EASTERN Europe is cool. Listen to the style counsels: you
wear a Russian watch; you go to see Czechoslovak plays; and you eat at Polish restaurants. True, Daquise is where you go if you are actually Polish, but Wodka is where you go if you are merely fashionable. For the past year (the res- taurant actually opened at the end of 1988 but it took a few months to catch on), this is where the beautiful people have been meeting. The lamb's-lettuce brigade opting for dumplings? This is nothing short of a cultural revolution.
But Wodka is not so much a Polish restaurant as a restaurant that serves Polish food, or, as Dr Jonathan Miller might say, Pole-ish food. Its owner, Jan Woroniecki, is a half-Polish photographer who thought it would be fun to run a restaurant in his spare time, but has since had to turn his photography into a hobby. He doesn't speak much Polish, but knows what Polish food should taste like and how much of it his clientele can take. Which means that his menu, while sticking to the real thing, is more keen to give his customers a 'feel of what kind of food it is'.
But for all his pre-emptive disclaimers, the food is authentic enough — barszcz, ogorkowa (the dill and cucumber soup imported more successfully by emigres to America), pierogi and blini are the main- stay of the starter list. And the blini are superb, hot, absorbent sponges to be eaten with the traditional Russian accompani- ments of smoked salmon, caviar, cream cheese or herring, but so much better, even, with garlic-soused aubergine purée or a mound of cream cheese.
Since I am paid to be greedy, I went for the grand selection and had a bit of everything with the blini. Actually, it's a lot of everything. As Lesley Chamberlain writes in her magisterial Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe, the idea of lightness flits across Polish food and quickly vanishes'.
But even if you have to stop eating for a week afterwards, this shouldn't put you off the pierogi — generous pockets of pasta stuffed with sauerkraut and mushrooms, sprinkled with fat, hot, cubes of bacon.
But if either of these choices makes a main course hard to contemplate, don't worry. For some reason, restaurants nearly always seem to do better with the starters than with the main courses, and it's true here. I would stick with the blini and pierogi, and perhaps a plate of herring with apple and sour cream. The main courses aren't bad, they're just not as good.
In Poland pork is a much favoured meat, here flavoured with honey (the Pole has a sweet tooth) and cranberries. The meat was tender, the sauce perhaps slightly sweet for Western tastes, but the whole less robust than it would be if cooked by a Pole for Poles.
The same was true of the venison with mixed berries. The sauce was a thin, sweetened reduction, which owed more to the reductions of nouvelle cuisine than the rich, fruit-studded, gloopy sauces of the Eastern bloc. More successful was the kulebiak, really a Russian rather than Polish speciality — salmon, layered and rolled with puff pastry, dill and rice, mushrooms and vesiga (the dried back- bone of sturgeon). 'The kulebiaka should be appetising, shameless in its nakedness, an invitation to sin,' says one of Chekhov's characters in The Siren. Here the kulebiak is short on voluptuousness (and the vesi- ga), the size and shape of a McDonald's apple pie rather than the expansively curved and swaddled form it should per- fectly be. Still, as you break through the pastry, the warm, dill-rich air which escapes has its own modest promise, but one that is fulfilled.
Drink not wine with these but a glass of cold Polish beer or one of the many flavoured vodkas. I can vouch for only two of them — the honey vodka, which is served hot and I guarantee will stave off any cold — or sobriety — that may be lurking, or the plum burn of sliwowica. Wodka's Ltd, 12 St Albans Grove, London W8; tel 071 937 6513.
Nigella Lawson
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