Café St. Petersburg

An example is the venigret ($3.25). This is the salad of cooked beets, potatoes, and a few carrots known all over the world as Russian salad (salade russe, ensalada rusia . . . ), and served everywhere with a gloppy mayonnaise dressing. Here it is modernized with a simpler vinaigrette for a cleaner look and more direct flavor -- and it's one of my favorite light lunches of the year.

Across the lengthy lunch and dinner menus of Café St. Petersburg are such neatly made and brightly flavored dishes. The very occasional weak spot is a dish that's simply too refined, as in a cabbage soup ($2.50 at lunch) that was clear-broth vegetable soup with no real flavor of cabbage. Or one can hit an overlong streak of dill, as we did at a dinner splitting up a sampler appetizer of vegetable zakuska ($8.95): the eggplant caviar was unusually and attractively spiced with dill; the marinated mushrooms were typically spiced with dill; the red-cabbage slaw was interestingly made with dill-pickled grapes -- and if you don't like dill, you were down to Georgian eggplant in walnut sauce, and our friend the venigret, which was merely sprinkled with dill.

The opening round of frozen shots of homemade cranberry vodka is a brilliant update of a Russian drinking tradition. The menu is full of such sure-to-be-copied updates. A Pozharski cutlet ($10.95, $5.50 at lunch) is just a chicken croquette with mushroom gravy, but what a meaty croquette and what a crisp, exquisite crust! I have since read that the mysterious julienne strips in the crust are actually cut from bagels. We see, and taste, more of that fine julienne technique in a series of vegetarian pancakes at lunch. The potato pancakes ($4.25, $4.50) are soft inside, crusty outside, but the real revelation is the beet version.

At dinner, I had fried sturgeon steak ($13.95), and although sturgeon is a dense fish to be fried, the cutlet was done perfectly, the frying set off brilliantly with a cup of tamarind sauce -- it smells sweet as maple syrup but tastes more tart than lemon juice.

There is an unusual elegance in this 10-table restaurant, where the waiters wear tuxedos even at lunch. Modestly priced platters are tastefully garnished with a few well-chosen pickles here, a leaf of kale there, a tomato rose or a carved lemon. Even at lunch there is a choice of four starches, served in separate covered dishes. The choice would be the whole-grain buckwheat kasha, if you're a kasha lover. If not, the boiled potato or baked rice are blander foils for the food. The default salad is the red marinated raw cabbage, with those pickled grapes, pickled garlic cloves, and some bright-red cauliflower florets mixed in.

Of the classic Russian dishes I tried, a lot is made of the various blini. The smoked-salmon version ($12.95) is a lox-lover's dream: thick slices of smoked salmon, beautifully made buckwheat pancakes (as I had come to expect, very mild on the buckwheat), and sour cream. You roll your own at table, and it is a heavenly combination. If you can hold back and take some home, a great breakfast as well.

"Sibirian Pelimeni" ($8.50) is a little dish of beef dumplings, sort of milder Peking ravioli, in a covered crock, with sour cream. Chicken tabaka ($11.95) is a good-looking rendition of the Georgian dish, flat-fried under a press. This is usually served with a pickled hot sauce, and thus was the tastiest dish in the former Soviet repertoire. St. Petersburg keeps the attractive presentation, but drops the hot sauce, substituting a refreshing dill vinegar.

The wine list has been cut back a little since the opening, but still includes Georgian champagne as well as beer, Russian mineral water, and European-style unsweetened fruit juices.

Desserts are basically a tray of unexceptional French pastries ($3.50-$5). You may well want to split one to accompany the truly exceptional Turkish coffee ($3.50). It's the thick stuff, boiled with the grounds, and served in a hemi-semi-demitasse, a porcelain cup in a silvery holder. When you've finished, swirl the grounds and turn the cup upside down. Wait a few minutes and you can read fortunes in the drippings. Mine looked to me like a poodle typing on a laptop -- on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog -- inside the belly of a fish. Go figure.

The interior detail exhibits the food's knack for incorporating both folk and imperial motifs. This is apparently an ideal of contemporary Russian culture, as we see it in most of the excellent wall art, framed paintings, and prints. There are three chandeliers for ten tables. The tables are covered with what my mother would call green babushkas, which are in turn covered with plexiglass. Actually many restaurants this popular would have added two or three more tables by removing the upright piano, but St. Petersburg is committed to live music, Gypsy and classical, three nights a week.

It was widely discussed at the fall of Communism that the new Eastern Europe was now more classically European (i.e., less Americanized) than the West. St. Petersburg seems to me to embody this with a cool neoclassicism, almost like that of Prokofiev. Oddly, the background music has not hit that note yet. The restaurant opened playing piano themes from the musical South Pacific, but has since worked into schmalzier Russian classical music.