Los Angeles, Porto, Marrakesh, Cascais, Lima, Tokyo, Volterra.

I’m often attracted by the phonetics of the names. I won’t go to a place, the name of which is unpleasant to hear (I fought against “Selfie” for quite some time, but the food did overwhelm eventually). The same here, I was almost sure that a place named «Pies, Wine and Goose»™ can’t be bad.

It is nice when your expectations hold true, and it is even nicer when you first think they would fail but in the end everything turns out to be suddenly better than you could imagine.

We enter and sit down.

Post-hipster, “warm” design, almost imperceptible, with Tsvetnoy Boulevard behind the windows. Few visitors are around in the afternoon.

Ok, but let’s talk about the food while the hillocks on the taste buds are still fresh.

Moscow restaurants are like an ocean: a boundless mass of waves rolls in and out, but even on a sunny day only some rare sparks boil in the useless water.

Here everything’s even burning!

For example, pies. Ok, I love pies, but the Moscow shitty “concept of a pie” drives me crazy: there’s way too much dough that spreads out to the horizon, and way too little no-one-knows-what inside that’s supposed to make me think I’m not wasting my money.

A straight-away no.

Here all the pies are of the hockey puck size and the fillings are very complicated like pear with meat, or chopped greens with cheese. Consider the price of just 90-150 ₽. So what we have here is «a new trend»:

“Yes, sure, I’ll have a pie basket. What do I need your bread for?!”

All the food here is kind of insinuating like those owls™, which are not what they seem: everything in the menu is very simple, and this is even more true about the prices (they’re just elementary), but when you put a spoon into your mouth, you find a whole palette of taste there.

Flowers and colors in your plate for just €10. Temperature gradients, that’s my drug. Hare kidneys, burning-hot sauce, cabbage and sub-zero cabbage. You scoop it with a spoon from bottom to top, you close your eyes and moo.

It’s a truly sacred place, a point on the ley lines grid. Goddess of Luck please give them luck and enough work, so that they never spoil.

Do enjoy.

PS: Oh yes, and the grape goose soup. Hurry up to get it before the season’s over.