‘We’d like to try some Russian food.’
‘No, Russian food is bad – how about New Fusion?’
There was only one way to answer that. And anyway Vitaly clearly wouldn’t hear otherwise.
But we were in Russia to see Russia. Surely that meant doing Russian things, like tasting the borsch, stodgy stews, and endless herrings that passed for their national cuisine. Having no overwhelming desire to stuff ourselves with potatoes and small fish, though, we took Vitaly’s suggestion went to Duo, the New Fusion ‘gastrobar’, to book a table.
Seven hours, and much canal-admiring and rain-dodging later, we were back.
The burrata we ordered came out with a thick, salty puree of sundried tomatoes, and a dark green tapenade of mashed olives; we speared it on our forks and watched the cheese wobbling under the pastes; it disappeared in seconds. Veal cheeks followed, in a sticky, sweet gravy: slow-cooked, tender meat offset by sharp spinach and young peas. We finished with a chocolate ganache – the enthusiastic recommendation of a bartender we’d met earlier, another Duo fan. It looked like a soft, naked chocolate egg, studded with piquant blackcurrants and white chocolate flakes. We washed it all down with two glasses of red wine. The bill came to just £15 each.
As we sat in the kitchen of our AirBnb next to the bust of Lenin, whose head was wrapped in a fetching pink and green headscarf, I was still thinking about our earlier exchange with Vitaly. Was going to Duo something we could have done in London? Had we really been seeing Russia?
I thought back to the food we’d had in Moscow. Would that pass this new test?
Borsch did. My chief memory of it is the deep purple colour. Other things came back too, like the sour cream perched on top before you swirled it into the soft beetroots within the soup. But I can’t remember much of the taste, just texture and colour.
Shashlik too – meat skewers – might pass the test, though they’re hardly the height of sophistication and anyway appear all over the world (for obvious reasons). The ones we ate in the fading light by the lakeside in Tvarsinsky, a palace built for Catherine the Great on the outskirts of Moscow, were classics of the genre: meaty, smoky, devoured in moments.
Porridge also. Bear with me. When, on our first morning, nursing sore heads from the night before, we’d asked Vicente, one of our hosts, for his breakfast recommendation he immediately said ‘You’ve got to try the porridge.’ I laughed.
But when we got to the cafe, and encountered the long, complex menu that morning, I panicked. I picked millet porridge. What arrived was very thick, grainy soup with a sharp taste of parmesan and a boiled egg lying in the centre. It was delicious – one of those dishes that you struggle to finish, equal parts tasty, filling, and bizarre.
Then there was the best food we’d had in Moscow. Again the menu had proved more mysterious than we would have liked, so we asked the waitress for her recommendations. She returned with fat dumplings the size of a fist with a doughy stalk to hold them by; you nipped the skin and sucked out the juices before chomping the rest of it in as few bites as you thought socially decent; a double cheese pizza: thick dough, with cheese lathered on the top and then a further seam of cheese running through the middle; herby tomato sauce which gave both the pizza and the dumplings a juicy kick.
She also brought out a mug of black beer and a bottle of dark, lurid green lemonade. It looked like it had come from the dentist’s. It tasted as strange as it looked, but maybe that was to be expected, given it was ‘tarragon’ flavour. The beer (a lager), and its rich, toasted malt, went perfectly with the heavy food.
Was this Russian food? It certainly wasn’t food we’d had elsewhere, but it wasn’t Russian. It was Georgian. I’ll leave the entanglements of those two countries to others, but suffice it to say Russia feels a certain amount of ownership not just over Georgian food, but Georgian territory too. Georgians do not feel similarly.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that of all the food I’d enjoyed in Russia, borsch would be the only one I could call ‘Russian food’ as I’d meant it to Vitaly. But even borsch is not just Russian, as it’s eaten across Eastern Europe.
What dawned on me as we sat in that kitchen in St Petersburg, talking about the chocolate ganache, was the (rather obvious) realisation that ‘Russian food’ is also simply what Russians eat. So Duo was Russian food, the Georgian food was, in its way, Russian food, the shashlik and the porridge too.
Why did both the traditional and the new count? I realised if I was giving advice to a tourist coming to London I would (probably) encourage them to try fish and chips. That’s because it’s a dish that’s eaten across the country, while, for example, specialist London vegetarian restaurants, some of which I might recommend more heartily, are not national in the same way.
Nor is it just a question of distance – what’s eaten most widely across the country – but also one of time. Fish and chips, and borsch, have stood a test of time that the more faddish foods have yet to pass.
I think a national identity and culture in food is made up of parts that move at different speeds. The trendiest bits are the swiftest, while the traditional plods along. Together they add up to something close to the ‘real’ country. To understand Russia we had to try both. I realised, then, that Vitaly knew us better than we did: what we wanted was New Fusion.
‘No, Russian food is bad – how about New Fusion?’
There was only one way to answer that. And anyway Vitaly clearly wouldn’t hear otherwise.
But we were in Russia to see Russia. Surely that meant doing Russian things, like tasting the borsch, stodgy stews, and endless herrings that passed for their national cuisine. Having no overwhelming desire to stuff ourselves with potatoes and small fish, though, we took Vitaly’s suggestion went to Duo, the New Fusion ‘gastrobar’, to book a table.
Seven hours, and much canal-admiring and rain-dodging later, we were back.
The burrata we ordered came out with a thick, salty puree of sundried tomatoes, and a dark green tapenade of mashed olives; we speared it on our forks and watched the cheese wobbling under the pastes; it disappeared in seconds. Veal cheeks followed, in a sticky, sweet gravy: slow-cooked, tender meat offset by sharp spinach and young peas. We finished with a chocolate ganache – the enthusiastic recommendation of a bartender we’d met earlier, another Duo fan. It looked like a soft, naked chocolate egg, studded with piquant blackcurrants and white chocolate flakes. We washed it all down with two glasses of red wine. The bill came to just £15 each.
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| Credit: @gourmand_spb |
As we sat in the kitchen of our AirBnb next to the bust of Lenin, whose head was wrapped in a fetching pink and green headscarf, I was still thinking about our earlier exchange with Vitaly. Was going to Duo something we could have done in London? Had we really been seeing Russia?
I thought back to the food we’d had in Moscow. Would that pass this new test?
Borsch did. My chief memory of it is the deep purple colour. Other things came back too, like the sour cream perched on top before you swirled it into the soft beetroots within the soup. But I can’t remember much of the taste, just texture and colour.
Shashlik too – meat skewers – might pass the test, though they’re hardly the height of sophistication and anyway appear all over the world (for obvious reasons). The ones we ate in the fading light by the lakeside in Tvarsinsky, a palace built for Catherine the Great on the outskirts of Moscow, were classics of the genre: meaty, smoky, devoured in moments.
Porridge also. Bear with me. When, on our first morning, nursing sore heads from the night before, we’d asked Vicente, one of our hosts, for his breakfast recommendation he immediately said ‘You’ve got to try the porridge.’ I laughed.
But when we got to the cafe, and encountered the long, complex menu that morning, I panicked. I picked millet porridge. What arrived was very thick, grainy soup with a sharp taste of parmesan and a boiled egg lying in the centre. It was delicious – one of those dishes that you struggle to finish, equal parts tasty, filling, and bizarre.
Then there was the best food we’d had in Moscow. Again the menu had proved more mysterious than we would have liked, so we asked the waitress for her recommendations. She returned with fat dumplings the size of a fist with a doughy stalk to hold them by; you nipped the skin and sucked out the juices before chomping the rest of it in as few bites as you thought socially decent; a double cheese pizza: thick dough, with cheese lathered on the top and then a further seam of cheese running through the middle; herby tomato sauce which gave both the pizza and the dumplings a juicy kick.
She also brought out a mug of black beer and a bottle of dark, lurid green lemonade. It looked like it had come from the dentist’s. It tasted as strange as it looked, but maybe that was to be expected, given it was ‘tarragon’ flavour. The beer (a lager), and its rich, toasted malt, went perfectly with the heavy food.
Was this Russian food? It certainly wasn’t food we’d had elsewhere, but it wasn’t Russian. It was Georgian. I’ll leave the entanglements of those two countries to others, but suffice it to say Russia feels a certain amount of ownership not just over Georgian food, but Georgian territory too. Georgians do not feel similarly.
What dawned on me as we sat in that kitchen in St Petersburg, talking about the chocolate ganache, was the (rather obvious) realisation that ‘Russian food’ is also simply what Russians eat. So Duo was Russian food, the Georgian food was, in its way, Russian food, the shashlik and the porridge too.
Why did both the traditional and the new count? I realised if I was giving advice to a tourist coming to London I would (probably) encourage them to try fish and chips. That’s because it’s a dish that’s eaten across the country, while, for example, specialist London vegetarian restaurants, some of which I might recommend more heartily, are not national in the same way.
Nor is it just a question of distance – what’s eaten most widely across the country – but also one of time. Fish and chips, and borsch, have stood a test of time that the more faddish foods have yet to pass.
I think a national identity and culture in food is made up of parts that move at different speeds. The trendiest bits are the swiftest, while the traditional plods along. Together they add up to something close to the ‘real’ country. To understand Russia we had to try both. I realised, then, that Vitaly knew us better than we did: what we wanted was New Fusion.
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