The Man Who Ate the World (9 page)

The Moscow that I was to encounter, as I searched its new breed of fine-dining restaurants for the perfect meal, would indeed live up—or down—to the stories I had been told about it. No, nobody was shot on my watch. But the city’s big restaurateurs really did have bodyguards, and almost everybody seemed to have a chauffeur-driven four-wheel drive or a Mercedes limo, some with bulletproof glass. The doors to all the big-ticket restaurants really were protected by huge security men, and it became clear that the Moscow restaurant business was fully plugged in to the very highest echelons of the Russian government.

What I hadn’t expected to find was that the restaurants themselves would be rooted in a strain of moist-eyed sentimentality. Nor that they
would indulge a passion for kitsch that would have left the Walt Disney Corporation feeling like rank amateurs.

And I certainly didn’t expect to come face-to-face with it all on my very first night in town.

C
afé Pushkin, a 350-seat restaurant less than a mile from Red Square, occupies an eighteenth-century mansion a short walk from the statue of the great Russian writer, Aleksandr Pushkin, from which it takes its name. The statue’s head is bowed, and it is easy to imagine that the author of
Boris Godunov
and
Eugene Onegin
is mourning the commercialization of his reputation, although he should be used to it by now. Only a few years after he died, in 1837, from wounds acquired during a duel, merchants were already selling Pushkin-branded vodka and cough mixture.

In 1999, to mark the bicentenary of his birth, Pushkin and his famed muttonchop sideburns were used to advertise everything from cigarettes to knickers, chocolates to more vodka. That was also the year in which a young Muscovite called Andrei Dellos opened Café Pushkin. It looks the part. Candles gutter in wood-lined salons, and waiters wear beige moleskin waistcoats as if they have just stepped off the pages of a nineteenth-century novel. There are cracks in the old brick walls, and the flagstoned floors are smoothed to a shine by centuries of Russian feet. On the first floor is a library packed with leather-bound volumes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and bibles in every language, should you wish to repent over dessert. It is a cozy and beguiling environment.

It is also a complete fake. Café Pushkin was built from the ground up in just six months in the late nineties, and nothing about it is real: not the cracks in the plaster nor the intricate cornices around the ceiling, nor the polish on the flagstones. They have even given the restaurant what screenwriters like to call a backstory. “At the end of the eighteenth-century some Germans opened here a pharmacy,” I was told by the
manager, who said her name was Anastasia, “like the youngest daughter of the tsar,” though I wondered if that, too, was something she had put on for the evening, much like the high-waisted, ankle-length, lace-necked frock she was wearing.

She showed me around the ground floor. “Behind the bar you see the pharmacy bottles. Here they would cook the medicines and while you wait for your medicine they make coffee and tea and snacks and this is the beginning of the restaurant today.” On our tour we pass a distinguished elderly gentleman, dressed in appropriate vintage costume, with a carefully cropped white beard, wire-framed round glasses, leather book in hand, who is strolling the dining rooms. “The pharmacist,” Anastasia says casually; this backstory even has a cast.

She leads me to the basement, which, she says, “is the laboratory. You see the equipment?” Ancient and dusty glass bottles and test tubes are lined up in cabinets. Down here, she says the food is traditional Russian. Upstairs, where we are sitting, it is modern Russian. Pushkin is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

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.

F
or 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 cheap
est
) 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.

A
t 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 stuff. 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.

I
n 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.