The restaurant, which once contained a Russian grocery store, is more spacious, more atmospheric now. Log walls decorated with platok, colorful Russian scarves, plus trompe l'oeil windows painted with winter scenes and light fixtures that resemble votive candles, give the restaurant the look of an izba, a traditional Russian woodsman's hut.
Seating is at cozy booths or wooden tables, on wooden chairs. The menu is extensive, far more so than it was when the restaurant opened six years ago. Chef Oleg Basov, one of the waitresses told me, came here for six months to help Groisman start the restaurant. He's still manning the stoves.
If you come with Russians, it's likely you'll be served tiny thimbles of exotic vodkas, flavored with pepper or horseradish. We opted instead for bottles of Baltika, a lager beer with a smooth finish, and later, a mysterious red wine from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, made from a grape called Saperani. The wine, slightly sweet, has a spicy and fruity character unlike any other wine you're likely to have tasted.
Russians love their zakuskis, appetizers eaten with those endless toasts and Kazakh dances, and these dishes are, to my mind, the best things in Russian cooking and also the best dishes here. First among equals is Siberian pelmeni, a dozen meat ravioli in a ceramic pot, along with sour cream and a heady snootful of chopped dill.
There are also grandmother's pirogi, palm-sized stuffed buns with yeasty crusts and fillings fashioned from minced, spiced cabbage, pork or mushrooms. Each is delicious. I just wish that the kitchen would heat them in a toaster oven instead of the microwave so that their naturally springy textures wouldn't be compromised.
Cold appetizers are more plentiful, and several are excellent. Stolichny salad is a blend of turkey, vegetables and mayonnaise, a Slavic take on chicken salad that I like to schmear on slices of the house black bread, the generic term for Russian rye.
"Boyarsky" platter contains various jellied meats and cold cuts. Tipsy salmon is cognac-marinated smoked salmon arranged in a floral swirl, also excellent with black bread and the piquant house pickles. The only cold dish I don't care for, in fact, is marinated mushrooms. It's a generous portion of whole mushrooms, but the marinade is a sweet rather than a salty one, and the flavors don't mesh well. In fact, Russian cooking is often sweet, sometimes distressingly so when it comes to sauces and cold vegetable dishes.
Soups, though, are wonderful, including the famous beet soup borscht, eaten with sour cream on top. I'd go back anytime for solianka, a meat soup laced with olives and pickles that tastes like nothing else. There is also the wonderful monastry fish soup, a rich golden broth with pieces of salmon and sturgeon in the bowl.
I prefer Russian entrees when they are grilled or sautéed as opposed to stewed or drenched in sauces. One of my favorites is chicken tabaka, grilled baby chicken squashed to pancake thinness. It's another refugee from Georgia, a garlic-loving place if there ever was one—this bird, a crisp-skinned masterpiece, is redolent of the stinking rose.
Shashlik is Russian for kebab, but unlike those in the Middle East, it's made of pork. Beef stroganoff is thinly sliced beef in a rich sour cream sauce with onions and mushrooms, not in large chunks, the way it might be in an American frozen-food version. It's served on buckwheat kernels, a delicious, whole-grain pilaf that is rarely eaten in this country.
Do try Caucauses stew, which looks like one of those country-style chicken pot pies, with a huge pastry hat protruding from the top. It's actually a spicy lamb stew, stuffed with beans, peppers, assorted vegetables and yes, loads of garlic. But pass on skolbyanka-grilled sturgeon in a cloying white wine sauce, and forget "quail nest," a pot of sauce and a few unidentifiable pieces of quail floating somewhere under the surface.
With the main dishes, you can add side dishes like Pushkin potatoes (first boiled, then fried) or fried mushrooms, which don't have the sweetness of the marinated ones but rather a light, crunchy batter that makes them far more appealing.
For dessert, there are several incarnations of crepes, or blinis, if you will, doused with chocolate sauce or filled with strawberries, or a more Russian hunk of sponge cake and fresh fruit, topped with aerosol-strength whipped cream.
We may never see another Olympiad of Eastern European cooking around here, but it is nice to know that Artem is still bearing its torch.