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

famed muttonchop sideburns were used to advertise everything from cigarettes to knickers, chocolates to more vodka. That was also the year in which a young Muscovite called Andrei Dellos opened Café Pushkin. It looks the part. Candles gutter in wood-lined salons, and waiters wear beige moleskin waistcoats as if they have just stepped off the pages of a nineteenth-century novel. There are cracks in the old brick walls, and the flagstoned floors are smoothed to a shine by centuries of Russian feet. On the first floor is a library packed with leather-bound volumes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and bibles in every language, should you wish to repent over dessert. It is a cozy and beguiling environment.
    It is also a complete fake. Café Pushkin was built from the ground up in just six months in the late nineties, and nothing about it is real: not the cracks in the plaster nor the intricate cornices around the ceiling, nor the polish on the flagstones. They have even given the restaurant what screenwriters like to call a backstory. “At the end of the eighteenth-century some Germans opened here a pharmacy,” I was told by themanager, who said her name was Anastasia, “like the youngest daughter of the tsar,” though I wondered if that, too, was something she had put on for the evening, much like the high-waisted, ankle-length, lace-necked frock she was wearing.
    She showed me around the ground floor. “Behind the bar you see the pharmacy bottles. Here they would cook the medicines and while you wait for your medicine they make coffee and tea and snacks and this is the beginning of the restaurant today.” On our tour we pass a distinguished elderly gentleman, dressed in appropriate vintage costume, with a carefully cropped white beard, wire-framed round glasses, leather book in hand, who is strolling the dining rooms. “The pharmacist,” Anastasia says casually; this backstory even has a cast.
    She leads me to the basement, which, she says, “is the laboratory. You see the equipment?” Ancient and dusty glass bottles and test tubes are lined up in cabinets. Down here, she says the food is traditional Russian. Upstairs, where we are sitting, it is modern Russian. Pushkin is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
    Back at our table we are presented with the menu. It is long. Not just, “Gosh, what a lot of choice there is” long. Not even, “My, how busy the kitchens must be” long. It’s long as in, “If I read all of this, will I have any time left for dinner?” At Pushkin there are forty starters, not including the pies and pickles (and in a Russian restaurant, one must always include the pickles). There are twenty-nine main courses, thirty desserts, and twenty-one honeys, should you want twenty-one honeys, and I wasn’t sure I did.
    There are also twenty-four waters. At Pushkin they not only have mineral waters from the usual suspects—France and Italy—but also from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, and Wales. I had flown for nearly four hours, queued for forty-five minutes at passport control for the pleasure of being stared at as if I were attempting to import anthrax, had been driven through Moscow’s evening traffic jams for double that length of time and, living dangerously, walked for thirty minutes through the city’s streets only to be offered mineral water from a country so close towhere I live, I make a point of never going there. I considered ordering it, and then noticed the price. At Café Pushkin, water from Wales—where it is either raining or about to start raining—costs almost £10 ($20) a bottle. Perhaps it had flown business class to be here. Instead I ordered a Russian mineral water at a mere £8. It was wet and had bubbles.
    The water prices, however, were nothing compared to those on the wine list. It wasn’t just the big-ticket Bordeaux and Burgundies, the prices of which often read like telephone numbers in whatever currency they happen to be