Free The Man Who Ate the World by Jay Rayner Page A

the crime syndicates were fighting one another for control of the city, but it was a different place now. Just to be sure, I entered four words into Google. They were: “restaurant owner,” “Moscow,” and “murdered.” The result was startling. In the previous few weeks two restaurant owners had been shot dead. Pavel Orlov, the owner of a chain of restaurants, had been found murdered in his apartment on Udaltsova Street, two bullet holes in his back.
    Ilgar Shirinov, the owner of a restaurant called Olymp, had been killed with his bodyguard when the Toyota Land Cruiser they were traveling in was sprayed with bullets. Law enforcement officials said Mr. Shirinov’s death was linked to his “professional activities.” It spoke volumes to me that these killings warranted no more than a paragraph each in the Moscow press. Around the same time, the campaigning Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, was killed by a hit man, as were a bunchof bankers. The Financial Times was moved to run a long report about the return to the bad old days of business-motivated assassinations.
    I became nervous. The plan had been to go to Moscow for a bit of dinner. I was thinking blinis, smoked fish, maybe a little vodka. I wanted to see how the cheerful new capitalists of the new Russia liked to eat out. Instead, it appeared I was heading to Chicago circa 1929. It became clear to me that I needed a good hotel, ideally, one with scary, armed heavies at the door. The problem was that the authorities in Moscow had gone out of their way in recent years to close down all the mid-range places so they could be replaced by expensive business hotels. Those were way out of my league.
    Fully inculcated now into the ways of Moscow, I knew immediately what to do: I had to make use of my connections. I asked Janina Wolkow if her father might be able to get me an advantageous “press rate” at one of the hotels where he had a restaurant.
    She called me two days later. “He has a permanent suite at the Kempinski,” she said, naming the most expensive hotel in town. “But he doesn’t need it while you are there. You can have it for free.” In Las Vegas I had worried that receiving free meals might make me a creature of the restaurateurs. Now, in Moscow, I was allowing one of them to put a roof over my head. Weirder still, it seemed like the only sane thing to do.
    The Moscow that I was to encounter, as I searched its new breed of fine-dining restaurants for the perfect meal, would indeed live up—or down—to the stories I had been told about it. No, nobody was shot on my watch. But the city’s big restaurateurs really did have bodyguards, and almost everybody seemed to have a chauffeur-driven four-wheel drive or a Mercedes limo, some with bulletproof glass. The doors to all the big-ticket restaurants really were protected by huge security men, and it became clear that the Moscow restaurant business was fully plugged in to the very highest echelons of the Russian government.
    What I hadn’t expected to find was that the restaurants themselves would be rooted in a strain of moist-eyed sentimentality. Nor that theywould indulge a passion for kitsch that would have left the Walt Disney Corporation feeling like rank amateurs.
    And I certainly didn’t expect to come face-to-face with it all on my very first night in town.
     
    C afé Pushkin, a 350-seat restaurant less than a mile from Red Square, occupies an eighteenth-century mansion a short walk from the statue of the great Russian writer, Aleksandr Pushkin, from which it takes its name. The statue’s head is bowed, and it is easy to imagine that the author of Boris Godunov and Eugene Onegin is mourning the commercialization of his reputation, although he should be used to it by now. Only a few years after he died, in 1837, from wounds acquired during a duel, merchants were already selling Pushkin-branded vodka and cough mixture.
    In 1999, to mark the bicentenary of his birth, Pushkin and his