FT: Food finds: Moscow eateries
Dining out in a new generation of chic Russian restaurants springs more than
a few surprises on Andrew Jack
Russia's President Vladimir Putin might have warned recently that his
country risked becoming part of the third world, but you wouldn't think so
from the perspective of Le Duc, one of Moscow's more chic restaurants.
Beneath the arches and period decor of a fake Loire chateau, the tables are
all occupied, and guests are indulging in dishes such as frogs' legs on a
bed of Bayonne ham, and carpaccio of veal with red berries and tarragon. The
maitre d' is French, as is the chef, who prepares his food from 100 per cent
French ingredients, right down to the salt and pepper. You are unlikely to
emerge with a bill for less than $100 a head.
If English, French and German are to be widely heard, that is because, as
Andrei Dellos, the owner, argues, "the Russians have not yet learned to make
reservations".
Judging by the black Mercedes 600s and box-like Jeeps parked outside - the
preferred transport of bosses and their bodyguards respectively - it is not
because of a lack of local money. "There is no real poverty in Russia, and
certainly not in Moscow," he says. "It's a 100 per cent exaggeration. No one
is dying of hunger in this country."
That may seem a somewhat narrow view, as we sip on a dessert of pureed red
fruit which alone costs more than the monthly wage of many Russians. But in
a city with a population of 15m, and where a disproportionate amount of
Russian wealth has been concentrated for many decades, there are more than
enough people to fill Le Duc. And tips of up to $2,000 apiece to the coterie
of ever-attentive waiters are apparently not unknown.
In fact, Dellos stresses that foreign clients are simply an added bonus in a
restaurant that he designed for Russians. He says he is glad Moscow is no
great package tour destination, the bane of discriminating cuisine.
"Tourists kill restaurants," he says. "The battle for customers is much
fiercer without them."
The quantity of eager Muscovite mouths goes well beyond Le Duc. Pass across
the stone-clad corridor at the entrance to the restaurant, and you enter
another of Dellos's creations. Shinok is kitted out like a Ukrainian
courtyard, with most tables overlooking a central atrium containing a
working farm, complete with aged babushka, chickens and a horse which is let
out via a specially constructed lift twice a day to sniff the real Moscow
air.
Next door is Bochka, with its homely kitchen offering grilled salmon, veal
brains with mushrooms baked in a pot, and a pig roasted on a spit once a
week. A few minutes' drive away is the first in a chain of fast-food
restaurants called Mou Mou (the sound of a Russian cow) springing up around
the city and offering similar fare.
"With slightly lower prices, I could build hundreds of restaurants across
Moscow and there would still be demand. It doesn't interest me. I don't want
to build something industrial and I don't want to be a slave," says Dellos,
who has received 40 offers to take his concepts to the west, including Los
Angeles, Paris, London and Berlin.
Trained in the fine arts, construction and foreign languages, thanks to the
rich education system of the former Soviet Union, he says he still considers
himself primarily an artist.
The proof, and his pride, is Cafe Pushkin, a multi-floored fake 18th century
townhouse complete with decorated ceilings, antiquarian books and waiters in
period garb a few minutes' drive away from Le Duc.
The restaurant was an empty patch of land near Pushkin Square until late
1998. When Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, gave him the chance to develop
the land if he could complete it in time for Pushkin's bicentenary last
summer, he spent five months on three hours sleep a night to do so, scouring
antique shops around the world for the interiors. Many of the guests today
have no idea that the paint is hardly dry.
The subject of lyrics by the singer Gilbert Becaud, Cafe Pushkin was a
tribute to Dellos's French connections. A fluent French speaker, he says he
has aristocratic forebears from Paris, the city where he settled as a
painter and married in the mid 1980s after Mikhail Gorbachev's regime
started to ease travel restrictions. "Russians were a`la mode, and I wanted
to breathe the air," he says.
Returning in the early 1990s to deliver some of his paintings to an unnamed
Russian bank which "no longer exists", he says he was soon drawn into the
atmosphere of rapid and exhilarating change, and had no desire to go back to
France. "Moscow is chaotic, but it's the most democratic place in the world.
There are no laws, but money is easy. If you have a brain, you can do
miracles."
With backing from a Japanese businessman, he launched Soho, a private club
for the artistic friends of his mother in 1992, designed to draw them out of
that Soviet focal point for discussions, the family kitchen. He soon added
Pilot, a night-club, and the Institute of Beauty with a gym. "Some people
would go from one venue to another and never leave the building for days."
Within three years, he was exhausted by his efforts in trying to entertain
those most difficult of clients, entertainers themselves. And he was
frustrated by the "columns, lobsters and frogs" of grandiose perestroika-era
restaurants. "I was the first to notice that people were fed up with it. It
was not our cuisine. I wanted rustic decor, traditional food, things that
you could cook at home."
By September 1996, Bochka had opened, setting the pattern for his subsequent
restaurants, all of which operate day and night. Shinok soon followed, after
an exhaustive search in Kiev for a chef who went beyond the dominant
"Russo-Soviet" legacy that had been left behind.
That left him ready to pay tribute to the French with Le Duc. But
adaptations were required for Russian palates, not least increasing the
quantity of food, and reducing the richness of the sauces to prepare for
palates brought up on "smoked sausage as the highpoint of Soviet cooking".
He says Russians play the game, requesting wine instead of vodka when they
notice the shock on the sommelier's face, and not repeating the apocryphal
tale of one New Russian who poured the two most expensive French red wines
on the menu into a single glass, arguing that they must be twice as good if
mixed together.
With Soho, he says he avoided the ubiquitous racketeering by the new
Russia's emerging mafia by stressing that he was entertaining artists, a
milieu that they traditionally left alone.
As his restaurants grew and his clientele became more prestigious, including
leading politicians, officials and businessmen, he ended up with a form of
implicit protection so powerful that no thugs dared try to intrude. Now
unsolicited and unwelcome offers are nor mally in the form of potential
partners offering cash to buy a small share of his company - including one
who proposed $380m.
Today, on top of his recently opened kitchen laboratory for developing new
dishes, he is contemplating opening a school for waiters.
"We are in a country where service was killed for 70 years," he says. "A
superhuman effort is required. The most difficult challenge here is to
restore the links with the 19th century, and everything that we lost with
the Revolution."
He has acquired a building next to Cafe Pushkin that will host an
Indo-Chinese restaurant to be opened next spring; followed by an Italian, a
Greek, and then maybe one offering nouvelle cuisine. Then there is his idea
of a night-club that shifts venue every few months to cater to Moscow's
restless night scene; a restaurant in which decor and food alike are only in
black and white; and a hotel in which every room has a different style.
It has to be said that the food in Dellos's restaurants does not always live
up to the elaborate decors. But - unlike a number of his more recent
imitators - it is generally consistent, frequently good value, and on offer
in an atmosphere that beats the drab Soviet interiors still so common across
Russia without veering too far towards kitsch. That helps make eating in
Moscow chez Dellos a rare pleasure.
Cafe Pushkin, 26A Tverskoi Blvd, Moscow, tel: +7 095-229 5590 or 9411.
Bochka (+7 095-252 3041), Le Duc (+7 095-255 0390) and Shinok (+7 095-255
0204 or 0888) are all at 2 1905 Street, Moscow.
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