The best day ever: how to spend a delicious weekend in St. Petersburg
With the onset of spring, weekend tourist trips to St. Petersburg are gaining popularity again. In the city on the Neva, restaurateurs are well aware of this seasonal feature and invariably try to prepare for it as best they can. How to arrange a little trip with taste — in the material of Izvestia.
The beginning is the business half
It is best to arrive in St. Petersburg by night express or early Peregrine Falcon — then there will be a full day ahead, full of a variety of activities. You can plan long walks around the city, visits to museums, trips to the theater or to a concert. But first of all, you need to refresh yourself.
Finding a place in St. Petersburg where you can have a cup of coffee with a croissant is not a problem. But having a full, high-quality and delicious breakfast in the vicinity of, say, Moskovsky railway station is already more difficult. The Marius restaurant at the Helvetia Hotel on Marata Street, which has long been well known to guests of the Northern Capital, is still among the checked places. The menu includes fiery shakshuka and tender benedict, bicher muesli with oatmeal and chia with kefir, pork and pies. However, first of all, you should look here for branded cheesecakes with jam and sour cream.
Pass the equator
You can also return to Marius for a light lunch, as chef Alexander Bogdanov recently launched a small lean menu. Guests are offered a vinaigrette of baked root vegetables with pickled cabbage, cauliflower cream soup with vegetable caviar, mushroom roast, zucchini pasta with mushrooms, young cabbage steak with mushroom sauce, and for dessert, a chocolate cake, of course, is also lean.
Those who are interested in modern experiments in the field of Russian cuisine and do not adhere to strict fasting should definitely take a look at the "Change" on Petrogradskaya Embankment. In the new project of the famous St. Petersburg chef and restaurateur Dmitry Blinov, you can taste, for example, beef tartare with young cheese and adjika, rich borscht with smoked duck and prunes, a pancake generously stuffed with crab meat (Blinov, by the way, does not hide his ardent love for this particular dish), stewed beef tongue with ice cream horseradish, rabbit kidneys with port wine and celery, Ladoga walleye with pike caviar, beef rib with spelt, baked beetroot with vanilla honey and sage, and for dessert — shu with dill mousse.
Everything is prepared in the signature pancake style — original, daring, sometimes on the verge of provocation, but without extremes, with attention to detail and respect for the original product. However, even here it was not without classics in the form of a fire cutlet with mashed potatoes.
Evening diving
In the evening, you can plan a visit to an institution with a more intricate gastronomic program. For example, take a look at the Regions restaurant on Zhukovsky Street and taste the author's new set with the intriguing title "Anatomy of a Paradox". According to its creator, chef Maxim Razhnev, each serving carries an additional, not always obvious meaning, and the guest is invited to unravel it.
However, if we discard the otherwise unobvious storytelling, we can say that the set turned out to be solid and even. It includes, for example, rye gate with mushroom cream, black truffle and mushroom tea, solyanka with fried scallop and smoked rib broth, roe deer fillet with mashed coffee and gorgonzola and wakame sauce, Kiev cutlet with crab and milkshake with black caviar. Everything seems to be recognizable, but at the same time unusual, with intricate gastronomic puzzles and a fair amount of culinary humor.
If you want some good old classics, it's worth getting to the Cristal restaurant on Sinopskaya Embankment. The list of products includes about everything that can be found in the seas surrounding Russia — oysters, crabs, scallops, rapan, sea urchins, caviar, and a variety of red and white fish. From all this luxury, chef Valery Poryadin has put together a rather spacious, but at the same time, an exquisite menu in a pan-Asian style.
You can start with an assortment of sashimi, oshizushi with eel and salmon carpaccio with olive and anchovy tapenade. Then move on to the squid loligo with new potatoes in a blanket sauce, rapanams with morels and champagne mousse, and pasta with scallops. Next, switch to halibut with orzo and salmon with baked pumpkin gnocchi in bearnaise sauce. And finish with a meringue cake and a signature tiramisu with seasonal berries.
As a free application, there is a magnificent view of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra and the beautiful Neva River.
My name is red
In the late evening, you can add a few vivid impressions to an intelligent gastrodosug. For this, you should go to the Maison Rouge club-restaurant on Konyushennaya Square. The entertainment program includes live music, concert performances, show ballet and advanced DJ sets - in short, everything that a decent club should have. However, there is also a full-fledged restaurant area and cozy corners for private dinners. You usually don't expect an interesting gastronomic experience from such establishments, since the food there plays a purely auxiliary role. However, the "Red House" does not fit into the usual stereotypes at all.
Local brand chefs Mikhail Lushev and Alexander Zuev, very young, but surprisingly experienced and brave, prepare excellent food, which is still to be found in "real" gourmet restaurants. It's easy to see this by tasting, for example, dorado crudo with tomato and citrus dressing, crab salad with grapefruit, linguini with smoked ricotta, octopus with peppery berblanc or puff pastry pie with oxtails.
Surprisingly, there are no passing positions here. Each dish is expertly and expertly executed.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
