The Man Who Ate the World (10 page)

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.

His Little Italy “made man” look is appropriate for the space because the murals that once depicted Stalin and Mao shaking on the deal are no longer visible. The columns painted in oxblood are also gone. Instead, the restaurant created to celebrate the victory of communism is now called the New York Casino and in the middle of the room is a model of the Statue of Liberty, rotating in a clockwise direction to survey the slot machines, flame aloft. On the carpet is a skyscraper motif. The pillars have been made to look like the supports to the Brooklyn Bridge, and there are fake street signs to Broadway, Times Square, and Fifth Avenue.

When Kveton arrived two years before, the Peking Restaurant was still functioning, but only just. He shows me the current menu in the Peking’s new restaurant, which is called the Manhattan Bar and Grill. Given the name, it is an unsurprising mix of Caesar salads, burgers, and club sandwiches, plus a page of Russian standards including Salad Olivier, to appeal to the Soviet nostalgia market. There is also a Chinese menu. “But we’ve closed the Chinese kitchen,” Kveton says. “In Russia,
everything used in a restaurant has to be officially approved and most of the things we use, by necessity, come from unofficial sources. We’re due an inspection very soon, so we thought it was better to close that kitchen down.” They’ll open it once the inspectors leave, he says.

Then he says: “There’s something amazing I’ve got to show you. It’s the room where Beria used to watch the city. You want to see it?” Usually the room, on the very top floor of this thirteen-story hotel, is locked off, but Kveton negotiates with the building’s managers, and soon the five of us—Kveton, his Austrian executive chef, two executives from the building, and me—are crammed into a rattling lift. Up above the cheesy glamour of the casino, the Peking is still very much an unrenovated Soviet-era hotel. It is gloomy and dour and decorated in four shades of brown.

We reach the eleventh floor, from where we take the stairs. Finally at the top of a sweep of curving staircase, we reach two locked double doors that open onto a huge open space, swamped with light from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Below us is the spread of Moscow and we pad about trying to imagine Beria keeping watch on his people below with binoculars slung at his neck.

I look up. On the ceiling is a well-executed if garish mural of a young Chinese woman crossing a wooden bridge and being welcomed into the Soviet Union by what I assume are meant to be the flower of Russia’s youth. It is the last reminder in this building, save for its name, of the past, though it is oddly positioned and I find it hard to work out how best to view it, and say so. Richard moves me to the top of the stairs and, his hands on my shoulders, tells me to look up.

“You stand there,” he says. “And it would probably have been the last thing you would have seen before you got a bullet in the head.” Everybody laughs.

O
ne thing is now clear to me: In Moscow, nobody cares about chefs. There are no superstar cooks, no masters of the stove, no Gordon Ram
says or Wolfgang Pucks or Joël Robuchons. “In Moscow it’s all about the restaurateurs,” says Guillaume Rochette, a French-born, London-based recruitment consultant, who makes a nice living supplying Moscow—and many of the other cities on my global haute cuisine trail—with the Western European chefs and maître d’s they all need.

The biggest of the Moscow restaurateurs, he says, is Arkady Novikov. “You have to meet Arkady,” says Rochette, who is a large, soft-cheeked man, with big hands and tidy hair. Rochette is in Moscow drumming up business and is keen for me to interview his star client. Novikov trained as a chef in the Soviet era, at the romantically named Culinary College No. 174. He was turned down for a job at the first branch of McDonald’s in Moscow, and so moved into the business side of restaurants.

The week I am in Moscow he has forty-six of them, but he was due to open eight more before the end of the year (and it was already October). Rochette tells me that people go to a new Novikov place simply because he’s involved; that they love his arugula salad with shrimp and Parmesan, which is available in most of his restaurants, or the indecently young burrata, a fresh, milky-tasting cheese much like mozzarella that he has flown in every day from Italy.

For the first time on this trip, I feel a surge of optimism. My experience at Pushkin had made me fear that Moscow would be an awful eating city, that there was nothing here for a man in search of the perfect meal, but the burrata thing has excited me. This Arkady Novikov really might be my kind of guy. He goes to huge efforts to score good cheese. Rochette tells me he even does some of the catering for the Kremlin, that he’s very well connected, though he doesn’t like to talk about it. I love the image of Vladamir Putin eating soft milky cheese and arugula salad while he wages war on the oligarchs. At the moment, I’m told, Novikov is somewhere in his car, roaming his city, overseeing his new restaurants, working the phones, working the Moscow traffic.

While I wait to meet the man himself I decide to try the first restaurant he opened back in 1992. In a very Moscow fashion Sirena is famous not so much because of the fish and seafood it serves but because of the
floor: It is made of glass, and beneath it, in a tank, swim sturgeon and carp. From what Rochette has told me, I am expecting something sleek and chic, a shiny joint for shiny people, but I have forgotten about the Russian taste for sentimentality.

Sirena is located on a drab residential street, just on the edge of the city center. Inside, it is entirely wood paneled. The dining room is an arched space with portholes behind which water gurgles, as though you are eating inside a galleon that has been upended on the seabed. Garlands of plastic laurel leaves, dotted with fairy lights, stretch across the room, the waiters all wear sailor outfits, and on the stereo an instrumental version of Chris de Burgh’s “Lady in Red” is playing. It is one of those songs that is appalling when you can hear the lyrics, worse still when you can’t.

It doesn’t help that, on a Thursday lunchtime, I am the only diner. Eventually there will be others, big Russian men with thick necks and cropped hair, drinking vodka and ordering the oysters at £5 each. For now it’s just me and Chris de Burgh and the waiters and the stonking three-foot sturgeon, with their familiar ribbed backs and pointed noses. Beneath my feet they swim in long, lazy circuits as I study the menu. I consider having the BBQ sturgeon because I think it would be cute to eat the siblings of the tank’s residents. Unfortunately it’s not available.