The stars have gone.

The same thing has happened to the sluts with cocktails. They’ve disappeared. And all the millionaires have moved out.

The lads in red sneakers were replaced with some brainless women (Arkady Anatolyevich, you’re totally wrong here; with all my respect, you won’t succeed in your attempt to serve the traditional values: you know that no one from the establishment will ask those wenches to a dessert at Hyatt even if you want it/don’t want it – so, please, have the lads back).

Whores waiting in the bar for some mythical oligarchs all the evening long are no more.

But.

The place’s packed, even during the day. For already 15 years in a row.

It’s the 2000s.

But (2). If the provincial version of high society attracts none of your interest, then they still have the timeless salad with chicken liver and chicken (and it remains fucking awesome), gazpacho with crab, which you won’t find in Andalusia, veal with cucumber and coconut sorbet for you. And half of the menu more, ok!

Forget about all the rest. Leave it for “fashionable fashionistas”. It’s for them that TsUM is rebuild across the road, and it doesn’t matter if they don’t know who Dries van Noten is, and even who Ann Demeulemeester is (for Christ’s sake!), but they have a deep understanding of Gosha Rubchinskiy. Just drop it.

It’s still delicious in “Vogue”. It’s still 2003, and there are Le form & wild strawberry in there.

The bay reminded me of the film «Slack Bay» that I had seen recently. It’s about a family of messed-up maniacs, and because of this very fact it makes it all look charming and mysterious.

After a long trek, there was only one wish to eat and sleep. “Give us whatever you have, just please nearby,” we asked plaintively on the Internet.

The heavens heard us but in a funny way…

“We’re next to your marina!” they informed us cheerfully from Chez Felix restaurant. So we headed there …

The path went along the steep coast, through citrus gardens, across thickets of huge cactuses and through stones of strange forms and sizes, it passed along a fantastic view of mountains and so the valley with our bay was left below. Finally, it led us… to the ancient cemetery.

It was growing dark…

«Mom, why do some dead people get holes in the ground, and others lodges?» children wandered. Utility distracted them from their parents’ ominous thoughts who among other things sought for a glass of wine much more than for a plate.

«Perhaps we should go back?» asked Dasha after the 4th kilometer when there was nothing visible around except graves.

«Well, the place shouldn’t be at the cemetery, should it?” asked captain Bolotov, and in reply I told a story about my favorite coffee shop in Istanbul on the ruins of 14^th century graves. My friends looked at me askance and we continued on our way silently.

After the 7^th kilometer, we entered the settlement and saw a crowd on the street. These strange people felt themselves as if they were in Lisbon or Barcelona, but not in a village on the edge of a huge cemetery. Probably, they came from the other side and didn’t have to walk an hour through the avenues with archangels and crosses.

The restaurant was packed. Everyone around was joking and drinking. They behaved in a kind of improper high-toned manner. We also felt much better already after the first glass of wine.

The restaurant is situated around a huge wood-burning stove for roasting huge pieces of meat and pizza. We pounced with hungry eyes and received everything from the menu on our table including “two, no, three bottles” of lovely red-colored Corsican booze. It didn’t make sense to mess around with the 15 item wine list, we knew little about the island’s wines. We quite elegantly poured this very drink on local cheese specialties and charcuterie, ox ribeye, black wild boar’s ribs, a couple of gigantic and most delicious pizzas (a local specialty), and a portion of seafood with dorada. All this was supplied with “another two, no three bottles” of white wine, which turned out to be quite a wine and of worthy quality unlike the red one.

Only children spoke after the dinner, as well Bychkov, who found the only taxi driver at the cemetery ready to take us in three round trips through the elegiac grave fields back to the boat.

Of course, there’s little hope that there is someone among our readers who would gladly moor in a lonely bay and trudge through the cemetery and calderas to Chez Felix. But if you by chance find yourself in the south of Corsica, do visit.

The food is worth the travelling.

Adjaruli. Lobiani. Salads. Pizza. Lemonade.

That’s it.

You can see for yourself that here in Batumi even in the most typical Georgian café you can extraordinarily pork out as well as have some decent dietary lunch.

It all usually starts like this:

“… oh well the Mingrelian khachapuri in Sisa-Tura is actually better. Adjarian one with an egg and a knob of butter – too boring for my taste but good, indeed! Still we’d better get it with meat. Ok, with meat, yes, though the Mingrelian one also sounds good. Or should we stick to the cheese one after all, the one with an egg? Or the “two-storeyed” one, the Mingrelian?”

In this place they have only one type of khachapuri – the Adjarian one – the rest is just memories. We order one, medium size, with cheese, and one with meat. They also have it in the large size and the Titanic – I don’t even dare to imagine it.

But… pay attention that with all the feast of boiling cheese and knobs of butter, its edges are empty. There’s no thick dough going on all around.

It happens the same way everywhere:

An aalogue of Caesar salad looks like the last farewell to someone trying to lose weight but actually, it’s nothing more than some great vegetables under the kefir and sour cream sauce.

Let alone the Greek salad. You can live off it: always juicy, with a drop of vinegar, savory vegetable mix. Even I, meat-eater as I am, find it incredibly delicious. It makes me think of several days on a plant diet.

See the pictures, there’s nothing more to talk about.

The article’s finished, do enjoy.

PS: oh yeah and everything in the pictures was almost for free.

“Dolgorukov Street? Two Aaa?”

“Yes!”

“Three Lari.”

“Let’s go.”

The composition at the entrance, which is located in the middle of a most usual street with some soviet type high-rise buildings  and of course, laundry put to dry on their facades, immediately puts you into the right mood.

We enter.

We pass through a verandah with two cabins and get into a tiny room without any windows and full of tables. Only after you visit the toilet and actually see a proper bathroom with a typical bathtub and everything, you realize that some time ago this used to be a normal apartment on the ground floor. They just cut a portal towards the street and here it is – the restaurant.

We take a seat at the verandah in a wooden cabin, which is densely covered with chess, icons and all sort of things. It’s as well equipped with a TV so you can watch contemporary Indian films, which immediately attracts your attention – but only till the moment you find an old man, looking like a true movie character, sticking into the window behind your shoulder.

“Oh there’s a TV, so we can watch a film!” He says with a strong Georgian accent.

This man had a teleport effect on us, exactly as the ratatouille in the eponymous animation film did on a gastro-critic who bore the same name as I do.

Immediate stupor, but only for a split second, and …

… I don’t feel those 15 years that have passed since I was in Georgia for the last time. Moreover, I feel like I’ve never left.

They bring the food.

At first all these: cheese (I don’t remember the name) with cream and mint, delicious cheese, but not exactly my thing.

Then, attention please, there was a corn “flatbread” with cheese inside (chvishtari). But actually I’ll lie if I say it was a flatbread. It was a huge pie with lots of cheese. A tasty one.

Then began the gastro-rape™.

The owner served us her version of satsivi™. Mummy, get me back in your tummy! (c)

So there’s a bowl and inside of it there’s a sea of tepid sauce “bazhe” (by the way, it isn’t as fat as it is in all the Georgian restaurants outside Georgia), and you have hot roast chicken cut into big pieces inside this bowl. What you get has nothing to do the usual rot rubbish but literally a whole chicken, which easily breaks like caramel and has crunchy thin skin.

And it comes in this SAUCE! Can you fucking imagine the scale of this fucking mess? And, as they say, one should also dip the “flatbread” in it. Ok, I’ve run out of words trying to explain it. Now I better go to find some new ones.

Still it was not enough and our “play” went on: chicken tapaka appeared on stage. If you remember, this type of chicken after its death gets hammered by an iron hammer to a condition of a flatbread covered into some iron skin. It’s more like the poor thing takes the last revenge on man so he couldn’t gobble it up that easily.

But here you quite unexpectedly get this.

White meat, which isn’t anyhow affected by rancid over-roasting but is indeed thoroughly fried so that the small bones are safely edible. And all over on top it has thin, frangible, crunchy skin, which is semitransparent like burnt sugar from your the childhood.

In short, a disaster!

In addition, we had all these.

If someone ever spoke to you about the Georgian restaurants “the-same-as-in-Georgia” (c), don’t believe them just like you don’t believe in such restaurants outside Japan, Thai, India.

Honestly, you’d better get on the plane. It’s worth it.

A voice from the receiver reporting with interrogative intonation: «I have a reservation in El Celler de Can Roca in a week. Would you like to come along?” It is a game in tactfulness (thank you, Natalya Avdeeva).

You answer politely that you have to think about it and you start to check flights to Barcelona for the required dates and pack a suitcase.

It doesn’t have much to do with the fact that one has to reserve a table there a year before the date of the visit, three Michelin stars since 2009 and a number of nominations like «the best restaurant of the world» according to whatever it might be.

The prototype kilogram, which is kept in the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, is not the best kilogram. But it’s important as a reference.

It happened that the Roca brothers’ restaurant (as well as a number of some other still existing and unfortunately deceased ones: elBulli, Noma, The French Laundry, The Fat Duck, Osteria Francescana, etc (may gastro gods bless and salute them)) sets this kind of prototype in the world of Haute cuisine.

You have to visit it in order to get acquainted and be able to make a comparison.

P.S. After my dinner at El Celler de can Roca, a thought came into my mind: «Our Russian chefs, for example Vladimir Mukhin (taking into account his Spanish school, it’s simpler to draw parallels this way), are very close, not just a step behind, but literally treading on their toes.

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!