Happy Anniversary to us

Last night Jeremy and I went out for a belated celebration of our fourth wedding anniversary.  We decided to hit Cafe Pushkin.  We sat in the library.

Let me tell ya - that place is fancy.  You can tell by the service.  We don't eat out that much on account of, you know, kids. Also everything here is a bit spendy.  But we've eaten out enough to know that expressions of boredom and vague disgust are the norm, and that, sometimes, you have to practically beg serving staff to take your order.  Not so at Pushkin.  The waiters also speak English.  I'm really curious how much they are paid.


We started off our meal with pirozhki - Russian savory filled pastries.  We got the salmon and the lamb.  They were tasty, but it was odd to me to spend $5 on something that my mom used to make using Pillsbury crescent dough.  (My mom's pirozhki are very tasty - these were also good, but not $5-a-pop good).

For the appetizer course, Jeremy ordered a cold foie gras served cranberry and apple jellies, and green salad on the side.  We were both keen to try foie gras, since everyone's always using it on Top Chef and neither of us had ever tasted it.  In this dish, it didn't have a lot of flavor, and we were wondering what all the fuss was about.  But the presentation was pretty cool. The leaf and stem are made of sugar, and the core bit in the bottom is a clove.

 
I ordered the borscht, as recommended by a friend.  I had been pretty set on NOT getting borscht, since I grew up on it and it seemed like an odd thing to me to order in a fancy restaurant.  But I'm glad I did.  The borscht I grew up on was vegetarian, and kind of tasted like beet-and-cabbage water (blech), and this was definitely not.  It had bits of fried goose breast in it, and apples and honey and was just awesome.  Note to self: Learn to make non-vegetarian borscht.

For my main course, I got a fried duck breast with cherry sauce, cherry risotto, pears and foie gras ravioli.  Finally we understood the hype about foie gras.  The ravioli was delicious - my favorite part of the entire meal.  The duck was good too, as was the cherry risotto (I was skeptical).  The cherries themselves had been soaked in liquor and were like little alcohol bombs.  No thanks.

Jeremy got pan-seared tuna with crab ravioli and black noodles.  There was a weird tomato-dill salsa under the noodles that didn't seem to go with the dish at all, other than aesthetically.  We don't know what the red boat thing was.  We assumed it was edible, but it was very hard - like an incredibly stale tortilla. Still, the tuna was fantastic, as were the crab raviolis (if very hard to photograph).

For dessert, Jeremy got a pistachio cake that also had strawberries, strawberry jam, and a meringue on top.  Then they doused the whole thing with flaming liquor.  That was cool, but hard to photograph, too.

I got a "candle of chocolate."  There was cake, cream, more drunken cherries and some fudgy chocolate in there.  Good - except for the drunken cherries.

I'm glad we went, but we probably won't be going back.  We can't afford it!  Happy Anniversary to us, though!