Sobrainne, Fountain Square, Victoria, London
Soviet kitsch is all the rage; huge tactless dollops of nostalgia for the days of pre-glasnost clunkiness seem to be liberally applied to all Russian gatherings and cultural events. A bit like sour cream, there is no escaping it. This morning I sat eating in a café of the Antipodean variety and, due to a shortage of reading matter, I thumbed through the glossy book of adverts that is GQ. There was an article about how impossibly cool Moscow has become. The super rich insulate themselves from the masses in their American vehicles, stuck in the stifling traffic, whilst the real hipsters float effortlessly through the art deco metro in a bubble of uber trendy retro kitsch bars, clubs and restaurants.
Yawn, since when did Moscow turn into Berlin? Stuff retro kitsch, it’s boring and lazy. A small touch every now and again is funny and interesting, wall to wall soviet memorabilia is crass and pedestrian. Although, that said, there is nothing wrong with retro Soviet pop music, bouncing along to that is allowed because I like it.
On a more serious note, the fad for Soviet fashion is probably an interesting psychological syndrome. Anyone born in 1991, after the end of the Soviet Union, is now 22 with no living memory of the conditions their own parents lived under, but old enough to maintain a curiosity for the past. Is this healthy? It would very much depend on how seriously those of the first ‘free’ generation take the past. Longing for the dependability of the bad old days is by no means a new phenomenon. After the collapse of communism people struggled so much economically that swapping their new found freedom for certainty and oppression almost seemed like a good idea.
It is almost as if the super rich of Russia, of which there are many, prefer to insulate themselves in a world that looks like an American designer version of the tsarist palaces, full of Faberge trinkets and gold icons, whereas the rest of the urbanites like things decidedly more 20th century.
Unsurprisingly London seems to have a lot of the super rich variety. Hardly a week seems to go by without one of them making headlines for spending obscene amounts of money on apartments, paintings or football players. Either that, or they are suing each other for vast sums of not-always-legally-obtained money. Or they just have each other gunned down or poisoned or otherwise disposed of with rather chilling finality.
Oddly Russian restaurants in London are strangely uniform. They have the price tag of the super rich, but there is a clear set of stylistic rules. The outside of the building, it’s location and prospective clientele matters not. Without fail the inside will look like a wooden village with matryoshka, fake forests, wooden wall panelling and sometimes karaoke with flashing disco lights. There will be white table cloths, leather menus, and food designed to insulate you from the cold with Oligarch level price tags. It will also be a bit dark and at least one wall will be tsarist red.
I have been doing a bit of a tour of London’s Russian restaurants. I like the food, especially in Winter: pod shouboy, borscht, pelmeni and sour cream are all the ideal stuff of dark cold winter evenings. I enjoy the waiters’ confusions when they see I’m not Russian, yet appear to understand what everything is on the menu. Russian restaurants are still for the Russians, not the rest of the natives. This is a shame as English people would really like good Russian food. Olga’s Blog http://kitchen.galanter.net/ is a really good place to start.
Sobrainne is one such restaurant. It is located in the transient zone that is The Colonnades opposite Victoria Coach Station. The areas around major transport hubs are always a bit chaotic, jumbled and low rent. I spent a while this morning trying to think of an exception to this and there is no obvious candidate. I’d like to qualify this by saying I have seen plenty of bus stations. The Colonnades is an odd collection of rental units under a glass meccano-style roofed walkway. The lower level is the original Victorian façade. In short, a proper mish-mash. It looks very un-London in appearance, every time I walk through it I feel like I am in a foreign city. Sobrainne means gathering in Russian, it’s also a famous French brand of cigarette, a mish-mash. The restaurant is located in Fountain Square in the middle of The Colonnades and lurks deceptively behind black glass panels. It is a strange location to put an expensive Russian restaurant.
It’s even weirder inside. Wood panelling is everywhere, the walls are lined with pictures of snow leopards and Siberian scenes. There are at least two collections of matryoshkas illuminated by flashing disco lights. There are waiters in traditional country dress and a singer doing traditional Russian folksy numbers. It looks, for all intensive purposes, like a wooden Russian village kitchen. The menus are reassuringly heavy and all the classics are there. Blinis with meats and cheeses for starters and my favourite golubtsy were perfectly executed in rich tomato and cream. The lamb was delicately stewed and served in a hollowed out rye loaf. I tried a frozen glass of smooth Russian Standard Vodka and for a moment I could have been out somewhere in Murmansk enjoying the hospitality. Except I wasn’t, I was in a bus station in London’s Victoria.
It is all perfectly nice food, bit over priced perhaps but it was a pleasant enough trip out, nothing spectacular. Why can we not have a modern simple Russian restaurant that isn’t kitted out like Stalin’s last dacha? How about classic eastern food in a simple setting: no bling, no Siberian pictures, no singing waitresses and no disco matryoshkas. Just somewhere modern that serves excellent pelmeni, borscht, pod shouboy and napoleon cake with vodka. There, I’ve invented it, now someone bring it to life. Until then the search continues.
Yawn, since when did Moscow turn into Berlin? Stuff retro kitsch, it’s boring and lazy. A small touch every now and again is funny and interesting, wall to wall soviet memorabilia is crass and pedestrian. Although, that said, there is nothing wrong with retro Soviet pop music, bouncing along to that is allowed because I like it.
On a more serious note, the fad for Soviet fashion is probably an interesting psychological syndrome. Anyone born in 1991, after the end of the Soviet Union, is now 22 with no living memory of the conditions their own parents lived under, but old enough to maintain a curiosity for the past. Is this healthy? It would very much depend on how seriously those of the first ‘free’ generation take the past. Longing for the dependability of the bad old days is by no means a new phenomenon. After the collapse of communism people struggled so much economically that swapping their new found freedom for certainty and oppression almost seemed like a good idea.
It is almost as if the super rich of Russia, of which there are many, prefer to insulate themselves in a world that looks like an American designer version of the tsarist palaces, full of Faberge trinkets and gold icons, whereas the rest of the urbanites like things decidedly more 20th century.
Unsurprisingly London seems to have a lot of the super rich variety. Hardly a week seems to go by without one of them making headlines for spending obscene amounts of money on apartments, paintings or football players. Either that, or they are suing each other for vast sums of not-always-legally-obtained money. Or they just have each other gunned down or poisoned or otherwise disposed of with rather chilling finality.
Oddly Russian restaurants in London are strangely uniform. They have the price tag of the super rich, but there is a clear set of stylistic rules. The outside of the building, it’s location and prospective clientele matters not. Without fail the inside will look like a wooden village with matryoshka, fake forests, wooden wall panelling and sometimes karaoke with flashing disco lights. There will be white table cloths, leather menus, and food designed to insulate you from the cold with Oligarch level price tags. It will also be a bit dark and at least one wall will be tsarist red.
I have been doing a bit of a tour of London’s Russian restaurants. I like the food, especially in Winter: pod shouboy, borscht, pelmeni and sour cream are all the ideal stuff of dark cold winter evenings. I enjoy the waiters’ confusions when they see I’m not Russian, yet appear to understand what everything is on the menu. Russian restaurants are still for the Russians, not the rest of the natives. This is a shame as English people would really like good Russian food. Olga’s Blog http://kitchen.galanter.net/ is a really good place to start.
Sobrainne is one such restaurant. It is located in the transient zone that is The Colonnades opposite Victoria Coach Station. The areas around major transport hubs are always a bit chaotic, jumbled and low rent. I spent a while this morning trying to think of an exception to this and there is no obvious candidate. I’d like to qualify this by saying I have seen plenty of bus stations. The Colonnades is an odd collection of rental units under a glass meccano-style roofed walkway. The lower level is the original Victorian façade. In short, a proper mish-mash. It looks very un-London in appearance, every time I walk through it I feel like I am in a foreign city. Sobrainne means gathering in Russian, it’s also a famous French brand of cigarette, a mish-mash. The restaurant is located in Fountain Square in the middle of The Colonnades and lurks deceptively behind black glass panels. It is a strange location to put an expensive Russian restaurant.
It’s even weirder inside. Wood panelling is everywhere, the walls are lined with pictures of snow leopards and Siberian scenes. There are at least two collections of matryoshkas illuminated by flashing disco lights. There are waiters in traditional country dress and a singer doing traditional Russian folksy numbers. It looks, for all intensive purposes, like a wooden Russian village kitchen. The menus are reassuringly heavy and all the classics are there. Blinis with meats and cheeses for starters and my favourite golubtsy were perfectly executed in rich tomato and cream. The lamb was delicately stewed and served in a hollowed out rye loaf. I tried a frozen glass of smooth Russian Standard Vodka and for a moment I could have been out somewhere in Murmansk enjoying the hospitality. Except I wasn’t, I was in a bus station in London’s Victoria.
It is all perfectly nice food, bit over priced perhaps but it was a pleasant enough trip out, nothing spectacular. Why can we not have a modern simple Russian restaurant that isn’t kitted out like Stalin’s last dacha? How about classic eastern food in a simple setting: no bling, no Siberian pictures, no singing waitresses and no disco matryoshkas. Just somewhere modern that serves excellent pelmeni, borscht, pod shouboy and napoleon cake with vodka. There, I’ve invented it, now someone bring it to life. Until then the search continues.