Free The Man Who Ate the World by Jay Rayner

intention, or at least not at first. I really did mean to pay. Then, while still in London planning my trip, I was invited to meet Janina Wolkow, and it all went wrong. Janina is the twentysomething daughter of Alexander Wolkow, a Muscovite restaurateur who owns the three most expensive Japanese restaurants in a city so obsessed by sushi that even the Indian restaurants serve it.
    In London’s Mayfair, Wolkow owns Sumosan, which his daughter manages. A mutual friend said she was the person I should talk to about Moscow. Janina invited me to lunch at her restaurant. She fed me lobster salad, and sushi rice topped with seared foie gras, a desperate combination of carbohydrate and luxury fat that made me mourn theunnecessary sacrifice of a blameless goose. Janina told me she would be happy to help. She proffered another plate of sushi, this time topped with truffle mayonnaise, and said she could direct me to all the best restaurants in the Russian capital and that her father would be delighted to introduce me to the city’s leading restaurateurs. Without pausing for breath she said, “And when are you going to review my restaurant?”
    I chewed on the swab of warm rice and buttery, truffled salad dressing. I understood that she was looking for some form of quid pro quo. I could see her point. I explained gently, swallowing hard, that Sumosan, at an easy £70 ($143) a head, might be too expensive for my newspaper’s liberal, often puritanical, readers.
    “We do a cheap lunch,” she said quickly, and she fixed me with a fierce glare.
    And so, a few weeks later, I found myself in Sumosan with a friend, reviewing the cheap lunch. Happily there was no more foie gras sushi. Instead there were bright clear broths with thick slurpable noodles, and crisp tempuras. There were pristine sushis and sashimis, black cod in miso, a white chocolate fondant, and green tea ice cream, and I liked it all very much. I said so in my column. At £22 ($45) a head, I said it was good value.
    It was the day the review appeared that I began to worry. What was I doing reviewing Sumosan? The restaurant had been open for four years, and many of the reviews were less than admiring. (One said the food was generally “without merit or taste”; another described the “funeral pall” of the room; a third said it was the kind of place frequented by “young girls and older men.”) Had I been dishonest then, when I said I liked the Sumosan lunch? No, I was certain of that. I really did like it. But would I have bothered to review it had I not been looking for some sort of assistance? Again, the answer was a firm no. Finally I faced up to the truth: The moment I became involved with the Moscow restaurant business I had started working to a different set of principles; unconsciously or otherwise, I had recognized that accommodations needed tobe made, that it was not a place for scruples. I had become Muscovite in my methods.
    I certainly knew by then that Moscow was not like other restaurant cities. I had spoken to a French chef who, for a few years, ran the kitchen of a high-end Muscovite restaurant, the kind of place where, he said, “it wasn’t uncommon to see someone drop a $500 tip.” He told me about the armed security men outside the doors and said that, while he had never experienced any problems, he knew the owner had been pressured by criminal gangs. “The place was a money machine,” he said. “It was turning over $11 million a year, and a million of that went straight to the Mafia.” For obvious reasons, he asked not to be named.
    An experienced London restaurateur told me (again, on condition of anonymity) that he had investigated setting up in Moscow but had quickly abandoned the idea. “I got pressure when I went there. People came to see me. They said, ‘You will use us as your suppliers or else.’ I left town.”
    Others told me that Moscow was nothing like this anymore; that it might have been chaotic back in the midnineties when