Dining Like a Soviet on Coney Island Ave.
Parallel Moscow
The two tremendous doors in front were shut, and there was no one resembling a doorman; finally I pushed one open. Up a few stairs was a kind of waiting area or lounge and two guys behind a reception desk, like at a hotel. I told them my friend's name and the two guys started repeating it, making it clear that not only had they never heard of him but that there was no reservation under that name, and what could I possibly think I was doing here? Seconds later my friend came in behind me, and he said hi to them?he comes here all the time, with large groups, he's Russian?and two guys behind the desk yelled back, "Nikolai!" and then looked at me only slightly sheepishly. I think they were still trying to practice Soviet manners, or maybe this kind of rudeness is just Russian behavior, but it had the effect of making me feel, well, old and ugly.
Past the lobby area is the dinner club, two huge stories tall, dancefloor in the middle, giant stage to one side, upper-floor tables on a balcony. Our table covered with food, covered?a baffling array, fish, meat, pickles, salads, as if somebody's grandmother had started to prepare things and then thought, "Oh, maybe they'll want a little something hot! I'll just toast some bread and put shrimp on it and melt some cheese on top! But what if the guests don't want fish? I know, I'll wrap up some meat in pastry crust!"
And so on and so forth.
When I was in Moscow?this was, I don't know, maybe 1990?any Russian home or restaurant I was in always displayed lavish spreads of food, but nobody Russian ever ate. They would sit staring uncomfortably, depressed, into space, as if somehow the very thought of food made them ill. But this was Brooklyn, the guests American or European or, if Russian, transplanted, so now everybody dove in. Mostly the stuff was delicious?crab claws with cocktail sauce, really sweet and smoky thick whitefish, then these peculiar shrimp-and-melted-cheese-on-toast hors d'oeuvres, and, in the Russian style, endless hordes of waiters leaning against the walls, often looking extremely busy but never actually doing anything. They had the same quality I remembered from the Russian hotel waiters on my visit. Under communism there was something demeaning about serving someone paying money for food, but they couldn't quite figure out or remember why?so they compromised by not actually doing any waitering.
There were bottles of vodka next to every other plate, which everyone kept pouring, and drinking. The noise, though: a fat guy singing with a band, then a woman (dressed in a remarkable dress, photographic images of something like cacti in the desert) singing with the man, and another woman joining in?the noise level made it impossible to communicate even after drinking vodka. Made it impossible, really, even to taste the food.
I've come to believe the aural and oral are connected?for me, anyway, if a place is too noisy then the food has no flavor, as if the sound has drowned out the taste. The other diners, at the other tables, mostly Russian-American families, in big groups, out celebrating?this place was actually crowded, with a clientele of middle-class Brooklynites?were that night at least more family oriented, a woman in a red sequined dress, older men who were most definitely Russians from Russia (something in the facial features), a little kid with his family.
But nobody appeared as gangsterish as those I had seen on my visit to Odessa, another one of these Brooklyn places, smaller in scope and somewhat less upscale (though more Las Vegas in tawdriness) located a bit farther out in Brighton Beach. At Odessa the food was not so good. But did it really matter if the food was good or not, here at Rasputin, at 10 o'clock at night, with the noise and chaos and then the diners getting up to dance on the little dancefloor, slowly shuffling around to, I don't know, sort of Russian versions or covers of reggae songs and Ricky Martin, a kind of vague background or foreground howling accompanied by disco/techno beats...and then, back at the table, more food, lamb shanks on a platter, and perhaps the most astonishing course?deep-fried lobster tails. A gigantic platter of deep-fried lobster tails.
I suppose it made sense, in a weird way. The lobster was already in a crusty carapace, why not encase it in a second one? It was surprisingly less tough than I thought it would have been from the deep-frying?in a sort of coat of bread crumbs. But crumbs did not, let's say, help the lobster. It was as if two things had gotten mixed up in someone's head. Hey! The lobster comes in a shell you can't eat, so I'll give it a crust you can eat! Only the chef forgot this wouldn't work. It was sort of like something that might have been done in an upscale Manhattan restaurant along the lines of salty ice cream, or pepper-flavored cake?totally wrong. But at least deep-frying a lobster's tail wasn't pretentious. It seemed, in my mind at least, to come from a tradition of czarist cuisine: caviar and blini with sour cream! Chicken breasts stuffed with cream cheese!
Then the floor show?a huge production in which Vegas-style showgirls and -boys danced to musical numbers with various themes (one about China, the dancers in pagoda hats; a Siberian number where they were clad in white, fluffy, faux-ermine mini-frocks; an English routine with umbrellas; a German-Dutch disco-dance with a wooden-clog tap-dance and fake-beer-kegs-juggling), all oddly, startlingly charming?either a throwback in time to an earlier Broadway or a present-day cruise ship entertainment.
The whole time I kept thinking of the cleverness of the costume designer, and the cute blonde showgirls tap-dancing frantically?so this was why their parents had escaped Soviet Russia, so their kids could end up putting on a show, right here in Brooklyn. And, who knew where this would take them. And, after the hourlong show was finished, the food kept coming?now for some reason a platter of lamb chops, only seconds after the platter of lamb shanks were whisked away. I kept begging the waiters for the leftovers. (I had, alas, agreed to dog-sit two dogs, and was desperate to bribe them; and those lamb chops, I could feed one to my kid.) Huge platters of leftover meat?what were they going to do with it all? I wanted the half-eaten stuff; surely the waiters weren't going to take that home. Now I understood why there were no windows in this place: outside the starving peasants were howling.
Each time the waiter nodded, then took away the plates and never brought me the wrapped remains, until finally after endless pleas one gave me a huge thin plastic bag, into which I was apparently meant to sling the desired portion from the huge, shamefully untouched platters and the plates upon which sat lamb chops with only one bite removed. Inevitably I saw how I would exit leaking. Now the guests were staring at the plates with that same dull Russian expression of depression...though there were probably endless more courses to come, slowly we said our goodbyes, wandering out past the red-uniformed waiters, the two scowling maitre d's.
After my trip to Russia (pre-putsch by about a year), at a time when things were slowly loosening up over there but still quite grim, I used to wander around Brighton Beach and marvel?how it was sort of a parallel Moscow, everybody speaking Russian but the stores full of food, and the shops full of items and the restaurant menus not simply lists of food but food one could actually order?an alternative Russia, or a better Russia, or a fake, Disneyland Russia?and I would think, what if there were a kind of reverse United States someplace? I don't know, in a biosphere on Mars, or that Walt Disney town that I've never been to, a kind of perfect, improved America. But then, to me, the States was already a kind of fake place; how could you fake a fake place?
One day I know I'll get back to Russia. In the meantime, at least, I might slowly come to believe that Russia is a country of blondes in cowboy hats and high-heeled cowboy boots kicking their legs in disco/square-dance routines, snacking on deep-fried lobster tails. And maybe, by the time I get there, that's what it will be.