Ages ago, my friend Andrey Boltenko and I were sitting in a restaurant, it was some prominent place, probably the legendary “Mon Café”. We were talking about that dream we had of starting a restaurant: there would have been projector onto the three walls in order to be able to change the decorations, the fourth wall was to be glass facing a park or a river, and a new chef touring each month.

Just some idle talk that was forgotten in a moment.

But some people went ahead an did it with the only difference that the guest chefs stay for three months instead of one.

It took me quite a long time to get ready to visit this place but finally I reached it (on foot through the streets of the endlessly renovated city, which are ripped up and cut across with trenches; there was no way we could make it by taxi because of the fierce traffic jams thanks to our current mayor). Perhaps this delay’s to the better, because the chef who’s in charge now is really good.

We come in.

The interior design is very usual. Dear restaurateurs, I do understand everything, the trend and so on. Still would you please send your people to somewhere like Tokyo, Singapore or better to Tuscany, so you could “diversify the look”? You know what? This long-standing later-hipster-concrete-armature-period™, in which all the restaurants in the city have become faceless, starts to remind the monotony of  L. Brezhnev’s government.

Ok, let’s skip the design (I thank God no one so far has come up with the idea to concrete “Simachev” in the spirit of “Tadao Ando for the poor”).

We take a seat.

Their menu is ultrashort… and they have an incredible business-lunch, though expensive by the standards of Moscow – 900 rubles for three dishes – but I have to say in advance, it’s at least 146% worth it.

The food.

Indeed, the food’s great except for the sluggish Moscow octopus. A young vis-à-vis of mine would order it in each and every new place in vain attempts to bring to life the taste from a tavern in Santorini. However, they claim that the mentioned octopus was from some former menu and promise to liquidate it.

Stracciatella with white currant, tomatoes and tomato consommé is really a wow! It gains some kind of slightly medical flavor that makes it incredibly fresh. And this is something new.

Carrot shrimp soup gets 10 points out of 10. A rib with mushroom chutney is definitely a success.

Warm™ crab brioche is EXCELLENT.

The desserts were too “Nordic” for my taste. I think this is the influence of “Noma” where the current chef has worked for the last 4 years. But, since I love “panna cotta al naturale” most of all among the desserts and usually have beef tartare instead of anything else, my opinion regarding it should be omitted.

Business lunch means that you receive THREE full-fledged dishes at 900RUB (12 Euros), which come with all the embellishments. And the soup is truly identical (I didn’t manage to take a photo of the main thing as it was gobbled up by my contractors much more quickly than I could make it to the opposite end of the table with my Iphone).

Very good business!

The serving of the cocktails was beautiful but here again the same shit as with the designs in Moscow. For instance, when I have the “autumn” drink somewhere in Mandarin Oriental Tokyo I never confuse it with the “spring”, it’s like good Italian ice cream in Rome, at the corner near the Pantheon, if it is the “sorbetto con fragoline di bosco”, you definitely can tell it’s wild strawberry even if your eyes are shut.

Would be great, if there was some more thought on the part of our mixologists. Kind of it feels like the form’s here, but the content’s on delay.

Oh well, first of all, it’s just beautiful! (c).

Everything’s fine. The new chefs should be checked in autumn but one can’t know in advance so you’d better hurry up. This one does a really good job.

Do enjoy!