The Man Who Ate the World (13 page)

There is a hedgehog fashioned from chicken liver pâté and a giant golden melon carved to look like a swan. “I have worked for fifty-two years,” Morozov says, nodding at the photographs. “All this beauty is the treasure of our country. What the guest first sees is the table and how the table looks reflects the importance I associate with your visit. Nowhere in the whole of Moscow is there anywhere doing food as tasty and beautiful as mine.” He pauses. “I am the last of them.”

What immediately strikes me, looking at this gallery of food sculptures, is that I was completely wrong about Café Pushkin. I had laughed when they had brought out the salmon dish with the head of a shrimp and the tail of mange-tout. But now I could see there was a direct line between the Soviet-era creations in the photo album in front of me and that mutant fish at Pushkin.

“Only God knows how long I will go on cooking,” Morozov says. “And as long as I have the energy, I will continue passing on the information.”

He tips his head on one side, to consider the picture we are looking at. He nods slowly. “You can do amazing things with a melon,” he says, and he sounds sad and wistful.

I
am convinced now that the most outrageous, lunatic, and completely over-the-top restaurant in Moscow is Café Pushkin, the one I had visited on my very first night in town—apart, that is, from the restaurant right next door to Café Pushkin. Turandot, which cost $55 million to build, is probably the single most expensive restaurant in the world. It opened in
December of 2005 and, like Café Pushkin, is owned by Andrei Dellos. It is more outrageous, more lunatic, more over-the-top.

Here, the theme is the chinoiserie style of the eighteenth century. At its heart is an enormous eggshell-blue dome, crusted with gold-leaf detail. It looks like something the producers of the movie
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
would have rejected as a location for being too ornate, just too damn gilded. There are cherubs and faux Chinese figures in relief around the fringes of the dome, and songbirds and tendrils of wispy plants, much of it created by the scenic designers at the Bolshoi Ballet.

Around the huge, galleried circular dining room are intimate private salons, and in the middle of the ground floor a string quartet plays Mozart, wearing period costumes and high, white, rococo wigs. It is both intoxicating and far too much, the visual equivalent of eating a whole box of Turkish delight.

For the food, Dellos took his cue from the word “chinoiserie” and hired as his consultant the London-based Chinese restaurateur Alan Yau, who has two Michelin-starred Chinese restaurants, Hakkasan and Yauatcha, in the British capital. Yau happened to be in Moscow when I was there, so we met for tea one afternoon at Turandot and it quickly became clear that he was not happy with the way things were going.

The first time he had worked in Moscow, he said, it had been under duress. “I was approached by some Russians who said they had a restaurant in Moscow called Shatush, which they admitted was a blatant rip off of Hakkasan. Now they wanted the food to go with it and wanted to know if I would help. At first I refused. I kept turning them down. But eventually I gave in.” It was after the Shatush experience that he was approached by Dellos, who said he’d been working on Turandot for six years and had a team of eighteen craftsmen on full salary, creating the interior. He needed the food to match the ambition of the building.

“But it wasn’t easy,” Yau said. “Chinoiserie is Chinese-ness based on French attitudes. It’s a parody.” To reflect that Asiatic theme they wanted both a Japanese kitchen—“because all Muscovites love sushi”—and an
Imperial Chinese kitchen. “A lot of the food here is what I call classical chop suey,” he said, with little enthusiasm.

The real problem was getting the staff. Turandot has eighty chefs, of which fourteen are his people—expatriates from Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong—though he’d already been through two teams and was about to move on to a third. “It’s very hard working here. The weather is appalling. There’s also the Soviet mentality, which still holds on. Here the chefs aren’t allowed the keys to the storerooms because of the old Soviet fear of the staff stealing from the management.”

I told Yau that I had heard Russians didn’t have much of a palette for spicy food. Some had even told me spice was actively hazardous to human health, which told me everything I needed to know about Muscovite attitudes to eating. He nodded sadly. “It’s true. Wait till you see what they’ve done to my food.”

The dishes I eat that night, in the company of Katya Dovlatov, are much better than I had been told to expect, though the chili heat that I am familiar with from Yau’s restaurants in London is indeed completely absent. It is as if a whole color with which the kitchen can paint has been removed from the palette. The reds are gone. There are flavor s, but they have no depth or clarity.

The most reassuring thing we try is a platter of dim sum, and I find it reassuring because it is familiar to me from home. Alan Yau revolutionized Chinese food in the British capital by insisting that dim sum didn’t just have to be daytime food. He said it could be eaten anytime, including the evening. Then he employed chefs who did dim sum better than almost anybody else: The slippery, rice flour casings were lighter than anybody else’s, the seafood with which they were filled was fresher and more skillfully seasoned.

Clearly, whoever is in the kitchen at Turandot is from the same school of dim summery, for here comes the prawn dumpling with chive, and something with scallop, and something else with unctuous minced pork in a savory sauce, and it is all lovely. The food at Sirena had reminded
me of home in a bad way, the carp in the Jewish style leading me toward uncomfortable truths about my origins.

The dim sum here at Turandot are reminding me of home in a good way. What is not reminding me of home is the waiters, because, as far as I can recall, there is no Chinese restaurant in London that insists the men wear knee britches and the girls wear huge, shiny taffeta ball gowns, in shades of ivory and amber. If there were, they would be laughed first out of the dining room, then out of town, and finally out of the country. This, though, is Turandot, where dinner for two costs £300 ($600) at least, and all of these things are being taken terribly seriously by the moneyed New Russians who fill the tables crowding the gallery.

It strikes me that for this place to work, for any of it to make sense, this restaurant would actually have to be rather
more
decadent than it currently is, not less. If I were told there were orgies going on in the various anterooms ringing the rotunda, that the diners were first eating dinner and then one another, perhaps while snorting arm-lengths of cocaine off sliver platters, proffered by bare-chested dwarfs wearing brightly colored turbans, it would all be totally of a piece—and not just because I have a sordid imagination. Instead, it feels like a stage set filled with actors who don’t yet know their lines, and are awaiting direction.

This is partly due to the ham-fisted service. Faced by noodles and steamed rice and dumplings, Katya becomes the New York girl through and through and insists, as I do, that the dishes are just placed on the table so we can help ourselves. This is what we do in Chinese restaurants and it makes no difference to us that we are in a Chinese restaurant in Moscow.

We gently shoo the waiters away whenever they attempt to serve us. The waiters, in turn, look completely flummoxed, as if we have disenfranchised them cruelly. One girl, apparently searching for something, anything to do, takes it upon herself to refill our water glasses if we take the slightest sip. The same happens with the wine. We are no longer being served. We are no longer being looked after. We are now being
stalked. Sip, fill, sip, fill, sip, fill, it goes, until we start muttering to each other about how much effort it would take to tip the poor woman off the gallery and into the musicians below, where she might be speared on the powdered peaks of their white wigs.

To subdue our homicidal thoughts we turn our attention back to the food. We try jasmine tea–smoked ribs, which taste exactly the same as the ones in London, though they are much fattier. For some reason this doesn’t surprise me. On Yau’s recommendation we order the long-braised beef ribs in red rice sauce, which has a tiny echo of chili heat. Finally, they bring us a dish of steamed king crab legs in black bean sauce, which costs £45 ($92). I have seen king crab on the menu in many of the restaurants I have eaten in, and it seems to me now the quintessential Moscow ingredient. It is like the huge four-wheel drives that any businessman worthy of the name has to drive in this city. The king crab is huge, unmissable, and bloody expensive. You order it not because you particularly have a taste for king crab, but because its appearance on your bill says something important about you, which is: I can afford it. At Turandot it comes in a light black bean broth which, combined with the briny flavor of the crab itself, makes for a salty plateful.

After puddings from Turandot’s French patisserie kitchen—a silky crème brûlée, an
assiette
of lovely chocolate things, scattered with fragile curls of gold leaf as though the décor had fluttered away from the ceiling—we escape the waiters to do a little window shopping. Downstairs, in the colonnaded lobby of Turandot, there are a set of jewelry and antique shops, placed there, Katya tells me, “So that stupidly rich drunk men will come out and buy their girlfriends presents.”

It is close to midnight but, seeing us staring into the shops, a woman appears and opens them all. We wander from one to the other, making what we hope are the appropriate noises.

“A girlfriend of mine was actually given a ring by her boyfriend, which he had bought here,” Katya tells me. “The next day she brought it back to exchange it for the cash and discovered it had cost $12,500. She was outraged.”

Of course, I say. I can see she would be.

“Yeah,” says Katya, deadpan. “It was the cheapest in the shop. She was really pissed off.”

B
ack in the bar of my hotel a slender Asian woman—Korean, perhaps, or Vietnamese—is singing power ballads to a computerized backing track. It is late and the few men watching her are drunk, as indeed am I, on a heavy-bottomed tumbler of Russian Standard vodka. It is not helping my mood. Before I left London, a colleague, who reported from Moscow for many years, had described the city as being “full of bitterness and anger and undiagnosed psychosis,” and I am coming to agree with him.

The restaurants here do not feel like somewhere you go to eat, not even the ones like Tsar’s Hunt, where the food can be better than average. They feel like a redoubt, one built against a surfeit of politics and history at the door. In the restaurants of Las Vegas the fantasy was by turns charming and ludicrous, but never sinister. At the end everyone went home. Here, the fantasy restaurants feel necessary, a place of escape and therefore a vital resource for those who can afford them, and that in itself is troubling. No one cares about the food. Just as in Soviet times, they only care that they are part of an elite who can visit them.

Or maybe it is just that I am reminded too much of my own family’s history by being here. Maybe I was never going to be happy in Moscow.

I wander downstairs to the wide-open hotel lobby, vodka in hand. In one corner is a model of the next project by the Kempinski Hotel Group. It is called the Emerald Palace Kempinski and, when it is completed, will occupy a prime site on a set of man-made islands now being built in the shape of a palm tree off the coast of Dubai. The model is very detailed. It shows the hotel’s two main buildings, with their shiny sea-green windows and, in front of them, around two dozen individual villas.

There are huge outdoor swimming pools, children’s play areas and, fringing the site, beautiful custard-yellow beaches. It is only mid-October,
but today in Moscow there were snowflakes on the wind and all the Muscovites I had spoken to talked ominously of the winter that was to come, as if the thought of it had taken them by surprise. I look again at the model, and then at the glossy presentation photograph alongside which shows the exact location of the hotel when it is completed a year from now. I conclude that a place like Dubai, which would choose to build islands in the shape of palm trees, sounds like an awful lot of fun.

I
t is just before seven on a damp winter’s evening, and I am sitting outside the most expensive restaurant in Dubai, watching the queue. There shouldn’t be a queue outside the most expensive restaurant in Dubai. It costs £150 ($307) a head to eat at Al Mahara, more if you hit the caviar list, and among the things that money should buy you is the right not to stand in line.

Ever since my bruising experience with the wine list at Pushkin I have been thinking hard about the purpose of big-ticket restaurants. I have concluded that I am not the only one attempting to live life like an oligarch by dining in them. It is part of what they are about: For the price of dinner we get to experience life as a wealthy person, only without having to sell our souls as investment bankers, rape and pillage developing nations, or exploit the downtrodden. It doesn’t matter how long it took you to save up (and how low down the wine list you have to shop). If you can pay the bill, you become one of them.