When I left Moscow for the United States in 1978, the humorists in the city of my birth were fond of circulating a true story about a Politburo member's daughter who, having come down with food poisoning, was greeted at the Kremlin hospital by her mother's reprimand: 'Ty s'ela shto-to v gorode?!'('You've eaten something in the city, haven't you?!') Supplied weekly with enormous food parcels from secret depots, the top party bosses, their children, their servants, and, in the finely calibrated order of seniority, the rest of the nomenklatura - from the military brass and Central Committee staffers to propagandists, writers, journalists, and movie directors - considered suspect anything sold in stores.
At the time, Moscow was still better off than the rest of the country, where meat appeared in stores twice a year: around the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution on 7 November and Labour Solidarity Day, 1 May. During the rest of the year, one could purchase (with a valid ration coupon) a monthly allocation of 'meat products', which in 1988, in the heyday of glasnost, a Soviet newspaper described as 500 grams of 'cooked sausage' and 300 grams of 'smoked sausage'. In the late 1980s, along with milk and cheese, meat was available at semi-privatised farmers' markets, but to buy it required monthly outlays of at least 150 roubles - an astronomical sum in a country where one-third of the citizens lived on less than 100 roubles a month (then about £8). By that time Moscow's relative prosperity, sustained by robbing the rest of the country, had collapsed under the assault of hundreds of thousands of hungry visitors from the provinces. Every day the commuter trains, called kolbasnye elektrichki (sausage trains) disgorged the foragers at the capital's seven train stations. By the autumn of 1991, the collapsed state-owned economy had left behind bare shelves in grocery stores, bread lines around the block, and sacks of potatoes on the balconies of residents preparing for famine.
Today, the sausage train has gone. The streets are brightly lit; the shop windows, inviting. The flow of cars is thick and furious, and Audis, BMWs, and Toyota Land Cruisers no longer turn heads. Moscow women, who used to beg their male bosses to bring back a pair of tights from a trip abroad, now sport European fashions and haircuts. It seems that everyone has a mobile phone.
The shift to a more open economy has given rise to a post-communist middle class, which consists of the young, the college-educated, and the residents of large cities. The tastes and preferences of this modest but energetic and increasingly self-confident population account for all manner of new trends sweeping Russia in the past decade. The stifling ownership of everyone's livelihood and tastes by a corrupt and self-sufficient state has gone the way of Pravda and compulsory political education. Nowhere is the metamorphosis as vivid as in the national gastronomic renaissance. That eating and drinking has been ahead of many other areas of life in the speed and robustness of its recovery is due to the fact that the Russian table was always the one place where the state receded. In the long run, liberty creates wealth everywhere, but in Russia it has repaid the debt to the table a hundredfold.
An amazing abundance and variety of food is now available in Moscow. Snack bars and kiosks dispensing not only Russian but Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, Greek, and Middle Eastern fare dot the same pavements on which crowds of shabbily dressed men and women used to shuffle silently and sullenly from store to store in search of food. Menus and domestic pantries brim with items discovered after an 80-year hiatus: pineapple and kiwi, asparagus, squid and baby-octopus salad, frogs' legs, or pizza. People everywhere in the city walk around munching on shawarma, a species of doner kebab: chicken or lamb sliced off a hot rotating cone, wrapped in either pitta or flat Georgia lavash and dipped in spicy yoghurt.
In Moscow's new gastronomic universe everything has to be fresh and hot. I found myself, a 10-rouble bill in hand, in front of a kiosk selling chebureki, the Crimean meat pasty. 'And heat it up, will you?' demanded the customer in front of me, an older woman wearing a white kerchief. Inspired by the intrepid babushka, I overcame the inbred fear of Russian salesmen and requested that my order be warmed as well.
Will collapses at the sight of vypechka - freshly baked goods, sold for a few roubles on street corners, outside all major Metro stations, and, of course, in bakeries that seem to grace every other block: puff pastry (sloyki) and Danish pastries (vatrushki) with fillings of cheese or prunes or poppy seeds; buns with raisins; tarts with apricots, apples, or blueberries; meringue cookies, eclairs, almond rings, rum babas, or sochniki: little bricks of sweet cottage cheese in a crumbly dough shell.
All of the delights formerly reserved for party officials are now to be found in ordinary grocery stores - like the Razumovskiy deli in a quiet residential neighbourhood. Products available include 54 kinds of sausage and 19 hams, ranging in price from 18 to 146 roubles a kilo (25p to £3 - there are roughly 48 roubles to the pound currently), such exotic fare as veal sausages, and the hard, peppery, fat-speckled salami servelat.This used to be available either in snack bars set up at polling places on election days to attract voters or during the week before New Year's Eve (officially, there was no Christmas in Soviet times), and was among the best gifts one could bring to a friend's house. Among the 16 kinds of cheeses displayed are the hard, piquant, light-yellow poshekhonskiy; the round and softer gollandskiy wrapped in red wax; and feta-like brynza. The breads vary from the fat, white, all-wheat ovals of bulki to darker hues of rye and the black, pungent borodinskiy studded with caraway seeds. The Razumovskiy carries smoked or cured sturgeon and salmon for between 31 and 75 roubles for 100 grams. Caviar can now be bought in almost every shop, and the price is fairly low. Caviar in tins and jars range from salmon's red (ripe and briny) at 99 roubles for a 113-gram can to the luscious, silvery-grey beluga at 500 roubles. Fish was virtually absent from the Russian diet in Soviet times. For those in need of a serious dessert - for an evening tea at home or, following tradition, a gift to bring to a dinner party - there are torte kiosks. Chocolate, cream, or souffl¿ or filled with nuts, layered with waffles, or any combination thereof, these round, square, or loglike confections with names like adagio, polyot (flight), and ptich'e moloko (birds' milk). One of the kiosks near the Airport Metro sold 57 varieties.
Nearby, vendors sell homegrown tomatoes, honeydew melons, apples, large southern cherries (chereshni), as well as imported pineapples, oranges, and bananas. Bananas were the impossible dream of every Moscow child of my generation (most Soviet children outside the city didn't know what one was), the ultimate prize our mothers captured once or twice a year after queuing for hours. They were often green and small, and turned black within a few days. No matter: we loved their exotic shape and sweet mushy flesh, which was like nothing else we had ever tasted.
Now they sell for less than 30p a pound, children do not yell and drag their mothers toward the stalls, and no one is surprised or especially pleased at their availability. People buy one or two at a time, and eat them casually while walking. Another national craving is also now supplied by the market: between August and October no Moscow grocery store is complete without a variety of mushrooms. Some are used in soups; others are fried in butter with scallions and potatoes, or stewed in sour cream, flour, and parsley and then baked in pies, or salted and marinated to form one of the three best accompaniments to vodka. (The other two are herring and pickles.) The Razumovskiy offers half a dozen ready-to-eat mushroom salads: in sour cream or olive oil, and with beetroot, carrots, and potatoes.
As with the sudden abundance of food, the transformation in the way it is consumed has been dramatic. Dull and heavy, like Russians' lives, food used to be gorged on - after months of relentless foraging and hoarding - on birthdays, the 7 November anniversary of the Revolution, and New Year's Eve, and drowned in vodka. The rest of the year, the food was meagre but the vodka still plentiful. It was the shortage of food and the cheapness of vodka, which contributed up to one-fifth of the state budget both in tsarist and Soviet times, that were responsible for the stereotypical image of Russia as a nation of depressed drunks.
More and better food and the appearance of colourful beer bars, are likely to change this stereotype. Whetted by the opening of the market to imports, Russia's thirst for beer has increased by leaps and bounds. After 1998, when most Russians could not afford the imports because of the rouble devaluation, 1,500 private breweries filled the market with domestic brands, Zolotaya Bochka among the most popular. For the first time in history, Russians started to drink more beer than vodka - a development immensely beneficial for the life expectancy for Russian men, for whom alcoholism was among the leading causes of death.
The new casualness in acquiring food and the appreciation of taste and freshness are trends that were merely interrupted in 1917. Classic Russian literature and cuisine were born and reached their golden age at about the same time - between, approximately, 1830 and 1890 - and the former has compiled a marvellous record of the latter. Here, for instance, is the 'gentleman of average means' from Gogol's Dead Souls, who ordered ham at the first tavern on the road; suckling pig at the next stop; a 'chunk of sturgeon or sausage with onions' farther down the road; and finished on sterlet soup with round, open, literally 'unbuttoned', fish pies with filling exposed in the centre.
The flowering of classic Russian cuisine coincided with the rapid economic expansion and explosive growth of the middle class in the aftermath of Alexander II's liberal reforms. Moscow offered culinary delights to suit every taste and almost every wallet. For a few kopecks street vendors sold pies and blini, kalachi (white rolls), fried buckwheat kasha, or smoked sturgeon with horseradish and vinegar, to be washed down with hot sbiten' (a mead drink spiced with cardamom and nutmeg) in the winter and kvas (Russia's national non-alcoholic drink, made from rye bread fermented with sugar) in the summer.
Some of Europe's leading chefs worked in Moscow in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of them, the Frenchman Olivier, who owned the expensive and fashionable Hermitage, gave his name to the hearty salad of meat, potatoes, eggs, pickles, peas, scallions, and mayonnaise without which to this day no festive Russian table is complete. Waiting on tables in the best Moscow restaurants was a much sought-after profession. According to Vladimir Gilyarovskiy's Moskva i Moskvichi (Moscow and Muscovites), an apprenticeship began with dishwashing and was followed by six months in the kitchen (to remember 'all the sauces') and four years as a busboy.
All was lost when the last vestiges of private enterprise disappeared in the early 1930s. Taken over by the state, a few good restaurants lingered for years, most conspicuously the one at the Union of Soviet Writers on Povarskaya (Cook's) Street. Yet by the mid-1930s, in The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov mourned the restaurant's decline: 'Do you remember sterlet in a silver saucepan, cut into pieces and interlaced with lobster tails and fresh caviar?' he asked wistfully. 'Or eggs filled with pur¿ed mushrooms and served in tiny cups? And how about blackbird fillets - with truffles? Or quail ¿ la Genoa?'
No major Soviet author wrote in praise of fine food after that. A decade after the end of the relentless Soviet deprivation, universal thievery and daily indignities - the world Nabokov called 'so shoddy, so crabbed and grey' - the Russian capital seems to have been remade into one of Europe's best (and best-hidden) gastronomic destinations. The change in taste, d¿cor, and service is even more startling than the availability of food. Outside of the stolovye (dining rooms) of the high nomenklatura (closed to ordinary mortals), meals were equally awful in the glitzy Metropol or Natsional (which catered to foreigners, their KGB minders, and 'official Russians') and in the caf¿s and 'restaurants for the masses' - except that in the former the execrable food was dispensed with servility in kitschy chic, while in the latter it was ladled out in rudeness and squalor. All this has been replaced by cleanliness, competence, and, in many cases, polish and even panache.
Of course, far from all of Moscow's 4,000-plus restaurants are within the middle-class range. For those who, following Dr Johnson, wish to smile with the wise but feed with the rich (that is, the five percent with monthly incomes of over £2,300), there are several dozen superb establishments. Among them are Tsarskaya Okhota (Tsar's Hunt) in Zhukovka, near Stalin's favourite dacha, where in 1997 Boris Yeltsin entertained Jacques Chirac; the CDL, in the former headquarters of the Union of Soviet Writers; and the Sirena, Moscow's best seafood restaurant, which serves lobsters, oysters, crabs, and giant shrimp in hushed, wood-panelled surroundings as enormous sturgeon swim under the glass floor and sea creatures frolic behind glass walls.
A step below this grandeur are restaurants that middle-class Muscovites enjoy on special occasions. Across Tverskaya Street from Pushkin Square is Caf¿ Pushkin, an example of the intense but tasteful quest for authenticity that characterises Moscow dining today. The restaurant is housed in a typical early-nineteenth-century Moscow building, quite a few of which have survived the Soviet decay and demolition. The inside looks very much like a Moscow museum: parquet floors, mirrors fogged with age in heavy bronze frames, a patina of fine cracks on the marble stairs and the walls, a medium-size dining room under a 30-foot ceiling, and a wide staircase with cast-iron banisters leading to the second-floor library. But all is an illusion: the restaurant is barely four years old and was built from scratch on an empty lot within five months.
The Pushkin offers the mainstays of Russian cooking: kvas and sbiten'; suckling pig with apple gravy; mutton Hussar, 'stewed in beer for more swagger', and baked with mushrooms into a pie; beef Stroganoff; chicken giblets with mushrooms in rye-bread 'pots'; salmon and sturgeon (grilled, stewed, or jerked), pel'meni (dumplings) with beef, pork, veal, salmon, or mushrooms; and catfish 'baked into a potato pur¿e under a spinach sauce'. Starters and soups are between £4 and£6, and most mains are between £7 and £15, with the most expensive - saddle of lamb with vegetables - at £20. It being July, my hosts and I ordered the summer classic of chilled kvas-based soup, okroshka. Thinly sliced scallions, radishes, beef, potatoes, boiled eggs, and cucumbers, dill, a dollop of sour cream; and a touch of horseradish blended harmoniously, each ingredient true to its character and texture. Marinated Baltic sprats were delicate, their sharp briny taste balanced by an accompanying vinaigrette of potatoes, beetroot, onions, dill pickles, eggs, and mayonnaise. The main courses were faultless: golden-brown veal cutlet ¿ la Pozharsky (a famous nineteenth-century Russian chef, who made the dish from wild game) and crisp grilled sturgeon.
Both in the fare and the setting Beloye Solntze Pustyni, or BSP (White Sun of the Desert), on Neglinnaya Street is far from the lean elegance of the Pushkin. It dazzles with brilliant colours and pampers shamelessly. The restaurant is a festive blend of a Central Asian chai-khana (teahouse) and a movie set. The dining room is wrapped in red, gold, and black Persian carpets: on the floor, over the whitewashed clay walls, and on the seats. Life-size papier-m¿ch¿ soldiers crouch behind a Maxim machine gun. A few feet away swarthy white-bearded elders smoke hookahs on wooden boxes inscribed 'Danger: Dynamite!'.
In the centre of the room, circling an enormous treetrunk, is a dastarkhan: a prix-fix¿ collection of at least two dozen hot and cold Central Asian dishes, including such standards as lagman (noodles-and-lamb stew); shashlyki of sturgeon, lamb, and chicken, and baked aubergine stuffed with nuts. The patrons' tables are constantly resupplied with clear, cool, tart pomegranate juice and hot, flat white bread extracted with long-handled wooden spatulas from the ovens through openings in the walls. Plov (pilaf), the heart and obligatory dish in every meal, never stops cooking in the iron cauldrons hung over a low fire, where the rice is steamed with chunks of lamb shoulder or leg, carrots, onions, hot red pepper, and saffron. Although saut¿ed in lamb fat instead of olive oil and considerably more pungent than risotto, the classic plov is as much a product of constant stirring. Solemnly borne by two sous-chefs, the giant clay pot of plov is placed on a wooden pedestal next to our table and ladled onto the plates by the chef himself.
In post-Soviet Russia, as in any other country, the backbone of the national cuisine, however, is to be found not in the elaborateness of the Pushkin or the BSP but in places that are 'neither chic nor sordid', in A. J. Liebling's immortal classification: the restaurants where a meal is not an event but an uncomplicated and affordable pleasure. Muscovites stop by after work for a bit of smoked salmon or pickled Baltic sea herring, marinated mushrooms, fresh kholodetz (pork or veal in aspic), a bowl of borscht or fish broth, a cup of tea - and, often, listen to live jazz or romantic Russian ballads.
The Bochka (barrel) serves pigs roasted on a spit, veal brains with mushrooms in a pot, and grilled salmon. Those tormented by nostalgia for their Soviet youth may avail themselves of the New Vasyuki (the name is from the hilarious 1928 satire The Twelve Chairs, by Il'ya Il'f and Evgeniy Petrov), on whose menu one finds 'The union of the sword and the plough': two plump pieces of sturgeon with black and red caviar inside and a side of fried potato shavings under a cream sauce.
A more elaborate, retro experience is offered by Club Petrovich, named after the main character of a popular cartoon strip, an incorrigible plumber. The theme appealed to Russian PR folk, and the place became the hangout of ad people, imagemakers, and political-campaign managers. Its walls covered with original black-and-white photographs of Soviet movie stars and hanging toilet plungers, the restaurant is a combination of a crummy communal apartment and a kontora (office). The menu is delivered in the Soviet bureaucrat's indispensable carrying case: a thick, cardboard folder with tassels stained with imitation grease. Served by generous platefuls, the food - sosiski (fat frankfurters), grechnevaya kasha (boiled buckwheat groats), kupaty (fried sausages stuffed with spicy mincemeat) - is incomparably fresher and better-tasting than the Soviet original but perfectly recognisable.
Still, the most memorable Moscow meal was at Shinok (Tavern), number 2, 1905 Revolution Street, where dinner requires a serious commitment of time and effort. To come here for lunch is a strain and a waste of food designed to be consumed leisurely.
Behind the glass wall next to our heavy dark table, two milk-white goats, a red horse, and a spotted pig chewed and slept and walked about attended by a woman in the Ukrainian folk dress of a bright red jacket and a full green skirt with a few inches of linen petticoat showing below the hem. Here were all the requisite dishes: syrniki (cottage cheese pancakes), galushki, irregularly shaped pieces of dough, white and slippery, served hot with sour cream, and vareniki, ravioli-like large dumplings stuffed with fruit or cheese and served with either sour cream or sweet fruit sauce.
