While many first-time restaurateurs talk of being overwhelmed by the unexpected difficulties of the job, Ariana Grinblat, 28, who opened a downtown eatery this spring, says she’s found the work relatively easy compared with her first gig: Russian pop star.
“I pretty much anticipated the insanity, and I have to say that show business really prepared me for what is an unpredictable business with so many variables,” says Grinblat, whose new restaurant, Ariana, serves modern Russian fare.
Born in Houston to Russian parents, Grinblat grew up in Texas and Moscow. At the age of 15, she signed with Sony Music Russia and went on to become the Slavic equivalent of Britney Spears, selling more than a half-million records and winning six Russian Grammy awards.
“I like to say that I’m the Britney Spears without the meltdown,” cracks Grinblat, a statuesque blonde who is bilingual and speaks with the faintest of Texas twangs. Or maybe, she says, “more of a Jessica Simpson,” since she lacks Brit’s dancing abilities.
Grinblat’s father has managed both oil and gas companies, as well as his daughter’s career, but, as she tells it, the decision to get into the music industry was entirely her own. Mom and Dad just wanted her to learn to play the piano.
“I played for many, many years,” she recalls. “I kinda hated every moment of it.”
But that was before one of her teachers started letting her do 15 minutes of vocal lessons at the end of each piano session.
“That was my favorite part,” she says. “Finally, I asked my parents, ‘Please, can I just switch from piano to vocal?’ ”
After convincing her father that she was serious about a pop-music career, her family moved back to Russia; her father needed to be there for work and he had connections in the music industry there to jump-start his young daughter’s career.
“Everything happened really fast,” she says. “My first single kind of exploded, just because it was so different than anything that was on the market.”
“Under the Spanish Sky,” an emotional ballad sung in Russian with a heavy American accent, quickly became a radio hit, especially with younger audiences.
Still, she says she maintained a fairly normal life, attending the Anglo-American School of Moscow, a tony English academy catering to diplomats’ children. Her classmates didn’t even initially know about her fame.
“My niece likes to joke that I’m the original Hannah Montana, because in school no one had any clue,” she says, with the ease of someone who has been talking to the press since her early years. “My bubble was burst one day when one of the girls in my class was accidentally flipping through Russian TV. She was like, ‘Is it possible I could have seen you in a music video, standing on a rock on a mountain?’ ”
“Under the Spanish Sky” earned her two Russian Grammys at the age of 16. She performed the song at the 2001 awards show at the Kremlin wearing a red bra top, feather boa, miniskirt and no shoes.
“I hadn’t worn high heels yet,” she recalls. “I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other, [so] at the last minute, I went onstage barefoot.”
Under The Spanish Sky~Ariana~2001 from Ariana Grinblat on Myspace.
Her love life, meanwhile, was equally fantastic.
As a teenager living in Moscow, Grinblat started dating her producer’s son, Lev Shneur, who also had a musical career as a child. He proposed to her in Venice, on her 22nd birthday, with a 5-carat diamond ring from Tiffany, as a hired “Romeo” and “Juliet” serenaded them.
In 2008, the two wed in Monaco at a party for nearly 300 people. The ’90s R&B group Boyz II Men performed at the wedding, as did several Russian acts. And then there were the bride and groom, who sang a duet — “When I First Saw You” from “Dreamgirls,” with Russian lyrics.
“It was spectacular,” Grinblat says.
Yet, such spectacles aside, Grinblat comes across as decidedly low-key and thoughtful. In their off time, you’re more likely to find her and Shneur — who works in commercial real estate and startups — at a nice restaurant or hanging out with their Samoyed pup, Boscoe, than at bottle-service clubs.
She says she was accepted to Brown University, but decided to focus on her music instead. And her restaurant is more a project of passion than glamour. She’s long loved to cook and experiment in the kitchen, helping her mother cater family events with inventive takes on Russian classics.
“To open this kind of a restaurant has always been a dream,” she says. “I was very adamant about the fact that a Russian restaurant needed to be represented from a contemporary angle.”
Ariana, the restaurant, strives to be different than its Brighton Beach brethren. The decor is fairly understated. The refined take on borscht features an oxtail broth and house-made creme fraiche; the Russian dumplings known as pelmeni are stuffed with duck or sturgeon, not traditional ground beef; and vodka cocktails are crafted by Orson Salicetti, an alum of trendy speakeasy Apothéke.
Despite such attributes, the restaurant isn’t quite a hot spot. The crowd can be sparse, the roses in bud vases don’t exactly strike a sophisticated note and those vodka cocktails, while tasty, don’t seem to be drawing in the mixology masses.
But Grinblat, who funded the restaurant herself, isn’t worried. She says business is picking up, thanks in part to live music nights, and she plans to perform there herself later this summer.
With both the restaurant and the music industry, “you can never know exactly what’s going to work,” she says. “You really don’t know how people are going to respond.”