At 1913, a restaurant whose name commemorates the most prosperous year of
Russia's economy, we ate delicious dranki, potato pancakes stuffed with bacon and
wild mushrooms. Plain dranki are served with sour cream, dill and red pepper.
Three days was not long enough to taste all of St. Petersburg’s treasures, culinary and otherwise.
Between visits to Peterhof and the Hermitage, we couldn’t squeeze in a meal at Khinkalnaya-Khachapurnaya, a Georgian restaurant which offers Eastern Mediterranean style dishes like grilled shashlik, or lamb skewers, and eggplant with walnuts. Nor did we have time to eat blini stuffed with mushrooms and cheese at one of Teremok’s fast food outlets. Ditto for Molokhovets’ Dream, where the menu includes dishes from the 1861 Russian cookbook, A Gift to Young Housewives. (You can read about all these eateries in “36 Hours: St. Petersburg,” by Clifford J. Levy (The New York Times, Sunday May 12, 2007, Travel Section, p. 13).
Although St Petersburg is not known for great food—our best eating was at Podvorye in Pavolvsk--we did visit three restaurants where we dined reasonably well. Here’s where we ate—and what we most enjoyed.
Restaurant Polovtsev’s Mansion
A mosaic of lightly salted salmon with lemon and mint.
The former home of a Russian senator, this opulent mansion is known as the Architects’ Building, since it houses an architectural institute. The restaurant on the ground floor is in two rooms: a small bar for cocktails, with pale walls and lavender curtains, a place for Nora Charles, swathed in furs, to have a vodka martini, and a 19-century robber baron's dining room (think Orson Welles) with high carved walnut ceiling and elaborate panels streaming with medallions, flowers and ribbons. Darkly exotic paintings of elephants, a turbaned gentleman with a camel, and hunters in pursuit of lions, an ostrich and black boar are set high up on the walls.
We zigzagged our way through the enormous menu, sampling mostly small dishes and sipping the excellent Baltic Beer, a light, bitter lager brewed in St. Petersburg. We adored the mosaic of lightly salted salmon, hot-smoked sturgeon and halibut served with tiny olives, thinly sliced lemon and fresh mint, and a meat assortment of pork baked in mustard and garlic, beef tongue with horseradish and a gorgeous rabbit roll stuffed with bright green pistachios. Other winners included beet borshch with diced tongue and marinated chanterelles and milk mushrooms with garlic and dill. Alas, the vareniki, dessert dumplings stuffed with sour cherries, were slow in coming and leaden when they arrived. But as our waiter marched repeatedly into the kitchen, where voices were raised over the banging of pans, we had time to observe four men downing shots of vodka, becoming louder and pinker of face as the minutes ticked away. The one woman in the group, handsome with silver streaked hair, circumspectly sipped a glass of fruit juice.
We emerged at 11:20 PM (“open till the last customer leaves”) as twilight was deepening, but the streets were crowded. During summer’s “white nights” the bridges on the River Neva are raised around 2 AM to let large ships pass through; everyone stays up to watch the silhouettes arched against the pink and purple-streaked dawn sky.
Restaurant Polovtsev’s Mansion, 52 Bolshaya Morskaya, St. Petersburg. Telephone: 812-973-8467.
A pristine salad with chives and crisply fried eggplant.
The name celebrates the best-ever year of the Russian economy, which coincided with three centuries of Romanov rule. (It all came to a bloody end in 1917.) We lunched upstairs under a milky glass-domed ceiling in an elegant room with pale green curtains. Dishes were whisked on and off the table by a precisely choreographed battalion of waitresses. A pair of stolid men with impassive faces—I fantasized that they were Russian security agents--smoked cigarettes and drank wine at a nearby table.
We began with a pristine salad of tender lettuces, warty-skinned cucumbers, red peppers, and fresh chives with pesto and a few slices of paper-thin eggplant fried crisp and golden, then segued to delicious dranki--potato pancakes, one plain with dill and sour cream, the other stuffed with smoky bacon and succulent wild mushrooms. There was a lot more sour cream to come--in the whipped potatoes, in the mushroom soup and the meatballs in…sour cream sauce. The blueberry ice cream was lovely.
1913 Restaurant, 13/2 Vosnesensky Prospekt, St. Petersburg. Telephone: 812-315-5148.
Adamant
One blini with caviar, another with ham and cheese.
One evening we walked across St. Isaac’s Square to Adamant, a “luxury” restaurant on the Moika River, where we dined in a pretty room with red curtains and a trompe l’oeil vista of a terrace that could have been Versailles, but was probably Peterhof, Peter the Great’s palace of many fountains on the Gulf of Finland.
Here we had wonderful blini, thin butter-soaked pancakes topped with sevruga caviar and icy cold shots of Russian Standard Imperial Vodka. This was followed by clear fish broth with chunks of very fresh sturgeon, perfumed with dill, and chicken kiev, spurting with butter. A troupe of elaborately costumed “gypsy” dancers peered at us from the door, but, thankfully, never performed.
Adamant, 72 Nabereznaya Reki Moiki, St. Petersburg. Telephone: 812-311-0409.