Oligarchs have to eat, just like the rest of us. But it doesn’t mean we have to eat like them. Over-the-top Brasserie Pushkin lets you pig out amid billionaires without going broke. Just order cheaper dishes which tend to be the best — and forget about finding green vegetables at any price.
You want to laugh at this czarist-mansion fantasy a block east from the Russian Tea Room. At Pushkin, large-lipped women prowl the parquet floor in 6-inch heels. Some complain “the food’s not greasy enough,” an insider confided.
Yet the menu’s more refined than at any Russian place I’ve been in New York — about time in a city where it took Mr. Prokhorov to bring the Nets to Brooklyn. For all its giddy opulence and goofy pageantry (think coat-check numbers in golden lockets), Brasserie Pushkin is a very good restaurant that will be better if it rethinks its pricing and banishes certain old ways.
Owner Andrey Dellos can’t fill a 157-seat, West 57th Street satellite of his humongous Cafe Pushkin in Moscow just with vagabonding fertilizer and natural-gas moguls from the ex-USSR.
So it tries to be “New York” — but not Brighton Beach. The chef’s from Rockefeller Center, the floor staff from lots of local joints. The menu boasts a “contemporary interpretation of Russian haute cuisine through the cosmopolitan lens of New York City” and “French influence.” A Murano glass chandelier over the front lounge and pastry shop announces the rococo onslaught — pleated banquettes, French oak walls, ceilings “inspired” by the Hall of Hercules at Versailles and a mural of skybound nymphs.
The menu’s printed on a mock newspaper called the Pushkin Telegraph. Experts disagree on what czarist-era Russians really ate. But whatever it may have been, 74 years of Soviet privations turned it to lead and oil.
Executive chef Andrey Makhov and chef de cuisine Jawn Chasteen (recently at the Sea Grill ) pretend the revolution never happened, striking a precarious balance between expectations and innovation.
They can lose unreconstructed war horses — clay-like pelmeni (Russian meat dumplings), same-old beef stroganoff and “classic” beef and veal aspic terrine, an unfathomable mess I was born to hate.
The appalling side-dish list offers three forms of spuds, but only one “vegetable du jour” — one night, canned-tasting asparagus.
But pretty presentations and rare delicacy characterize many choices. Chicken Kiev appears only as caesar salad — chicken lollipops stuffed with oozy Emmentaler cheese and champignons amidst Romaine leaves.
“Are you from Moscow?” a lunching lady giggled to the Spanish-accented waiter. Scallop and ocean trout crudo seemed more attuned to tastes on the Hudson than on the Moskva. The mosaic tasted as striking as it looked — the raw scallops paper-thin, poker-chip rounds of trout vivid pink, their harmonious essences crystalline in vanilla-mustard dressing.
A flotilla of spicy short ribs navigates the surface of scarlet borscht ($18). Three-fish soup ukha ($18), ethereally light, brimmed with lush wedges of poached pike, sturgeon and salmon. Accompanied by a squirty fish dumpling and a shot of ginger vodka, it’s enough for an entree.
But pricing is all over the map. Cod ruined by cloying apple puree was a $36 rip-off. Rack of lamb was fabulous but felonious at $48.
On the other hand, there’s herbed Cornish hen for a mere $28, embraced in a winning marinade of the Georgian tomato-garlic paste Adjica. Pojarsky ($28) is a sublime breed of cutlet, a craggy-surfaced, garlic-crouton-breaded crescent stuffed with chicken and veal lightly bound as if by magic.
Fun desserts such as the sweet-filled, dome-shaped “Cafe Pushkin” are enough for two — as they should be at $16 each. They send you out merry at 11:30 p.m., when black limousines line the deserted sidewalk.
On a misty night, you imagine ZiL sedans waiting on dour commissars in Leonid Brezhnev’s day. Then the doors open and out pops a flock of laughing, blond giantesses. Moscow isn’t the same, and neither is New York. Welcome to the party, comrades.