upping the chianti
Does Moscow really need another Italian restaurant? Probably not, but it could always do with another outstanding one. Chianti, one of the five daughters of Alexander Rassokhin on Leningradsky Prospekt, just happens to be Italian too.
PHOTO ALEXEI VIKTOROV / TEXT FRANCIS MERSON feedback
On my last vacation I discovered a place that has even more Italian restaurants than Moscow. It’s called Venice. There, on the cobbled streets of La Serenissima, pizzerias are outnumbered only by gondoliers and slack-jawed tourists from the Midwest. But seriously, is there any city outside of Italy that has more pasta per square meter than Moscow? What is it about Italian food that so excites the Russian taste bud? Is it the mixture of the rustic and the refined? The combination of simple ingredients and complex taste? Are these rhetorical questions actually leading anywhere? Perhaps not. New Italian eatery Chianti certainly couldn’t provide us with the answers. In fact, the food was so good we even forgot what the questions were. Chianti is one of five conjoined quintuplets on the stretch of Leningradsky Prospekt between Dinamo and Aeroport metro stations. Owner of the whole strip Alexander Rassokhin has left no room for competition by opening a restaurant for every ethnicity and style that Moscow likes. Hankering for a hookah? Go to Golden Bukhara. Hungry for seafood? Dive into Seatoria. Wife kicked you out again? Drink your way to a divorce at Pivnaya Bochka. The addition of an Italian restaurant to this mini-Empire seemed only a matter of time. It was. One year, to be precise, and when you enter the main dining room of Chianti you’re amazed it didn’t take longer. Industrious hands have painted murals depicting a Florentine landscape of terracotta roofs and undulating hills, framed by windowsills and skirting hewn from Italian marble. But the centerpiece of the room is a chandelier in the form of a flurry of autumn leaves, each of which is of a different hue. It’s not quite kitsch, but it’s not quite tasteful either. In other words, it’s Italian. The decor strikes that characteristic balance between the rustic and the opulent: it’s like the residence of a goat-herder who has been asked to redecorate a Venetian palazzo. A liveried server, proffering menus in English and Russian, approached us as soon as we sat down. The dining room is so compact that the waiters could not ignore you even if they wanted to. Still, the feeling is cozy rather than cramped, thanks to the impressive open kitchen at one end of the room. For starters, we opted for the pan fried sea scallops on a bed of mixed salad and asparagus (480 rubles) and the Caccuco — seafood and fish soup with garlic croutons (390 rubles). The scallops were burnished with a golden crust and packed with sweet juice, in contrast to the bitter, fresh and crunchy leaves of arugula and lettuce. The tomato-based soup, flanked by two oysters, was hearty without being rich, and contained a whole swag of crustaceans. The lag between the starters and the mains could have been a tad shorter, but we had a bottle of the wonderfully balanced and oaky 2004 Wirra Wirra Church Block (2,250 rubles) to keep us entertained. The grilled salmon (440 rubles), cloaked in an ostensibly simple tomato sauce, turned out to contain a cocktail of tarragon and fresh spinach. The salmon split apart beautifully under the lightest pressure of a fork to reveal steaming, pink, delicious flesh. The black spaghetti (410 rubles) saw the same fresh seafood woven into strands of al dente pasta. Although the black spaghetti is imported, all other pasta at Chianti is made in-house. The dessert menu has a standard array of classics, like tiramisu for 310 rubles and panacotta for 290 rubles. After two ample courses of outstanding Italian nosh, we had no doubts as to the quality of the desserts, and left them for another day. Chef Kirill Shustrov, who has worked under Mirco Dzago at Syr, has risen from the ranks of protege to visionary at Chianti, where he plans to introduce daily specials and make continual changes, seasonal and otherwise, to the menu. Mid-range Italian is the sushi of Moscow 2007, and element has already reviewed at least ten pizza and pasta joints this year. On entering Chianti I thought the last thing the city needed was another Italian eatery. Now I admit I was wrong — it just needed a decent one. |
