Food with Elena Chekalova

I don’t know where it came from, that the way to the heart is through the stomach. I have been convinced many times that everything is just the opposite. My husband, children, friends, many acquaintances and strangers like everything I cook. They hardly notice my mistakes and always find some merit in my dishes. But it is simply impossible to please those who for various reasons do not like me (well, at least, for example, with my voice): they don’t even need to try my dish or cook according to my recipe - everything is obviously bad, in all respects.

I am, however, not at all unique here. For example, Moscow simply adores Arkady Novikov’s restaurants. They are always full of people, although the food can hardly be called outstanding. It is quite ordinary - sometimes a little better, and sometimes worse, than the Moscow average. I recently spoke on this topic with Arkady himself, whom I respect very much as a talented businessman and marketer. In his opinion, in Moscow, success in the restaurant business does not directly depend on the quality of cooking - it is much more important to simply please the main crowd, and then everyone will come and applaud. But in London, in his opinion, everything is different. Arkady boasted about the restaurant that had just opened there: if you’re in those parts, come in, there are a lot of interesting dishes. Less than two weeks after our conversation, the English newspaper The Guardian published a simply devastating review. It turns out that everything is bad at Novikov: the prices are staggering, and the cooking process is so clumsy, incorrect and gloomy that I want to congratulate the chef on his outstanding unprofessionalism. Nevertheless, the author of the article, Jay Reiner, testifies: the restaurant is not crowded, though mostly from the local Russians, “all the tables are occupied, everything glitters with a bronze tan and Botox.” Many of us immediately accused Rainer of rancor and even ordering. This, of course, cannot be ruled out, but in the very tone of the review one senses not so much someone’s order as the wildest irritation of the author. After all, while he notices some good things in the kitchen (“my companion approved of the vitello tonato, and the fried mushrooms and eggs were also worth the £18.50”), everything is interrupted by personal dislike: “you find yourself in a huge Italian restaurant - without windows, but with wrought iron decorations and pounding music that makes your balls ring.” There is one more thing: the Englishman is very offended by the fingering of the new rich Russians. I have seen something similar more than once on the Cote d'Azur. The French are also shaken by the noisy Russian companies that fill the most expensive establishments and compete to see who has the coolest show-off. “And my advice to you,” Reiner ends his note, “do not go to Novikov. In a city where there are already many terrible and tasteless restaurants, he managed to set a new bar.” In this radical conclusion, many of us saw purely anti-Russian sentiments.

Meanwhile, London applauds our other restaurateur and chef, followed by Madrid, Singapore, Hong Kong and Zurich and Geneva. I mean Anatoly Komm, whose world gastronomic tour begins next week. The venue for it is provided by the best hotels - Four Seasons or Mandarin Oriental, as well as restaurants awarded with Michelin stars and included in The S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best rating. But at home, Komm the restaurateur has more modest success than Novikov. In his establishments, especially in Varvara, which last year took 48th place in the ranking of the 50 best restaurants in the world (according to The S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants), the occupancy is far from Novikov's "crowded." Anatoly Komm, who proposes to call himself “maestro,” simply irritates many in his homeland, and his dishes seem strange and incomprehensible. Some kind of Olivier-flavored ice cream, liquid Borodino bread, biscuit with cuttlefish ink or herring salad, which is literally wrapped in a “fur coat” - thin “paper” made from beet juice. I say: the path to the stomach lies through the hearts and also through the head. The West likes Anatoly Komm because he works in a fashionable and recognized trend there. And no, it’s not only “molecular”, it’s a cuisine that is very diverse in techniques, but always light and creative with new and unexpected gastronomic sensations.

Today the famous French “butter, butter and more butter” is clearly being revised. Chefs discover brilliant tastes in meat without a golden brown crust, in fish without creamy sauce, and offer to enjoy carrots, beets, celery and zucchini, deifying the tastes of nature itself. The result is the satisfaction of not only physical, but also aesthetic hunger, without overeating and without heaviness in the stomach. Why do you need heavy cream when the most delicate sauce can be made from pepper or fennel, why thicken it with flour or starch when it can be filled with bubbles of air or champagne?

In France, for example, Thierry Marx, who recently headed the restaurant of the Parisian Mandarin Oriental, cooks in this style—to get there, I had to make an appointment a month in advance. I don’t know if his dishes would have made an impact in Moscow: an appetizer of cucumbers stuffed with crab meat on a bed of grapefruit jelly, or sea bass in orange emulsion, or dove in cappuccino made from mashed potatoes? I met Marx several years ago, when he worked in Bordeaux, at the Chateau Cordeillan-Bages winery hotel. Even then, he said that a gastronomic revolution was coming, an era of new healthy food, and that all this had to do not so much with the triumph of diets, but with the discovery of new tastes. They say that we have been told for a long time that we need to eat less sugar and fat, and this has finally penetrated into the mass consciousness, and now it seems tasty not at all what it was considered yesterday. Then I ate completely natural fish, not decomposed into particles, and the sauce of passion fruit and citronella bubbles only emphasized its noble sophistication. I couldn’t understand what he was doing with foie gras on caramelized peach with an airy porto veil: there was no trace of cloying fat left in the product - just tenderness. And now he has gone even further: he can turn food into a mist, inhaling which, you can “eat” cakes or fried potatoes without remorse. Agree, this will only seem tasty if, as we say, you vote with your heart.

Comm has its miracles. And if you ignore his peculiar manners (why can’t he have the right to them?) and tune in to the fact that worthwhile food is not necessarily arugula with shrimp and that perhaps they will bring you what you need without rushing, figure it out, there are a lot of interesting and tasty things on the “Barbarians” menu. And to prepare for what you're about to try, make one elegant little thing yourself - oysters in pink champagne (Komme cooks with Victor Dravigny Rose). True, for the purity of the experiment, you need to buy not only the freshest oysters, but also a special siphon with gas cans (not to be confused with the one for water!) - they are now in many restaurant equipment stores. Buy it - you won’t regret it: with the help of a siphon you can make fantastically delicate sauces and soups (if you suddenly doubt it, remember: once upon a time a microwave seemed like an unnecessary extravagance). So, if you have everything on hand, with oysters everything is really simple. Mix champagne, lemon juice, syrup and bring to a boil. Cool slightly and stir in starch and gelatin. Warm over low heat for another two minutes. Pour the resulting sauce into the siphon, fill it with gas and let it brew for 30 minutes. And then we amaze the guests: we open the oysters, press the siphon lever and cover them with airy pink foam. Serve on ice.

Bald Marx, so similar to Bruce Willis, calls his teaching “new Marxism”, why then does Comm with a flowing mop of hair not have the right to call himself “maestro”? Don't you still like it? Well, then close your eyes, plug your ears, turn off your personal feelings - and just try the dishes.

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Oyster in champagne

1 Dry pink champagne (Victor Dravigny Rose) (200 ml)

2 Lemon juice (1 coffee spoon)

3 Grenadine (pomegranate or raspberry red syrup) (25 ml)

4 Starch (6 g)

5 Gelatin (4 g)

6 Oyster (1 pc.)

7 Siphon and 2 cans of NO2 gas

The way to the stomach is through the heart