La Bottega Siciliano, Moscow
"Moscow Notebook:
A Dangerous Place to Lose Weight"
by Larry C. Johnson
"Let me give you a sense of what life in Russia is actually like right now - not the version you get from the wire services, but the one you get walking around, sitting down to dinner, talking to the people who live here. I don’t want to turn this into a food review. But I can’t tell you about Moscow this week without telling you about the food, because the food is telling you something about the country.
Start with an Italian restaurant called La Bottega Siciliana. It sits about a hundred yards across from the Metropole Hotel, tucked in behind the Four Seasons. It serves the best pizza I have ever eaten - anywhere, full stop - and the rest of the menu is right there with it. I’ve been enjoying it with my friend Pepe Escobar, and I suspect the two of us are putting on a few pounds in the service of research.
Then there’s Cantinetta Antinori, near the old Arbat. Walk in and you’d swear you were in Italy. This is where I had the best lasagna of my life - it carries a faint smoky flavor that I’ve never tasted in the dish before, and it is simply sensational. I had the lasagna at La Bottega Siciliana too, and it’s excellent, but nothing touches the Antinori version. Stick with the pizza at La Bottega and the lasagna at Antinori and you cannot go wrong.
That’s the setup for the real point, which I’ll come back to: Russia is a modern country. Go to St. Petersburg, come to Moscow - you have to work to find a bad restaurant. The ingredients are fresh, the chefs are serious, and the culinary talent is exceptional. Hold that thought against everything you’ve been told about a country supposedly buckling under sanctions.
Lunch with a “sanctioned oligarch”
Today I had lunch with Alexander Babakov, a member of the Duma. Alexander is on the U.S. sanctions list - go figure. The whole thing is insane. He is not some conspiring oligarch with nefarious designs on the United States. He’s a regular guy and a good legislator, and if you sat across from him you’d wonder, as I did, what exactly Washington thinks it’s accomplishing.
He was hosting a group of international election observers at a restaurant called Ryby Net — “Рыбы нет,” which means “no fish.” It’s a joke: they do serve a little seafood, but it’s primarily a meat house, and a superb one.
The table was a small United Nations. There was a porteño from Buenos Aires - that’s what they call the guys from the Argentine capital - and since I once lived in Córdoba, we struck up an instant rapport, trading stories about carne asada and drinking mate. Two gentlemen from Spain. One from Lebanon, one from Syria. A man and a woman from Greece. A gentleman from the Congo. All of them in Moscow to observe the Russian election. And once again, the food was exceptional.
About that election: Now, the election. I’ve watched the BBC’s complaints - that it isn’t fair, that it isn’t competitive. Here is what I can tell you from the street.
Eleven political parties are running. Eleven. I’ve seen no effort to suppress any of them - nobody trying to put up a sign and getting tackled or dragged away. The parties are out there, their positions stated plainly, competing for votes. My honest expectation is that the result will be a ringing endorsement of Vladimir Putin’s policies.
What makes this Duma election different from the last one is geography. For the first time, votes are being cast in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, along with Crimea - four oblasts that did not vote five years ago and whose voices will now be counted.
Here’s the number I’ll be watching. If Putin’s bloc falls below 310 seats in the Duma, that would tell you there’s real unhappiness with the pace of the war - and not, I’d wager, because Russians want it to stop. If anything, it would be an expression that the Russian people want a stronger, more severe posture. But we won’t have the real picture until Monday, so I’ll hold my observations until the count is in.
The voice of Russia: I also sat for an interview today with a correspondent from Radio Sputnik, and it put me in mind of a piece of history. During the Great Patriotic War, the voice of Russia belonged to a man named Yuri Levitan. It was Levitan who announced the Nazi invasion on June 22, 1941, and Levitan again who announced the defeat of the Nazis in 1945. His was the voice the entire country gathered around - much the way Walter Cronkite became the voice Americans trusted through Vietnam. To brush up against that lineage, sitting in a Moscow studio, was a small thrill.
The verdict: So here is my overall read on Russia at the moment. It is a dangerous place - if you are trying to lose weight. Stay away. The food is entirely too good, too tempting, and the chefs are entirely too talented for your own good.
On the more serious question: the Russians are prepared for a good election. They’ve brought international observers in to make sure there are no shenanigans, eleven parties are on the ballot, and four newly incorporated oblasts are voting for the first time. We’ll have a far better idea of what it all means by Monday. That’s my update. Thanks for reading."
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