Gourmet everyday life – Style

Gastronomic adventures of an Italian in Russia

Mirko Zago is an Italian chef who spent almost half of his life in Russia. 24 years ago he came to Moscow at the invitation of Arkady Novikov, fell in love with this city and stayed here forever.

For Moscow gastronomy, Mirko’s name is significant, because he went through a long and thorny path with his Italian restaurants from popular shrimp with arugula to high gastronomy. Many people remember Mirko from the Cheese restaurant, which opened in 2001, where he began experimenting with Russian products.

With the new set “Russian Fairy Tales”, which Mirko presented at the Onest restaurant, he opened almost a new chapter. The new set menu is replete with familiar names, but if you break down each dish into its ingredients, it turns out that not everything is as simple as it seems. The menu has only six chapters, where Russian names are intertwined with Italian specialties.

The first chapter with appetizers offers three starters that are based on the pillars of Russian cuisine. “Bread and Salt”, where unusual pastries like miniature bagels, made from traditional Italian grissini breadsticks, are served with Korean carrot-flavored sunflower oil. So the chef fantasizes what Italian pastries could be like in Russian guise. Cappuccino noo is obviously an ironic snack based on the fact that Russians drink cappuccino at any time of the day (Italians only drink it in the morning). Mirko sees this dish as borscht, in a small cup with a foamy crab bisque sauce.

“Sausage and mash” looks like this familiar dish in the classic version, but in fact the sausage is made from scallops and served with mashed potatoes with black truffle. The famous “herring under a fur coat” appears here in the form of an oyster “under a fur coat” with celery, sea buckthorn and tangerine.

As a pre-dessert, Mirko serves a traditional Russian dish that he has loved for two decades: fluffy crespelle pancakes with a sweet “bag” (with jam from garden berries), and the set ends with panettone with pine nuts, lingonberries, honey and apricot, as an ode fermentation processes. All dishes are paired with wines of Russian origin, but you can also choose a non-alcoholic pairing.

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High gastronomic dictionary “Kommersant Style”

The wave of popularity of oriental cuisine in Moscow does not subside. Some menus are sometimes full of completely unfamiliar names. Today we will tell you what lahmajun is. “Lahmajun” is translated from Arabic as “dough with meat.” Indeed, lahmacun in the classic version is a very thin crispy dough with minced meat and spices, laid in the same thin, even layer. This dish is found in Turkey, Armenia, and a number of other eastern countries and resembles Italian pizza in appearance. But it is assumed that the real place of origin of lahmajun is the Turkish cities of Mardin, Gaziantep, Sanliurfa, where the most popular craft was cattle breeding, and, as a result, there was a lot of meat.

In a number of Arab countries, it is believed that the Italians copied pizza from lahmajun, but in fact there are still differences between these two dishes. Firstly, the dough for lahmacun is twice as thin as that for pizza, and is crispier and drier. Secondly, it has only one filling, and it is prepared without adding cheese.

In Moscow, you can try the perfect lahmajun at the Meat Coin meat restaurant on Smolenskaya. Turkish chef Mehmet Çalışkan serves it as a large appetizer. The preparation process is simple: a thinly rolled dough (the recipe of which is kept secret) is filled with minced beef with the addition of fresh vegetables. Lahmajun, as expected, is baked in a wood-burning oven; this appetizer is served with fresh tomatoes, a slice of lemon and herbs, which are recommended to be eaten as a bite.

The Folk restaurant of new Caucasian cuisine has gone a step further.

Mini lahmacun here is served in an oblong shape with two types of fillings: veal sausage, Circassian pear and tomato paste or mortadella and a mix of cheeses. It is offered whole on a wooden board and the satyr is cut with a special semicircular knife right in front of you.

Olga Karpova