Where Not To Eat In Moscow

I never ate at New York's Taras Bulba on West Broadway in SoHo. Last year Vogue called it a "great Ukrainian restaurant" and it well may be but the one I ate in in Moscow 2 weeks ago was the worst restaurant I tried during my whole time in Russia. The chain was started in 1999 in Moscow and there are 16 restaurants there, one in Kiev and one in New York. One is down the street from the Baltschug Kempinski, where I stayed, and the concierge recommended it as a good place for hearty Russian food nearby. A stone's throw from the Kremlin, how bad could it be, I figured. Maybe I should gotten the clue when we walked in and found it empty save one table of drunk German tourists, but I didn't.

The food wasn't just supremely mediocre, the bill was triple what it should have been. When I asked why there where three times more items on the bill-- in Russian of course-- than what we ordered, they explained that when you order, say, fish and potatoes and a vegetable the way it's listed on the menu, they charge you for each component, although there's certainly no indication of that on the menu. As Roland said, "thank God they didn't charge us for the dill and the salt." So not only was it a bad dinner in a creepy atmosphere with bad service, it was extremely expensive, even though you'd never think that by looking at the menu.

This was the day I stressed out my peripheral neuropathy by walking too much

People who want to know where to eat a good meal in Moscow have to be told the truth: St. Petersburg, just a few hours by bullet train. We tried Café Pushkin and the food was good and the service perfect, but there was literally some guy walking around dressed as Pushkin trying to interact with the diners. We were also steered towards Dr. Zhivago at the Hotel National and that was also supremely mediocre in all ways. I heard that Varvary, a molecular gastronomy place, is really good but we never made it there and the whole idea of eating stopped appealing to me after a few days in Moscow.

St. Petersburg, on the other hand, must have a tradition of good food and good service because there were plenty of good restaurants all over town. Palkin on Nevsky Prospect was perfect-- great Russian food, awesome service, fantastic ambience and good value. There's a great seafood restaurant called Russkaya Rybalka where, if you choose, you can catch your own dinner. I didn't but the dinner was really great, as well as inexpensive. There was a pretty good vegetarian-oriented place near St. Isaac's Cathedral called The Idiot and that neighborhood also boasts Dom, which isn't quite as good as Palkin but close enough, and a decent Italian restaurant, Percorso, in the Four Seasons hotel. But, to tell you the truth, the restaurants in St Petersburg are just plain as good as the ones in Moscow aren't.

Back to Korchma Taras Bulba for a moment. It purports to serve "authentic Ukrainian cuisine, prepared with the exact recipe that was handed down for centuries from generation to generation, and now from our grandparents to our grandchildren [with] a unique interior design that will make you feel like you were brought back a hundred years to a cozy Ukrainian home." Well, it was named for a fictional character invented by Gogol as a national Ukrainian hero in an 1835 historical novella that was judged by the tsarist censors as being too Ukrainian and anti-Russian enough to be revised in 1842. I saw it-- the revised story-- as a film starring Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis when I was a kid. Bulba is painted as a kind of Ukrainian George Washington freeing his country from the yoke of the Turks and then the Poles, while engaging in the Ukrainian national trait of persecuting the Jews.

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Senza Glutine-- Eating Gluten-Free In Tuscany Is Easier Than In The U.S.

Da Delfina terrace with the 1596 Medici pad in the background

I just got back from about a month in Tuscany. Some old friends and I rented a beautiful old villa outside a small town in the Chianti region of northern Tuscany, just southwest of Florence. I ate every day-- and that included a lot of pasta and some pizza-- and never had to worry about gluten, which my doctor told me to avoid.

I have four favorite Italian restaurants here in L.A.-- BellaRiva, Angelini Osteria, Osteria Mozza, all in the Hollywood area, and Piccolo in Venice-- and I wouldn't even think to ask them for gluten-free anything. Although... I'm about to start. It's perfectly natural in Italy, where, apparently, Celiac is a well-understood disease. Health food stores, like the well-stocked NaturaSi in Florence (4 outlets), normal run-of-the-mill grocery stores (like the Coops everywhere) and pharmacies, all carry gluten-free food-- and lots of it. So cooking back at the villa was no problem.

But it's Tuscany. I was there to eat the most refined and deicious cuisine in the world. And I never had a problem with that it. Montespertoli is a tiny town you won't find on many maps. You don't even find the roads that go to it on any maps. But the one of the pizzeria's just off the main square Garby's, with dozens of different kinds of pizza on their menu, was always happy to make a pizza senza glutine. Down the road from the villa in the other direction, there was a big restaurant, Lo Spigo in Montelupo Fiorentino has a page on their menu with gluten-free dishes, but basically they'll make you anything you want in a gluten-free way, including every kind of pasta (except ravioli and lasagne) and every kind of pizza.

When I first got to town I called on a friend of mine who's been living in Tuscany for 8 years, American-born film-maker Frank LaLoggia (Lady In White, Fear No Evil). He suggested we go to a place owned by a friend of his, Paolo, in Lucardo, 10 minutes from Montespertoli and halfway between our villa and his house down a dirt road in San Casiano-- Ristorante C'era Una Volta in Lucardo. Not only did Paolo offer to make me any pasta I wanted senza glutine, he even served me gluten free bread while my friends ate the house bread. I might mention that the food is amazing and the view from the terrace is spectacular and that I ate there half a dozen times afterwards. Just down the road a piece is a turn-off on via Lucignano which leads to a not easy to find farm house that doubles-- if you make a reservation-- as a vegan restaurant, La Fonte. It's not specifically gluten-free-- more organic and macrobiotic-- but they know how to do it and do it well.

And that brings us to the world renowned Tuscan destination restaurants-- and, yes, they take care of their gluten-free guests as well. The first day I arrived in Italy I didn't go to the villa but stayed to see some friends honeymooning in Florence. We had dinner at one of the best restaurants in town, Ristorante Cibrèo. It was my first meal of the trip and I was taken aback when I asked the waiter if he could serve gluten-free pasta. He got all huffy-- but, as it turned out, not over the gluten-free part. In all their long history (Etruscan times?) they have never ever served pasta. OK, once we got over that, I sat back and had a superb meal. The menu, which changes constantly, is scrawled in Italian by hand but the waiter sits down and explains every dish on it to you. There were a dozen things I wanted to order and I barely remember what I wound up picking but everything was delicious and had I ever worked up the courage to brave Florence's bizarre traffic again, I would have certainly gone back again.

The only other restaurant in a city I ate in was Siena's wonderful Osteria le Logge, just off the Campo, the city's famed main square. Everything was delicious and although gluten-free wasn't their thing, they were able to easily accommodate my request. I went with a bunch of friends and we ordered tons of food, all of it delicious, well-prepared and shockingly inexpensive. All the other restaurants were in the countryside and-- warning-- they all require reservations. They also require a car and a lot of directional savvy to locate and get to.


In the small cluster of buildings in the middle of nowhere called Artimino, near a small town called Carmignano just west of Florence is a Tuscan classic, Da Delfina. The terrace overlooks a gorgeous bucolic scene that happens to include an amazing Medici villa built in 1596. As one reviewer put it, "Comfort is the keyword: you come here for an elegant take on mamma's home cooking, served on crisply laid tables by impeccable, bow-tied waiters." I had called ahead and told them I didn't eat gluten and they were prepared. One of the reasons-- there are several-- that I keep going back to RivaBella in L.A. is because of their unqiue take on eggplant parmigiana, which the L.A. Times described as "a luscious eggplant timbale in a light Parmesan cream" and I'm hooked. But wasn't I shocked to find the identical preparation at Delfina, only twice the portion size and a little more... let's say relaxed. I wouldn't call the restaurant inexpensive but it's far from expensive. They don't accept credit cards.

Another restaurant that stands out as especially delicious and also pretty much in the middle of nowhere was La Locanda di Pietracupa on the side of the "main road" into San Donato in Poggio. That's where we had our goodbye dinner when my friends from Amsterdam and Arizona were leaving for home. All send-offs should be that delicious! Again, I called ahead with the senza glutine request and they were solicitous and ready to serve! I had the amazing pasta dish with a light sauce made of beets and gorgonzola. It doesn't sound that good but, man, would I like to be eating there again tonight! They even had gluten-free bread for me!

I should also add that all the restaurants are especially proud of their olive oils and balsamics, and they should be. In fact the only souvenirs I brought home were bottles of local olive oil!

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L.A.'s Lucky Not To Have Lost Michael Voltaggio To Mumbai

Ink's the best restaurant in L.A. By that I mean, they serve the most unique and delicious food in town... and in a friendly, comfortable atmosphere. I eat there a lot and always try to sit in the same seat at the counter. Eventually I got to meet a lot of the people who work there. And one of them was 34 year old chef/owner Michael Voltaggio, who had his moment of Top Chef glory before I had started watching the show or even knew I could get Bravo on my TV.

I could tell immediately that Voltaggio is on fire for food. He obsesses over every dish-- and this is the kind of restaurant where nothing on the menu is in a recipe book or available at any other restaurant. It's all his creation-- like a song or a painting. I worked as a chef in Amsterdam for four years and I grokked the compulsion from the first conversation almost a year ago. But that's not why I go there so often. I go there because the food is so good and so unique; nothing like it anywhere, not even Bazaar, the other "molecular gastronomy" place in town where I used to eat all the time, never knowing Michael was Chef de Cuisine.

One day I told Michael and Cole, the other chef, that I was going to India for a month and I'd see them when I got back. Michael mentioned he had been to India not long ago, starting a restaurant. I found that fascinating of course, especially because I had been to Mumbai so many times over the years-- since it's where the Indian music business is and Warners had a subsidiary there-- and it was in the Colaba neighborhood, down the street from the Taj Hotel, that Michael and his brother Bryan were working on opening an American food restaurant.

If you ever googled Voltaggio you were overwhelmed with information. Everything about his life and his work is online-- except India. There's almost nothing about his time in India available. A couple tweets and two or three mentions in a local Mumbai city guide type paper, Mumbai Boss. Mumbai "foodies went into salivation overdrive," according to a local restaurant reviewer when word leaked out that the Voltaggios were coming to town. “It’s better to keep expectations low,” said the 27 year old partners who took over the space, a former Italian restaurant, Ranbir Batra and Rohan Talwar, in March of 2010. Eventually I figured out that the restaurant, Ellipsis, opened but that neither Michael nor Bryan was there. In fact, Michael had just opened Ink when he was flying over to Mumbai to help Batra and Talwar figure out how to start a restaurant from scratch in India. I started asking Michael about it. He's an incredibly friendly, polite guy and he always said he'd be happy to talk about it so... several months later we finally sat down and did.

Someone asked Michael, who grew up in Maryland and worked in at the Greenbriar in West Virginia, the Ritz in Naples, Florida, Dry Creek in Healdsberg and at the Langham in Pasadena, how he likes L.A. He said all he ever sees is the inside of his kitchen. That may be an exaggeration-- as you can see from the video down at the bottom-- but pretty much everything revolves around being a chef. Same with travel. He loves it. But whether it was a trip to Mexico, to Spain, to Singapore, or his excellent adveture in Mumbai, all the stuff normal travelers and tourists do took backseat to chef stuff. In fact, he's been all over the world but he's never been anywhere for a vacation. In Mexico he was looking for fresh seafood that isn't available in L.A.-- and visiting Valle de Guadalupe, the Mexican wine country in Baja California. In Spain he was learning about how they make ceramic plates. and in India... the restaurant. He'd fly over for a couple weeks at a time, sometimes he'd be there, some times Bryan would be there. I guess you could call them hands-on consultants or hands-off-chefs.

By the time Ellipsis opened Michael was working full time back at Ink (plus all the other stuff that seems to take him on the road half the time). He's never seen Ellipsis in action. I couldn't get much out of him about his experience there, beyond how excited he was to work with fresh Indian spices and how tough it was to get imported ingredients in a free-standing restaurant (India's weird that way) but I read something about Talwar and Batra enthusing about “modern American cuisine, and how the Voltaggios were helping develope the menu and were instrumental in training the staff, including chef de cuisine Rupam Bhagat (a Mumbai native who had worked with the Voltaggios in the U.S.).

He was excited, of course, to experience another culture-- and India's is about as "other" as you're going to find-- but "when you go someplace," he explained, "you have a plan and the plan changes and you're not in control of the situation... Reality was the difficulty of going into a foreign country and doing a good job."

I haven't eaten there. My last trip to India was to Cochin and Delhi and those links are about the restaurants in each, although the Delhi one is from a trip there in 2007. The reviews of Ellipis at Trip Advisor are great: "the food was absolutely amazing, the cocktails were great, the place is decked out brilliantly, the service attentive and we would highly recommend this place to anyone," came from a Brit. And American tourist was as enthusiastic: "All I can say is that my meal was fantastic, cooked exactly as I ordered and was delicious. The exact same sentiments were echoed by everyone at the table. However, the biggest surprise was awaiting us all. We decided on the Rocky Road Ice Cream for dessert. What we got seemed to be a hand-made concoction of chocolate ice cream with nuts, marshmallows and more, glazed over with chocolate that seemed to have been frozen with liquid nitrogen, a fog covering the plate. Though hard as a rock we started picking it to death with our spoons and we were all delighted with the presentation and the dessert itself. I do have to admit I was the one that finished off this huge mound of ice cream. Impressions completed and they were high. Overall, the whole experience of Ellipsis was excellent. The biggest drawback is perhaps the price, which was close to $400 USD for four, but we did have 2-3 drinks apiece which inflated the bill considerably. However, I don't care how much it was, it made for us another memory of our first trip to India and Mumbai and for the beginning of a new year. I highly recommend Ellipsis..."

If you're closer to L.A., try Ink. There's nothing like it. Best Hamachi dish I ever tasted; best black cod I ever tasted. Best corn dish I ever tasted. Best cuttlefish I ever tasted.

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