A Cook's Tour (15 page)

     At Povorodye, while a Georgian folk band played, Zamir showed me, step by step, how to drink vodka while we waited for our reindeer to be served. First, if at all possible, make sure you have food present. Even a simple crust of bread will do. We had an enticing selection of traditional appetizers in front of us: pickled garlic, cucumbers, mushrooms, some smoked eel, a little sturgeon, some salted salmon roe, and a loaf of heavy country bread.

     Step one, demonstrated Zamir, is the toast. To others present, to your parents, to your country – anything will do. Hold a full shot of vodka in one hand and food – bread is easiest – in the other hand. Exhale. Inhale slowly. Knock back your entire shot in one gulp, immediately inverting your glass over the table to allow the microscopic last drop to fall out, proving you’re not a wuss or a reactionary revanchist Trotskyite provocateur.

     Then take a bite of food. If you don’t have any food, a long, lingering sniff of your wrist or cuff will do. (I know it sounds strange, but trust me.) Repeat the procedure up to three times every twenty minutes throughout the drinking period. This is about as fast as your system can absorb all that alcohol. If you follow this regimen carefully, you can and will retain a state of verticality throughout the entire meal and into the postmeal drinking.

     In all likelihood, you will make it away from the table without disgracing yourself. You will probably make it home without help. After that, however, you’re on your own. Remember: They’re professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jäger shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don’t forget that the Russians – any Russian – can drink you under the table.

     Be prepared, by the way, no matter how bad you might feel when you wake up, to do it again – with breakfast.

     Zamir and I finished our reindeer (which tasted like slightly gamier venison) and strolled outside in the knee-deep snow. Near the restaurant, an area had been cleared and iced for skating. Kids played around a straw figure representing winter; it would be burned in effigy that night at the Farewell to Winter festivities. Families with children and toboggans and sleds slogged in heavy overcoats and fur hats from nearby homes, looking cheerful and excited, red-faced in the cold.

     ‘I should put reindeer on our Christmas menu,’ I mused out loud. ‘Can you picture it? All those crying kids, wondering if that’s a chunk of Rudolph or Blitzen lying on their plate?’

     ‘I take it you don’t have children,’ observed Zamir.

We ate piroshki in town, at a Russian fast-food joint. Adorable-looking women in white-peaked caps and spotless red-and-white uniforms with low décolletage dished up pastries filled with meat, fish, cabbage, and sausages. Put out of your mind, by the way, any idea that Russian women are all wide-bodied babushkas with faces like potatoes. They’re not. I’d never seen so many tall, beautiful, well-dressed women in one place in my life. That they seem about as soft and cuddly as a fistful of quarters is beside the point – they’re gorgeous. At a blintz place, My Mother-in-Law’s Blintzes, more creamy-white-breasted girls behind a spotless counter efficiently prepared and served made-to-order crepes wrapped around various sweet and savory fillings.

     We ate
ukha
, a clear fish soup, and wood-roasted trout on Krestovsky Island, a two-story structure by a frozen pond. The cooks were out back, dressed in paratrooper camos in the snow, feeding fish into wood-burning ovens in a windblown lean-to. We drank tequila in a cellar bar filled with Russian kids, a band playing phonetic English versions of ska, country-western, and blues standards. I bought the obligatory fur hat, then went ice fishing on the frozen Neva River, my two companions factory workers who came a few times a week to get away from their families. When I saw their catch – tiny whitebait-sized fish, which they said they gave to their cats – I got the idea that these guys weren’t there to catch the big one. When one of them cracked open a lunch box at eight o’clock in the morning and offered me a slug of vodka, I got the full picture.

     ‘Zamir,’ I said, ‘you’ve been dunking me in frozen lakes, involving me in reindeer killing, poisoning me with vodka. Let’s go someplace nice and eat some high-end stuff. Some fish eggs. Let’s dress up and go out for one last blowout.’

     That night, we trudged through the snow and a vicious wind on Vasilevski Island (Saint Petersburg is made up of about 120 islands). It was dark and extremely cold.

     Zamir and I stepped into the Russkya restaurant, a cavernous but cozy, rustically elegant space with wide wood floorboards, a plain plaster interior, dramatic ceilings, and a big brick and mortar oven in the dining room. A relaxed flathead in a tight jacket sat by the coat check, providing security, a suspicious-looking bulge under his left shoulder. We were greeted right away by a friendly host, who helped us peel off our layers and then showed us to two large glass jars of homemade vodka and another jar of cloudy greenish liquid.

     ‘Homemade mustard seed and horseradish vodka,’ I was informed. The greenish liquid was ‘cucumber juice,’ essentially pickle brine. The idea was to down a shot of the spicy, throat-burning vodka, then chase it immediately with a glass of brine. Sounds pretty loathsome, right? And either element alone would indeed have been troublesome. But in correct order, the searing neutral spirits followed by cooling and oddly mellowing brine was delicious, sort of like my earlier experience at the
banya:
sweating and burning, followed by dunking and freezing. Together, somehow, it works.

     We sat down and had a few more of these ‘one-two punch’ concoctions and some bread. Our waitress, a cute but unusually assertive young woman, seemed to materialize regularly with more of the stuff. ‘Don’t vorry,’ she said, ‘I am strong. If you get drunk, I can carry you home.’ She was fairly petite, but I believed her.

     Now, I famously hate salad bars. I don’t like buffets (unless I’m standing on the serving side: buffets are like free money for cost-conscious chefs). When I see food sitting out, exposed to the elements, I see food dying. I see a big open petri dish that every passing serial sneezer can feel free to drool on and fondle with spittle-flecked fingers. I see food not held at ideal temperature, food rotated (or not) by person or persons unknown, left to fester in the open air unprotected from the passing fancies of the general public. Those New York delis with the giant salad bars where all the health-conscious office workers go for their light, sensible lunches? You’re eating more bacteria than the guy standing outside eating mystery meat on a stick. I remember my own words when designing buffets at a large club: ‘Fill ’em up on free salads and bread, so they go light on the shrimp.’

     Russkya’s first-course salad bar, however, was not bad. It helped that the restaurant was empty and the food looked fresh. A long white table was covered with goodies:
pashket
(a liver pâté),
grechnevaya kasha
(buckwheat groats with mushrooms and onions), pickled beets, smoked fish, pickled herring, potato salad, potato latkes, and shaved paper-thin slices of chilled, uncooked pork fat. It was the perfect accompaniment to the early stages of what I was beginning to understand would be a marathon vodka-drinking session. A full bottle of Russian Standard had already hit our table when Zamir and I returned from the buffet, and our waitress, watching us like a severe schoolmarm, seemed hell-bent on seeing us both carried out on stretchers.

     Two huge plates loaded with osetra caviar and the traditional garnishes arrived at our table. We eyed the big mound of gray-black fish eggs, lemon wedges, separated hard-cooked egg yolks and whites, finely chopped onion, sour cream and chives, and a warm stack of fluffy, perfectly cooked buckwheat blinis. Then I dug in, not messing about with garnishes, shoveling about half an ounce into my mouth in one bite. The blinis were perfect, the little eggs bursting between my teeth.

     ‘She says there is a problem with our table,’ said Zamir, our waitress standing at his shoulder with a grave expression on her face. ‘Our waitress says we are not drinking enough vodka. She is concerned.’

     I searched my waitress’s face, trying to find a hint of a smile. Was she kidding? I didn’t know.

     Try to imagine this happening in an American restaurant or bar. Your waiter comes to your table and says he doesn’t think you are consuming enough booze, that you need more alcohol, and you need to consume it quickly. Our highways would be demolition derbies of colliding muscle cars overloaded with drunken frat boys, senseless Yuppies, and out-of-control secretaries stoked on spritzers and woo-woos. In Russia, though, this is apparently normal. At the time of their deaths, three out of five Russian men, I am told, are found to have a blood-alcohol level exceeding what one needs to qualify for a DWI. That doesn’t mean the booze killed them, just that the majority of Russian men happen to be drunk when they die. Hundreds, if not thousands, do die every year directly from the effects of drinking cheap rotgut – bathtub brews sold as vodka but more like lighter fluid or paint remover. I shudder to think what the threshold for ‘intoxicated’ is if pulled over by a cop in Russia. I’m guessing about fifty rubles.

     After we’d knocked off maybe four ounces of caviar and a half bottle of vodka, our entrée arrived, a whole roasted sterlet. Already smashed, Zamir and I were not off the hook. Even though we were well past the ‘I love you, man’ stage, exchanging slurred toasts every few minutes, our waitress returned to our table to admonish us.

     ‘You will both be considered traitors to your countries and your people if you do not drink more!’

     When we finally staggered out into the street, it was snowing hard, the wind howling off the river, a half bottle of Russian Standard sloshing around in our stuffed bellies. Zamir and I exchanged loud expressions of friendship and devotion, our coats flapping open in the frigid wind.

Reasons Why You Don’t Want to Be on Television: Number Two in a Series

‘We forgot to do the entrance scene,’ said Chris, the producer, bundled up like some sub-Arctic smurf in Gore-Tex and stocking cap. ‘We need to get you entering the restaurant. You know: “Where are we, why are we here, and what do we expect to find?” ’

     That all-important establishing shot had yet to be made, the part where Zamir and I, presumably sober, yet to eat that fine meal, are seen approaching the restaurant’s door, opening it, and stepping inside. This sort of shot is necessary – as has been explained to me repeatedly by one frustrated producer after another – for purposes of continuity and edification for the viewing audience. ‘We don’t want ’em getting confused, thinking they’re watching Emeril’s Christmas Luau.’

     This meant that while Igor and Chris shot, Zamir and I were to do our best to pretend that we had not just gorged ourselves on a large and luxurious meal, that we had not been forced into drinking about fifteen shots of vodka by a maniacal waitress.

     Needless to say, it took a lot of takes. Most were scratched from the get-go by obvious slurring and stumbling, Zamir and I practically holding each other up as we lurched through the snow toward the increasingly blurry front door of the Russkya restaurant. By the second or third take, I was fully convinced there were, in fact, two doors.

     ‘Shooo, Zhamir, ol’ buddy, where we goin’ now?’ I’d burble in a hideous, inebriated parody of witless TV preamble, before staggering into a wall.

     Finally, after many false starts, our lips freezing to our teeth, we had a near-flawless take: a few carefully enunciated remarks, some softball questions to my Russian friend and guide, the two of us picking our way down the street, Igor walking backward, with his camera facing us, Chris shooting from the side. Shoulder-to-shoulder we went, coats flapping, scarves blowing, two hungry, happy men about town, on their way to dinner.

     In the finished shot, we appear to be doing everything right. I’m saying the right things, Zamir is responding appropriately; there are no obvious indicators of our total inebriation – other than the fact that we both seem curiously oblivious to the cold and wind and snow.

     And we were doing fine until the last second, when, midsentence, I disappeared out of the frame in a sudden exit stage left. Zamir shot out an arm, reached off-camera, and pulled me back into the frame, rescuing me from what was very nearly a headlong tumble off the curb.

     ‘Let’s do it again,’ said Chris.

     ‘Lesh fix it later . . . In the editing room,’ I said. I was learning.

Something Very Special

‘Here, this place . . . They have something very special,’ said Abdul, a short, stocky Moroccan with a mustache, thick gold watch, and an alarmingly orange-and-green tweed sport jacket over a dress shirt. ‘Very special’ in Abdulspeak – as I had quickly come to learn – meant one of three things when talking about what to eat in Morocco: couscous, tagine, brochette. Morocco, while known for its excellent food and its many good cooks, is not renowned for its infinite variety of dishes. Or for its restaurants.

     We were approaching the town of Moulay Idriss, an important spot in Morocco’s introduction to Islam, a town named after a relative of the Prophet. It’s a crowded but picturesque hill town, studded with box-shaped houses built at kitty-cornered angles, with narrow streets, high walls, and hidden markets. Until recently, nonbelievers like me were forbidden entrance. These days, as long as you’re out by dark, it’s okay to visit.