On a warm summer night, with a moon strong enough to silver-plate the pines and X-ray a couple of yawning bodyguards in the adjacent parking lot, the tsar is inside having a tasting. A short, slight, fortyish man with an impish face, he hovers in one corner of the dining room over a tray of grilled fish as a waiter, whose expression changes back and forth from nervous to terrified, carefully plates them. Fillets of salmon, sea bass, icefish, sturgeon, sea bream, and John Dory have just emerged from the Muslim-style terra-cotta tandoor ovens that are embedded in the ground at the back of Veranda, the most fashionable restaurant in the elite northern suburbs of Moscow.
Arkady Novikov, the owner of Veranda and some 52 other Moscow restaurants, rejoins his guests, and the fish are served. He tastes them all and takes a sip of Perrier after each bite, but is finished with the degustation in a couple of minutes. “Now, you go, please,” he says to the table, and his guests begin to fork at their fish, which is amazingly succulent, fresh, and flavorful, considering it’s being served in a city that’s hundreds of miles from any major body of water. “So, is it good?” asks the man who started his restaurant empire a dozen years ago, when the main culinary preoccupation in Moscow was simply getting enough to eat.
Today, things are different. Sushi. Argentine grill. Tapas. Nachos with deep-fried onion blossoms. Moscow is giving it all a whirl, and with a handful of exceptions, the city’s best and most successful places all belong to Novikov, whose restaurants, like the rings of a tree, constitute a living chronology of the astonishing evolution of eating habits in the Russian capital. No wonder he picked up the moniker Restaurant Tsar along the way.
The tasting ends, to the discreet but palpable relief of everyone at the table. Novikov, who has the humming energy of a dragonfly, is off, darting around the room, a chic sort of lean-to with trencher tables, bare wood floors, and oil lanterns, all meant to evoke the dachas of the Muscovite gentry before their country houses morphed into Tara mansions with satellite dishes and indoor pools. He greets his clients, tousling a child’s hair at one table, offering free drinks at the next, stepping aside to take a call on his cellphone and concluding just in time to wish someone happy birthday as a cake arrives. Eventually, Novikov sits down at his own table again. “Tell chef the salmon needs more salt,” he instructs a waiter. Then, turning to his wife, Nadya, a blond with an olive-size diamond nestled at the base of her windpipe, he suddenly asks, “How long will they keep wanting Uzbek?” After spacing the gold bangles on her wrist, she answers, “Maybe a year or two.” The food of Uzbekistan, one of the former Soviet republics and now an independent nation, is to Russians what southern barbecue is to Americans—messy, good-time finger eats that pack a spicy wallop. And the tsar has put a few Uzbek dishes on the menu at Veranda, guessing correctly that Moscow is ready for it.
“I owe it all to Ronald McDonald,” says Novikov as he hops into the back of a Mercedes. He’s on his way to Galleria, a SoHo-style restaurant that, along with Vogue Cafe, is his latest venture. He had planned on becoming a road engineer, but, thwarted by poor grades in science, he went to a state cooking school instead, ending up in a variety of restaurants around Moscow on the eve of perestroika. In 1989, he applied for a job at Moscow’s first McDonald’s, but was rejected after boasting of his ability to cook great Russian and Greek food instead of feigning enthusiasm for flipping burgers. He then borrowed $50,000 from a friend, who later became a partner, and opened Sirena a few years later. Shrewdly identifying the scarcity of fresh fish in Moscow, Novikov decided Sirena would offer a catch of the day. He built his dining room over an enormous aquarium stocked with river fish—sturgeon, carp, and pike—and set up his own import company, with daily deliveries from Paris, Helsinki, and several other cities. Eleven years later, Sirena is as popular as ever.
Novikov is just as successful with his chain of 22 Yolki Palki restaurants—a Russian version of Denny’s or Howard Johnson’s—as he is with slick spots like Biscuit or Vanille, the former modeled on the Costes brothers’ enterprises in Paris. He also owns Syr, an upscale Italian restaurant; Pyramida, a wild, 24-hour Star Trek diner frequented by the city’s young hipsters; Yapona Mama, a Japanese noodle and sushi outpost; Kish Mesh, a central Asian (shish kebabs and salads) chain; and the Tsar’s Hunting Lodge, one of the rare restaurants to have resurrected old-fashioned Russian cooking. And the list goes on. One American investment banker in Moscow estimates that Novikov is doing $20 million, maybe $30 million, worth of business a year. And, in a town known for corruption, Novikov has a reputation for being something of a straight arrow.
Still, the ultimate prize has yet to be won. Moscow has no haute cuisine. Maxim’s, Pierre Cardin’s attempt at culinary colonization, remains an embarrassing time capsule across from the Kremlin. Koumir, from the Troisgros brothers, quickly went out of business (stuffy and too pricey, said the locals). Dozens of other foreign restaurateurs—everyone from Jacques Le Divellec, of the famous Paris fish house, to Italian star chef Gualtiero Marchesi—have backed off when faced with the complications of doing business in Russia and pleasing the Russian palate.
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