Moscow Goes Kosher
The Russian capital’s recent boom in kosher restaurants shows that kashrut isn’t just for Jews anymore
“A kosher restaurant in Moscow is like a Russian bear,” Talmud
scholar Daniel Boyarin told me recently over dinner. “It doesn’t matter
how well the bear dances as long as the bear does its dance.”
Boyarin [1],
a professor at the University of California Berkeley who recently
acquired something of a pop-culture status when mentioned in the
Oscar-nominated Israeli film
Footnote [2], was in Moscow to give a series of lectures about Jesus and kashrut for
Eshkolot [3],
an organization presenting classes and “edutainment” on Jewish culture.
After his first event, we were part of a group that met for dinner at
Noodles, a new “Brooklyn-style” kosher restaurant a stone’s throw from
the Kremlin. Giant candlesticks on our polished wooden table—which was
surrounded by heavy velvet chairs, all empty, as we were the only
guests—created the effect of tasteless baroque splendor. The burgers
were overcooked and too salty, but as Boyarin had implied, the décor and
the food didn’t necessarily matter; the important part was that Noodles
simply existed, and on that front, the bear—no matter how clumsy or
talentless—was definitely doing its dance.
Noodles is among more than a half-dozen kosher restaurants that have
proliferated in Moscow at breakneck speed since last autumn. One of the
reasons for this uptick seems obvious: Though most of Moscow’s Jews
remain as unobservant as they were throughout the Soviet period, a
significant minority of them has become religious; they’ve also been
joined by traditionally observant Jews from the Caucasus who have
relocated to Moscow. Most of these Muscovites’ needs are served by
stores and restaurants connected to Jewish communal organizations, but
they still want a larger range of dining and food-shopping options.
The bulk of these new restaurants’ actual and targeted customers,
however, are not observant Jews. Non-Jews are purportedly drawn to
kosher eateries for a variety of reasons; some think kosher food is
safer or higher quality, while others think it will help them lose
weight or be otherwise beneficial to their health. And even more so, it
seems, the proliferation of kosher restaurants reflects the expansion of
the Russian capital’s middle class, people with money to spend who are
looking for a novel culinary adventure. They want something new—now that
the thrill of sushi and pizza has worn off—and they are drawn by kosher
offerings not so much because it is “Jewish,” but because kashrut is
being explained to them as part of a system of eating that is thousands
of years old. The very old, in this case, is the new new.
Dan Shnaiderman, the manager of the kosher stand at the Farmers Bazaar, by the main kosher stand.
Dan Shnaiderman, manager of the kosher section of the Farmers Bazaar,
a high-end farmer’s market, recounted the words mumbled by one
non-Jewish client filling up his cart with kosher products: “If Jews
thought all of this up, it must be good,” the customer said. “Jews would
never come up with something that would be bad for themselves.” This
customer is, apparently, not alone: With a range of new restaurants that
have opened since last fall, serving a variety of tastes, kosher food
is among Moscow’s newly emergent culinary trends.
***
Besides dirt-cheap places where a self-respecting person would never
eat, there are two main categories of restaurants in Russia today. One,
referred to as
pafosnye—literally, “pathetic” (as in: “full of
pathos” or even pompous)—includes establishments overpriced in a way
that makes people who eat there aware, in a self-satisfied sort of way,
that they are paying a lot of money for their food distinguished more by
a similar kind of self-importance than by superior taste. The other
category includes restaurants referred to as
demokratichnye,
“democratic.” The word in Russian is formed with a different suffix from
the word referring to “democratic” as a political system. (One may say
that its frequent use displaces the concept that Russia’s contemporary
political system lacks.) The meaning here is “available to broad masses
of people,” and the reference is to those establishments that have good
yet moderately priced food on the menu and are attractive to an educated
clientele. When considering going out to eat in Moscow, one hears the
two terms constantly. The chandeliers and the velvet chairs placed
Noodles, which opened last fall, squarely in the category of pompously
pathetic establishments. Its name comes from the nickname of Robert De
Niro’s wily character in
Once Upon a Time in America, a film
about the Jewish underworld of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, even though
the restaurant’s owner, Shota Boterashvili, has shifted the association
to Brooklyn—a place he has never visited.
I ended up following Boyarin to Noodles during my very first week in
Moscow on this visit. Like any Russian whose dietary preferences and
expectations have changed since leaving the motherland (I moved to the
United States 16 years ago), I was craving a protein that wasn’t meat
and a vegetable that, in its cooked form, bore some trace of similarity
to the original (and wasn’t, say, a shredded beet doused in
mayonnaise [4]).
I ordered a filet of dorado with a side of tempura vegetables. When the
food arrived, beautifully arranged on a plate, costing upwards of $25
and quite tasteless, Boyarin, who had ordered lamb stew and a rack of
lamb, dispensed the following advice: The kitchen staff at Noodles was
probably from Central Asia, and the cooks don’t know as much from fish
as they know from lamb.
Boyarin, who unlike me keeps kosher, found that the recent
proliferation of kosher restaurants made his weeklong stay much easier
to manage than such visits used to be for observant visitors in the
past. He was right about the lamb, too. A large proportion of kitchen
staff in Moscow restaurants does, indeed, come from Central Asian states
that were once Soviet republics, particularly Uzbekistan. Their
presence in Moscow speaks to the larger fact that Moscow these days
attracts low-wage laborers from the former Soviet colonies; in this
respect, Moscow, as an immense postcolonial metropole, is comparable to
London. I got to try the lamb on a repeat visit to Noodles several days
later, too. It did taste decent, as did Boterashvili’s favorite dish,
steak entrecote, though it proved somewhat hard to convince him to let
me order it medium-rare. Russians like their meat cooked all the way
through.
Boterashvili comes from the small Georgian town of
Kulashi [5],
which had a closely knit Jewish community whose members, he told me,
have always been observant. When he, along with other Georgian Jews,
relocated to Moscow around 1990, fleeing the instability produced by the
gradual collapse of the Soviet Union and chasing after economic
opportunity (it’s rumored that a number of Jews from Kulashi control
major business interests in Moscow today), the situation was hard for
observant Jews. Boterashvili, who spent most of our lunchtime interview
attending to more pressing matters by phone (“the restaurant is hardly
the only business I have,” he said), recalls immense difficulties
finding kosher food.
David Rozenson, who left Russia as a child in the 1970s, recalls
similar difficulties when he visited Moscow around 1990. Trying to
organize a Passover Seder for the local community at the height of
Perestroika-era food shortages, he had to appeal to the Jewish
sensibility of the owner of Moscow’s very first McDonald’s, which had
just
opened [6],
to allow the community to purchase an entire cow from the farm that
supplied the franchise, so that the animal could be properly slaughtered
by a shoykhet in accordance with Jewish dietary laws.
Finding kosher food isn’t so difficult anymore. Rozenson, who moved
back to Moscow 11 years ago to run the local branch of the Avi Chai
Foundation (Avi Chai is affiliated with the Keren Keshet Foundation,
which created Nextbook Inc., Tablet’s publisher), took me on a tour of
the city’s Chabad-run Jewish Community Center. It opened in 2000 and
operates stores that stock kosher food as well as a kosher restaurant
that, in addition to its regular menu and event catering, offers an
affordable business-lunch option that attracts many non-Jewish clients
from office buildings in the neighborhood. To enter the restaurant
inside Moscow’s JCC, however, one has to go through a metal detector. By
contrast, the newly minted kosher restaurateurs hoped for spaces that
would exist outside Jewish communal structures and that would seem more
open and welcoming to everyone, including non-Jews.
At the Farmers Bazaar, which opened this spring, kosher products from
hummus to meat to salsas to many kinds of wine are spread throughout
the organic market. The space is bright and airy, and Shnaiderman’s
enthusiasm is infectious. Having grown up in Ukraine, where he gradually
became religious, Shnaiderman, following a brief stint as a new
immigrant in Israel, moved to Moscow, where he is on a kind of
self-imposed mission to educate others about kashrut.
The site of the new shopping mall and farmers market next to Moscow’s famed circus on Tsvetnoy (Flower)
Boulevard [8]
was the location of a flower market in the 19th century and an open-air
food market during the Soviet period, so the owners of the mall had a
contemporary spin-off in mind, Shnaiderman told me over a pot of ginger
tea in a café overlooking the market. The concept of a high-end farmers
market isn’t new in the United States (think a kind of a cross-breed
between San Francisco’s
Ferry Building [9] and the Farmers Market at the
Grove [10]
in L.A.), but in Moscow, such a place still does more to cultivate the
tastes of the middle class rather than to respond to them.
In many ways, it is the very expansion of the middle class that is
itself part of the story of culinary adventurousness in contemporary
Moscow. Russia’s capital city could be more appropriately described as a
city-state—a magnet for money and talent from across Russia, a city
well-oiled by petroleum and media rubles whose accumulation of wealth
has little to do with the dire financial conditions in the country as a
whole. As is common with the newly moneyed the world over, there is an
ever-growing need for new commodities and experiences. Sushi, for
example, which on average costs twice as much in Moscow as it does in
the United States (and isn’t any better for it), has become somewhat
ubiquitous. However, now that sushi no longer surprises anybody, there
is a niche for something new. And for non-Jewish Russians, kosher food
is one such new interest.
There was a phrase that I kept hearing from different purveyors of
kosher food in Moscow: “You are what you eat.” I first heard this phrase
from Ilya Kiselev, who runs a restaurant and bar called Tel Aviv across
the street from the Farmers Bazaar, to describe his rationale for
promoting kashrut as a system of eating that feeds the soul in addition
to the body. Kiselev, who is not observant, is a designer by
training—training that’s readily on display at Tel Aviv, where many
black-and-white photos of towns in Israel cover the walls, in addition
to political posters and reproductions of Israeli advertisement. Tel
Aviv was created as a restaurant oriented around hosting events. It
doubles as a concept bar by night. One night, I had met a friend there
during a klezmer concert; this was among Tel Aviv’s tamer evenings,
paling in comparison with their vaccination-theme party, during which
barmen dressed in white lab coats served cocktails out of syringes. More
straightforward events take place there, too: Kiselev told me of
hosting Israeli film nights and lectures about Bauhaus
buildings [11] in Tel Aviv, the city.
Not all potential clients of kosher restaurants, however, are
convinced that kosher food can be eaten by non-Jews. Over a tasty lunch
at Tel Aviv that included hummus with mushrooms, borekas, and a bowl of
Yemeni soup, Kiselev told me of a non-Jewish friend of his who, after
being invited to Kiselev’s birthday party at Tel Aviv, called to
double-check whether her very presence would somehow profane the
establishment.
Anna Adanina, who manages the only kosher branch of the Shokoladnitsa
(“Chocolate seller”) chain of coffee shops, recounts similar troubles
in explaining kashrut to non-Jewish clients. Unlike Tel Aviv and other
establishments, which advertise themselves as kosher, the kosher branch
of Shokoladnitsa, which opened last fall a short walk from one of
Moscow’s synagogues, doesn’t make this obvious. So, on a busy morning
when I visited, there were several men in
kippot there eating
breakfast (I had potato pancakes with an egg and smoked salmon on the
side) along with customers who weren’t there specifically because of
kosher food. For the former, the existence of the kosher Shokoladnitsa
is a huge relief: Two young men eating there that morning told me that
they could now take their non-Jewish clients and business partners out
to a place where they were free to order off the menu themselves. For
the latter customers, it’s often a surprise that the menu, unlike
throughout the ubiquitous Shokoladnitsa chain, does not include meat
items. These customers get an impromptu lecture on the laws of kashrut,
with its separation of dairy and meat products, and while some
occasionally decide to leave, most are intrigued enough to stay. One
such new customer at Shokoladnitsa I spoke with told me that even though
she had been trying many new things since she started eating at the
kosher branch, she hasn’t even gained any weight.
The odd-sounding equation of kashrut with weight loss, though the two
things do not have any direct correspondence, isn’t that farfetched a
conclusion for some. Arye Fein, a whimsically funny
mashgiach (kashrut supervisor) at Tel Aviv—all kosher restaurants employ the same half-dozen
mashgiachim
sent by the kashrut department of the rabbinate; they rotate between
restaurants in shifts—took me into the kitchen to show how difficult it
is to wash mint and other herbs to ensure that there are no small bugs
left in them. While doing so, he gave me his rationale for why the idea
of kashrut may be appealing to Moscow’s non-Jewish clients: Kosher food
is checked many times over, the kind of food that a discerning customer
concerned about food safety can trust.
The Tevye-branded milk.
Some of this marketing clearly works: At a regular supermarket, I
came across a line of dairy products under the brand name
“Tevye-molochnik” (“Tevye the Dairyman,” named after Yiddish writer
Sholem Aleichem’s most famous
protagonist [12]).
The milk and kefir cartons have a faint image of the violin—either
hinting at the sort of cultural refinement that comes with a cultural
stereotype that all Jews in Russia are violinists, or going by way of
Tevye’s Americanized image as a character in
Fiddler on the Roof.
The word “luxury” (in English) is printed above the Russian word
identifying the product (milk, kefir, or cream), appealing, together
with the above-average price and the kashrut stamp, to some kind of
middle-class shopper looking for some kind of certified refinement.
***
In addition to different attempts at branding kosher food as healthy,
there is also a demand to show some of this food as specifically
Jewish. Though a place like Tel Aviv tries to be a hip concept
restaurant serving mainly Middle Eastern fare—and though a restaurant
called Zucker (“sugar” in Yiddish) tries to serve mainly Italian food
(it offers, among other dishes, inedible risottos that have to be cooked
without key dairy ingredients)—even they cannot function without some
Eastern European Jewish foods, such as
forshmak, a traditional herring appetizer.
It’s no surprise, then, that of all the new options in Moscow, a
kosher restaurant that understands itself as a Jewish restaurant offers
the best culinary experience. This place is Misada (“restaurant” in
Hebrew). The décor feels a bit like a recreation of an Arab street in
Jaffa or East Jerusalem, its kitschiness exacerbated by the fact that
the restaurant is located inside a glitzy shopping mall in
Moscow-City [14],
a new commercial development with office and retail space that has
dramatically altered the city’s skyline. But, aesthetics aside, the
dining experience here is unquestionably satisfactory. Unlike Moscow’s
other kosher restaurants that target business diners, seekers of healthy
and “luxurious” foods, or theme partygoers, Misada thinks of itself as a
family-style establishment. (It does, however, have an economical
business-lunch option that has, among other things, a wonderful lentil
dish that could be a godsend to kosher vegetarians who land in the
famously meat-eating Russia.) As the owner of the restaurant, Misha
Amayev, who grew up in the Caucasus, explains, the concept of the
restaurant was to collect in one menu the highlights of different
cuisines from across Jewish diasporas, in addition to some highlights of
Middle Eastern-cum-Israeli cooking (such as very good hummus), as well
as a few nostalgically Soviet dishes (such as
chicken kiev [15]
prepared with a butter substitute). Dishes at Misada range from
predictable Eastern European Ashkenazi specialties to chudu, a
wonderfully tasty pie with greens that’s a favorite of Mountain Jews
(“In Dagestan this would have been local greens that got picked high up
on mountain slopes, above the point where dogs would go to pee,” said
Amayev, “but in Moscow we have to make do mostly with spinach”); to
plov—a
rice pilaf—from the Bukharan Jewish cuisine; to barbecued meats,
including lamb shanks, among the best I’ve ever had, prepared by the
restaurant’s Azeri barbecue chef; to
khinkali, Georgian dumplings.
My friend
Mila Dubrovina [16], assigned to cover Moscow’s kosher restaurants in a series of articles for
Booknik [17],
a project of the Avi Chai Foundation, got even luckier than me on her
visit to Misada: She got to see the restaurant’s main client among the
diners.
Lev Leviev [18],
a Russian-Jewish billionaire who runs Africa-Israel, the company that
owns the mall where Misada is located, is quite likely the only reason
that Misada exists. Another friend, who knows the Moscow Jewish scene
inside out, hinted to me that Leviev simply needed a place to eat when
he is at work: “He wanted to eat at his own restaurant, that’s all there
is to it!”
Toward the end of my week of reporting and restaurant-hopping, I got
to see Boyarin one more time. We went to Jerusalem, a restaurant on the
top floor of the synagogue on Malaya Bronnaya Street that was
expropriated by the Soviet state, recently returned to the Jewish
community, and expanded in 2004; Jerusalem opened in the building at
that time. This was Boyarin’s third consecutive night at Jerusalem—after
the mediocrity and the pathetic pompousness of Noodles, after the
hipster coolness of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem for him was the place where one
goes to eat well without all the frills present at the other kosher
establishments that profess to cater to non-Jews. The restaurant’s
gilded ceilings, tall candles gracing its tables, the metal detector one
has to pass through upon entering the synagogue—all this puts Jerusalem
on a different playing field in comparison with most of Moscow’s new
kosher establishments. But the food, indeed, is excellent (as are views
over old Moscow from the rooftop terrace that’s open in summertime).
Jerusalem, because of its predominantly Georgian Jewish clientele, may
very well be one of Moscow’s best restaurants specializing in Georgian
cuisine. They know how to make
kharcho [19],
a spicy cherry-plum-paste-based meat-and-rice soup that is a staple of
Georgian menus, and several kinds of grilled meats that are truly out of
this world. There is little at Jerusalem that will feel trendy and
plenty that may scare off the uninitiated (Ian, a non-Jewish friend of
mine, told me that he didn’t feel entirely in his element there when his
observant Jewish ex-girlfriend had brought him there once), but
Jerusalem, unlike most of Moscow’s new kosher establishments, knows its
clientele and doesn’t need to be trendy. After all, “this is a bear,” as
Boyarin said at dinner, “that doesn’t have to dance at all.”
***
Contact information:
Farmers Bazaar [20] (market)
Address: 15/1 Tsvetnoy Boulevard, Moscow
Subway station: Tsvetnoy Boulevard
Phone: +7 (495) 234-24-12
Jerusalem (fleishig restaurant)
Address: 6 Bolshaya Bronnaya Street, Moscow
Subway stations: Pushkinskaya, Chekhovskaya, Tverskaya
Phone: +7 (495) 690-62-66
Jewish Community Center (milchig and fleishig restaurants on premises)
Address: 2nd Vysheslavtsev pereulok, 5A, Moscow
Subway stations: Maryina roshcha, Novoslobodskaya, Mendeleevskaya
Phone: +7 (495) 645-50-00 (milkhig); +7 (495) 231-27-77 (fleishig)
Misada [21] (fleishig restaurant)
Address: Presnenskaia naberezhnaia, 2 (inside “Afimoll” shopping center)
Subway stations: Vystovochnaya, Mezhdunarodnaya
Phone: +7 (499) 408-01-06
Noodles [22] (fleishig restaurant)
Address: 15-17/1 Bolshoy Cherkasskiy pereulok, Moscow
Subway stations: Lubyanka, Okhotny Riad, Kitay-Gorod
Phone: +7 (495) 623-53-96
Shokoladnitsa [23] (milchig, kosher branch of larger chain)
Address: 32/1 Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Street, Moscow
Subway station: Mayakovskaya
Phone: +7 (495) 935-73-54
Tel Aviv [24] (fleishig restaurant)
Address: 30/1 Tsvetnoy Boulevard, Moscow
Subway station: Tsvetnoy Boulevard
Phone: + 7 (495) 964-01-45
Zucker [25] (fleishig restaurant)
Address: 12/2 Bolshoy Kozikhinskiy pereulok, Moscow
Subway stations: Pushkinskaya, Chekhovskaya, Tverskaya, Mayakovskaya
Phone: +7 (495) 695-73-55
