front of them, around two dozen individual villas.
There are huge outdoor swimming pools, children’s play areas and, fringing the site, beautiful custard-yellow beaches. It is only mid-October, but today in Moscow there were snowflakes on the wind and all the Muscovites I had spoken to talked ominously of the winter that was to come, as if the thought of it had taken them by surprise. I look again at the model, and then at the glossy presentation photograph alongside which shows the exact location of the hotel when it is completed a year from now. I conclude that a place like Dubai, which would choose to build islands in the shape of palm trees, sounds like an awful lot of fun.
THREE
DUBAI
It is just before seven on a damp winter’s evening, and I am sitting outside the most expensive restaurant in Dubai, watching the queue. There shouldn’t be a queue outside the most expensive restaurant in Dubai. It costs £150 ($307) a head to eat at Al Mahara, more if you hit the caviar list, and among the things that money should buy you is the right not to stand in line.
Ever since my bruising experience with the wine list at Pushkin I have been thinking hard about the purpose of big-ticket restaurants. I have concluded that I am not the only one attempting to live life like an oligarch by dining in them. It is part of what they are about: For the price of dinner we get to experience life as a wealthy person, only without having to sell our souls as investment bankers, rape and pillage developing nations, or exploit the downtrodden. It doesn’t matter how long it took you to save up (and how low down the wine list you have to shop). If you can pay the bill, you become one of them.
Few luxury services are like this. You can hire a limo for an hour or two but you will never have the ease, or sense of entitlement, that owning those wheels brings. You can spend three months’ salary on a designer outfit, but every time you look at it you will be reminded only that all your other clothes are cheap and tatty by comparison.
Expensive restaurants are different. They operate a deformed kind of democracy. In Moscow the point had been made most acutely as we left Turandot. Inside we had been the same as everybody else: big-ticket diners, with a leasehold on prime, eating real estate. Outside we were scum. Turning right from the front door, we walked past a sleek £300,000 Maybach idling at the curb in wait for its owner. There was no shiny Merc or BMW for us, let alone a Maybach. This being Moscow, we couldn’t even telephone for an ordinary taxi; they don’t do licensed taxis in Moscow. Instead we went to the corner, stuck out our hand, and hailed a gypsy cab, a romantic name for a sooty, clapped-out private car, whose driver just happened to be passing and thought he’d make himself an extra couple of quid. It smelt of old dog. We had gone from first to cattle class in minutes.
Now, of course, I was back in first class, or meant to be. I watched the line of diners continue to build, with a grim fascination. I knew why the queue was there. Al Mahara is reached by a submarine simulator designed to suggest that your table is not really on the ground floor of the hotel in which it is located, but ninety meters out across the seabed. It is the simulator—in truth just a lift that travels down one floor—which everybody is waiting for.
Apart from me. I refuse to queue. I look up. The 180-meter-high atrium of the Burj al Arab Hotel towers away from me, pinpricks of light glinting in the boldly colored ceilings of each open floor. The sail-shaped Burj al Arab, the tallest hotel in the world, is built on its own man-made island 100 meters out to sea as if it is about to float away on the breeze. It is also reputed to be the most luxurious in the world.
Shortly after it opened in 1999, a British journalist declared it the only seven-star hotel on the planet. There is no such thing as a seven-star hotel, because the ratings stop at five; it was a tidy bit of journalistic hyperbole, but the label stuck and, having been given the tour that afternoon, I could see why. The hotel employs 1,700 staff for a maximum of 500 guests. One hundred and sixty of those staff are butlers, so there are at least fifty on duty at any one time. There aren’t mere rooms at the Burj, only 202 double-floored suites ranging in price from £1,000 ($2,000) a night for a basic one-bedroom, to more than £6,500 ($13,350) a night for the 780-square-meter Royal Suite (breakfast not included).
The décor follows the “Soon to be deposed murderous dictator” school: too much 24-karat gold leaf, too much thick blue velvet, more gold, a bit of shiny black stuff, marble, tassels, curtains, gold, chandeliers like giant crystal tits, gold, glass-topped coffee tables, and leather armchairs upholstered in human skin. All right. I made up the armchairs, but not the gold. There really is a lot of gold. At the very top of the hotel, just above the bar with its view out over the city, is a circular helipad (where, famously, Andre Agassi and Roger Federer once played tennis).
At the bottom is the fish and seafood restaurant, Al Mahara, which I have been told is the best in the city, and if it’s the best in the city, obviously I have to eat there. And I will do, just as soon as the bloody queue subsides.
Eventually I am loaded onto the submarine with a crowd of Japanese tourists who only stop photographing one another when the Indian captain insists they sit down and strap themselves in. Then off we go: The cabin, with its electronic display up front and bucket seats in the back, vibrates and rolls as we apparently set off into the shallows of the Persian Gulf. Through the “windows” we see the “seabed.” Fish swim by. Seaweed waves. The captain maintains a listless commentary that clearly he has performed a dozen times already this evening: “Oh, here’s a turtle come to say hello, and there’s where I crashed yesterday . . .” Finally, with a judder, we are there and the video images fade. To celebrate, my companions photograph one another.
I am led into the dining room and have to stop to scoop my jaw up off the thickly carpeted floor. Al Mahara is to good taste what Adolf Hitler was to world peace. The entrance is through a gold-leaf, multiridged opening that reminds me of nothing less than a giant vulva (an image not helped by the fact that, behind it, is a womb of an antechamber in crushed red velvet). The dining room is one long curve with, on the ceiling, huge mirrored panels so you can watch yourself gawp. In the middle, dominating the space, filling your field of vision, is a backlit 80,000-gallon aquarium, complete with moray eels and leopard sharks and flamboyantly colored parrot fish, the
it-girls of this neighborhood, loitering by the glass as if aware of their good looks.
The fish have been forced onto a reverse-sleep schedule, so they are asleep during the day but raring to go at night, when people like me are staring at them. What is it about expensive fish restaurants that they feel the need to show you your dinner while it still has a pulse? At Sirena it was under-floor sturgeon. Here, it’s everything else. At Sirena, I had imagined the sudden sound of cracking, snapping glass as the floor gave way beneath me; here, all I can think is that I am now on the set of a seventies disaster movie, before the interesting stuff happens and Jason Robards dies an heroic death.
I am waiting for one pair of spring-loaded lobster crackers to go flying across the room, smash the glass, and send out the sharks, ideally in pursuit of the party of aging Canadians from Montreal who are talking in loud voices about the luxury cruise they are on from Istanbul to Singapore, and how their hometown has just been recognized by Gourmet magazine as one of the great food cities of the world. I quickly decide I’d pay good money to see them eaten by sharks.
As I am led to my table a harpist strikes up. “Yesterday” floats across the room, followed by George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” and, because it is now only a few weeks until Christmas, “Walking in a Winter Wonderland,” a natural choice of song for a restaurant in a city perched on the eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. I am handed the obligatory water menu and notice that here, water from Wales is half the price it is in Moscow, which almost makes it a bargain. They compensate for this outbreak of sanity by the inclusion of Chateldon, a mineral water that costs £12.50 ($26) a bottle. Apparently it was big with Louis XIV and “is also a curative for nerve and skin problems.” I consider my complexion in the bowl of a spoon and decide I am not yet in need of Louis XIV’s favorite water.