Brezhnev’s favourite dish was veal and pork stuffed with vegetables; Gorbachev prefers smoked salmon blinis. Fabius Burger sampled the fare of tsars and presidents at Moscow
THE Russians aren’t coming. They’ve arrived, culinary-wise that is, in the restaurant Moscow in Rosebank, Johannesburg, which has been open for just a week. And no, you don’t sit at a long communal table in a bare room under fierce portraits of Marx, Lenin or even Trotsky. In fact, you too can eat as the tsar did in 1903.
The best way to describe this intimate restaurant, run by a young married couple, Elena and Sergei — no! no! no surnames, they insist, we must all be friendly, on first-name terms — would be “cosy”.
Prints of traditional, gold-leafed religious icons hang on the walls, as well as richly lacquered trays and spoons — these colourful cooking spoons, explains Elena, were used 100 years ago by housewives in Moscow. Now they use “ordinary” spoons.
The trays, from a small village outside Moscow, are signed by a master craftsman, Vladimiroff. Babushka dolls stand on shelves. Shawls are draped here and there. Above the bar there’s a samovar, also richly lacquered, but Sergei admits with some amusement that he doesn’t know how to use it.
This is Elena and Sergei’s first restaurant. Elena worked for a large international hotel in Moscow, but Sergei is by trade a church restorer, and, in his own time, a sculptor and painter. They painted the frieze of fir trees on the restaurant walls without a stencil — each tree was separately drawn.
Their parents sent the dolls, trays, pictures and spoons from Moscow. “The flight is about 11 hours,” says Sergei, “but it took three weeks to get everything past Russian customs.”
But, says Sergei, you “should be writing about our cooks”, Mihailo Jovanovic and his wife, Dushanka, from Yugoslavia. “He’s famous, and was chef to (former Yugoslavian) President Tito and, later, Brezhnev in Moscow.” They took him on state visits and, says Elena, “he’s even served the queen of England and the prime minister of Japan!”
Ask Jovanovic about Tito’s favourite dish and he answers: “Sve!” — “everything!” Brezhnev favoured veal and pork stuffed with vegetables and garlic.
Ironically, the proprietors of Moscow found the Jovanovics in South Africa after advertising in a local newspaper. The Jovanovics, now retired, had been here a year. They left a good apartment in Belgrade boarded up — “The war! The war!” They wouldn’t have been able to sell the apartment. The Bosnian war left everyone without money, and they could barely afford food.
Mihailo Jovanovic, though, still celebrates March 3 every year as though it were his birthday — that was the date he started his career in 1948, as kitchen help.
Since opening the restaurant, Elena and Sergei have discovered there’s a large Russian community in Johannesburg. The restaurant, too, is determinedly post-perestroika, featuring Gorbachev’s favourite — a blini (Russian pancake) with smoked salmon and lemon — on the menu. Yeltsin, apparently, favours his blini with beef and sour cream.
The cooking is good, solid and tasty rather than exotic. Prices are reasonable: starters, soups and salads are between R10 and R12, main courses between R15 and R25, and desserts between R6 and R10.
There’s borscht, made with beetroot, cabbage and sausage. “Borscht must always be hot,” says Elena; “if it’s served cold, then it’s not borscht, but another type of beetroot soup.” A highly recommended starter is babushka (beetroot, walnuts, garlic and “a special dressing”) — very tasty.
Main courses include Ural-style pelmeni (fried meat dumplings), Baikal Lake (fish loaf and sauce), Zagorsk Village (potato and meat cutlets — very hearty) and Peter the Great (chicken stuffed with prunes, rice and apples).
Their Stroganoff is called Grand Duke Golitzen because it was for him that Stroganoff, a cook, developed the dish. Grand Duke Vladimir — chicken breasts stuffed with butter, served on a dumpling, with vegetables; Sergei’s very proud of the way it looks — is probably the most exotic dish on the menu, but not the most expensive at R19,80. Vladimir, says Sergei, loved to entertain guests with this dish. They invariably ended up with fatty stains on their clothes — a sign that they they had enjoyed themselves. A very rich dish, this.
Desserts include Kiev cake — chocolate cake, not the traditional meringue, almond and cream affair — and honey cake based on a recipe from Elena’s mother.
The menu will be changed in summer to include more salads, lighter dishes, and ice-cold kvas, a drink which includes brown bread among its ingredients and, says Sergei, “tastes like Guinness”.
If you want to eat as the tsar did in 1903, get a party together (minimum five persons), let the restaurant know in advance when you will be there, and the Jovanovics will do the rest. The six-course meal will be based on a treasured possession: a menu Mihailo inherited from a family in Belgrade who, in turn, inherited it from another family who got it from the tsar — so it’s the real thing.
* Moscow Restaurant: Constantia Centre, 158 Jan Smuts Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg. It’s a bit off the beaten track. Go though the lower ground arcade — they’re at the west end. They have no telephone as yet, and open at 11 am for breakfast and close when the last customer leaves. Vegetarians are catered for. Licensed.