The first time I visited Moscow, back in the dark days of the late 1980s, there were epic queues outside any shop that promised even a glimpse of a chicken. My first evening meal in the city consisted of four slices of beetroot. I still can’t even look at a carton of mango juice – it was the only thing other than salty Georgian mineral water or cheap spumante that was available to drink. I drank a lot of spumante that week, while the friend I was travelling with rationed out the box of Family Assortment biscuits that she’d brought with her, with the deadly serious suggestion that we might die of starvation. We eventually came to blows over a Bourbon Cream, or perhaps a Jammie Dodger – I forget, mostly because I’ve made myself forget. I hated the whole experience so much that one night, on the overnight train to Leningrad, after my supper (which consisted of one very elderly and strangely coloured boiled egg) I actually cried myself to sleep.
Now, of course, 25 years later, all the poor have been bussed out of central Moscow and the fur-coated oligarchs who remain live on a diet of Cristal, diamond dust and organic free-range peacock. Probably.
Mari Vanna is the London branch of a mini-chain of restaurants (there are others in St Petersburg, Moscow and New York) that put a spendy, quirky twist on the folksy-trad Russian tearoom. The look and cuisine will be familiar if you’ve travelled and dined anywhere east of Dresden – all dumplings, doilies, and sideboards groaning with floral ceramics. What Mari Vanna does is amp all of that up the point that it makes a Vegas gaming room seem serene. From the old bikes hanging above the coat-racks in the hallway – so overburdened with winter garments that you can barely pass – to the old fashioned phone on the wall downstairs with a pen dangling above it and numbers scrawled around, this has been art directed to within an inch of its life. The idea is that it should resemble someone’s house, which it does – the house of someone really quite insane. The tables and chairs are impossibly close together, and every surface is festooned with “stuff”. If John Pawson ever visited, he’d need to be led out with a bag over his head. I actually think it’s quite gorgeous – horrible, but gorgeous. It takes the notion of charming and bangs it around the head with a heavy saucepan, and stuffs it full of boiled potatoes until it can’t move.
The idea is that it should resemble someone’s house, which it does – the house of someone really quite insane
Ah yes – the potatoes. “I feel like I might be back home in Galway,” my dining companion commented as he perused the starch-rich menu. It made me think – is Russian cuisine, in fact, just Irish chow with a mink trapper hat on?
If you’re looking for authentic Russian food, then – following the old adage of “eat Chinese at a place full of Chinese” – this is probably the place. On my visit, three-quarters of the crowd were Muscovites, including a woman in a fur gilet, who was sitting beside a supercharged double-layered pram with gold handes. The people-watching is fantastic at Mari Vanna: there are characterful old men in suits and younger ones on dates dressed like a cross between Jay Gatsby and a Mussolini-era farmer on a day trip to Rome, ready for a shoot with Bruce Weber.
Service is splendidly chaotic. It takes an age to get seated, and if you’re visiting the toilet (and you must – it’s an audiovisual extravaganza of kitsch fabulousness), waitresses expect you to hold the door open for them while they dash about their duties. When you ask for a drink, it comes with such a satellite delay that you expect to be given news that Laika won’t be making it back alive. I was intrigued by the “Russini” cocktail, which is a bellini made with something called oblepiha instead of peach juice. We asked our waitress what we might know the fruit as, in English. She returned with another Russian word on a piece of paper so we gave up and ordered it anyway. It was delicious, sweet rich and orange – we thought it might have been kumquat, but an iPhone search revealed it to be sea buckthorn berry. It’s a superfood of sorts – René Redzepi forages like mad for it, apparently. This is the first time I’ve had a cocktail in London that felt genuinely exotic. In fact, being in Mari Vanna feels like being on holiday somewhere very strange indeed; you’re dining through the looking glass. But there’s a lot that’s unfamiliar that’s also very nice indeed: I had a glass of Georgian red, and I was surprised how palatable it was.
There are plenty of onion and beetroot themed salads on the menu at Mari Vanna but, we decided to forget any pandering to nutritional balance and go on an all-out coma-inducing carb binge, right down to the sweet cherry dumplings for pudding. I have few points of reference for Russian cuisine, so it’s tricky to say if what we had was good of its type. A minced chicken fritter with mashed potato turned out to be the kind of unchallenging but perfectly pleasant supper dish you might make for yourself in a hurry out of a Nigel Slater book – the kind of thing that you’re pleased resembles the picture on the page and makes you glad you didn’t resort to a bowl of three-minute tortellini again. A stroganoff was very decent, while the Siberian Pelmeni dumplings with beef and pork were moreish but flabby. I buy very similar dumplings from my local Costcutter, which has fridges stacked with different varieties of them (there’s a huge Polish contingent nearby). It’s basic stodge – hangover food – and hardly fine dining.
But then, there’s nothing really “fine” about Mari Vanna, even though it sits opposite the Bulgari hotel and basks in the shadow of the £140m apartments of One Hyde Park. That’s not the point. The point is in the slightly surreal imported home comforts that it offers to SW1’s Russian emigrées. The point is to experience all that, and then – and this is where it gets really good – to order something called “Megrelian Hachapuri”. The rest of the food at Mari Vanna might not be anywhere as memorable as its interior, but this is something else. This dish – billed as a “traditional Georgian bread pie with suluguni cheese” – is one of the most delicious things you’ll eat in London. The sulungi comes across as mozzarella with attitude – salty and tangy – while the pie itself is essentially the pizza bread of the gods. We ordered it to share and I was immediately transported back to bickering over a Jammie Dodger in a brutalist hotel block during Glasnost – I wanted it all. I almost wish we’d cancelled everything else and ordered two more pies. As it is, I’ve found a recipe online, had it translated, and I’m putting feelers out all over London for some suluguni.
Mari Vanna, Wellington Court, 116 Knightsbridge, London SW1 UK
020-7225 3122; marivanna.co.uk