Dining spotlight: Moscow
Anatoly Komm is reinventing Russia’s traditional cuisine
WORDS: ROBINA DAM
WHEN THE MOSCOW RESTAURANT SCENE HAS BECOME SO INCREDIBLY LAVISH, extravagant in cuisine (not to mention price) and achingly trendy, what’s the next step? Well, according to Moscow’s most exciting chef, Anatoly Komm – the city’s answer to Heston Blumenthal – it’s a return to traditional Russian dishes.
The newest addition to his small empire is the A Komm Restaurant at Barvikha Hotel & Spa, situated in the Rublevo district outside central Moscow, where the likes of Putin, Medvedev and the oligarchs have their homes. Instead of the avant-garde combinations you’d find in his flagship restaurant Varvary, it’s about taking classics such as pelmeni (dumplings) and borscht (beetroot soup) then giving them a twist.
“Every mouthful you taste here should tell you it is a Komm dish,” the superstar chef announces. If that sounds a grand statement, he has a point. The starter of beef pelmeni on an onion pillow (450 rubles; approx £8.50) has a pastry that melts in the mouth and his ‘golden cockerel’ stuffed with spinach and mushrooms (morels, which were in season on this occasion) maintained the individual flavours of the ingredients (690 rubles; £13).
The food is so brilliant that it’s a shame it’s lost in Barvikha Luxury Village – an area so privileged and underwraps even by Russian standards that Saturday lunchtime saw the dining room (designed by Italian maestro Citterio) visited by couples who seemed to stop for a bite as an afterthought to the designer shopping.
The upside is that it’s easier to book a table. You have more privacy than the centre of town yet it’s only a couple of hours from either Moscow city centre or Domododevo airport.
A Komm Restaurant at Barvikha Hotel & Spa, Barvikha Luxury Village, Rublevo-Uspenskoye Road, Moscow, +7 (495) 2225 8880; www.barvikhahotel.com
