TrendSpace continues the series of materials “Your Own Business” - about how young residents of the metropolis establish their own brands, doing what they love, and what difficulties they face in doing so. In the new issue, restaurant critics Olga Ovcharova and Katya Kalina talk about how they find a new home for furniture from closed restaurants with the help of garage sales Fucking Chairs.

Katya Kalina

Olga Ovcharova

What makes Fucking Chairs unique?

Firstly, no one before us cared about the fate of furniture from closed restaurants. And its fate, as a rule, is sad: armchairs and chests of drawers bought for a million dollars are sent first to a warehouse, and then to a landfill. Secondly, the niche for inexpensive but interesting furniture was empty. If you are not a millionaire, welcome to IKEA - in fact, there were no more options. Therefore, we came up with a unique business case, which is now being described at lectures in Skolkovo. We do not have our own showroom or catalogue. The team tours to different venues, holding private sales once or twice a month. To get to them, you need to write a personal message on the page www.facebook.com/fchairs or send a request via direct message on Instagram www.instagram.com/fchairs. Registration is limited: the invitation (and along with it detailed instructions) is received by only the first 500 people who write. At the same time, the assortment is changing so rapidly that the buyer literally has about five minutes to think about whether they need this sofa or not. After all, he is so one, one and only.

How come Fucking Chairs became not just a furniture sale, but a social event?

In the very first months of work, we realized that we were bored and uninterested in organizing another furniture showroom. What was needed was drive, its own unique atmosphere. Therefore, we began recording our own playlist for each sale, pouring sparkling wine, arranging furniture on the site in such a way that colors and textures were ideally combined, holding themed sales and inviting our creatively minded friends to participate. After all, it’s important for us not just to sell a chair, but for people to come to us as if it were a holiday, and even if they left without buying, it’s not a problem, but they had fun, and next time they’ll definitely come back and won’t leave empty-handed. For example, the summer before last we had a “British” sale: everyone measured cylinders, took pictures in the cars that our partners Rolls-Royce lent us, and behaved like real ladies and gentlemen. Together with Vlada Lesnichenko (a well-known wine promoter and the author of half the wine lists in this city - TrendSpace note) we came up with the Fucking Wines by Fucking Chairs project and regularly save expensive wines from the stocks of wine trading companies from an inglorious death, selling them at half price. This summer we will definitely try to implement our long-standing idea and do something together with the Detail school and the Local Food Market. And, besides, we are now looking for some nice young brand of T-shirts and sweatshirts to start a collaboration with.

How do you choose a location for a sale?

Of course, we are fashionable guys and choose sites accordingly. Fucking Chairs has existed since February 2015, and during this time we managed to organize several sales at the Danilovsky, Central and Usachevsky markets, “Flacon” and the Badaevsky plant. In addition, when a restaurant closes or moves somewhere, it’s most convenient to conduct a sale right in it - this is how we completely sold out “Pavilion”, “Brown Fox and the Lazy Dog”, Door 19, “Hugo”, Elements and “15 Sisters”. There were also unobvious, but no less cool places - for example, the Illskill Jumble tuning studio in Sokolniki, where they do tattoos, shave, cut hair, pump up cars and even fry steaks - the whole package!

Does it happen that restaurants that sell furniture with your help also become your customers?

Oh, this happens all the time! I sold the chairs and bought a sofa in return, and everyone is fine. There are especially many buyers among regional restaurateurs, and these guys don’t stop on the same couch. Often they buy out the restaurant almost entirely, eliminating the need to spend money on a designer. Thus, with our direct participation, the atmosphere of the well-known Ragu establishment was completely moved to permanent residence in Sochi.

Are you planning to hold sales in the regions?

There were such plans, but we understand that purchasing power in Moscow is much higher. We are strategically interested in St. Petersburg - this is a completely different market, with a different taste and its own traditions, but we are too demanding of partners, so for now our status is “in search.”

What difficulties do you face most often?

Naturally, it’s not easy to open a pop-up on a new unfamiliar site in one weekend, which involves installation and dismantling with the participation of a dozen truckloads of furniture. Even if we plan everything to the smallest detail (which is what we usually do), something always goes wrong - the human factor comes into force, and here it is important to be flexible, solve problems with lightning speed and never panic.

What can you buy from you that cannot be purchased anywhere and never?

Our assortment is a real chest of jewels! In the 2000s, restaurateurs spared no expense on interiors, thanks to which we now sell very high-quality and originally expensive furniture from well-known European brands, and not necessarily very shabby. After all, restaurants often close without being open for even a year. We send everything that needs reupholstery or repair for restoration, never forgetting about our mission - to extend the life of old things. We are constantly looking for new workshops for cooperation, where young designers create unique designer items, and give them a platform for sale. And with each sale, Fucking Chairs has more and more such partners, which we are incredibly happy about. Well, besides, we often buy fabrics ourselves and order our fellow craftsmen completely new things based on our own sketches. The main thing is that any furniture that gets into our networks should ultimately be inexpensive; price is generally an important part of our concept. Where else can you buy armchairs from the legendary Lebanese brand Bokja for 15,000 rubles, leather Fendi chairs for only 13,000 rubles, or a velvet red chair with gold plated from The Most, on which Deripaska sat, for only 10,000 rubles, and immediately wash your purchase with sparkling wine? Only at Fucking Chairs.

Who is your audience?

Young families who have just bought an apartment, people furnishing their country houses, and, of course, many interior designers in search of rare furniture treasures come to us. We adore our customers - they are fashionable, positive, cheerful, open, these people are not just interested in saving money, they are interested in finding something like that, with history. That's why everyone asks us where we got this chair, this chest of drawers, this banquette. And we are happy to tell stories about who created this furniture or who sat on it. Satisfied customers send us photographs of our (and now their) furniture in their interiors. And some houses on Rublyovka are almost entirely furnished with furniture from Fucking Chairs sales, but shhhh...

Has your assortment changed over the two-plus years of the project’s existence?

Of course, what ends up in our networks directly depends on trends in the restaurant market. First there was the era of golden toilets and crocodile chairs, which quickly moved from closed establishments to us and were sold for pennies - to the hooting of citizens and champagne. Nowadays, interior nihilism and stripped walls are in vogue, which means that Tolix and Eames chairs and all sorts of things from lofts regularly come to us. The latest restaurant fashion, however, is the return of luxury: people seem to miss palm trees in tubs, starched tablecloths, and the crystal shine of chandeliers and decanters. Therefore, new projects of restaurant trendsetters are becoming more and more glamorous. Of course, no one is shouting at all corners about the cost of chandeliers or calculating the price of food in proportion to the cost of furnishings - the new luxury is modest. Well, we'll wait and see what will happen to these chandeliers.

Has anyone come along who has followed in your footsteps?

No, we still have no competitors in the market. The fact is that our business is built on personal connections - we both have been working in the restaurant industry for more than ten years (Katya - on the radio Business FM, Olya - at Time Out Moscow), and all attempts to repeat our format end up not in the most successful way for imitators .

Sandra Dimitrovich with Alexander Ibragimov, LUCE restaurant

Based on the assessment results
competent jury

it was Sergey Batukov, restaurant “The Country Which Does Not Exist”.

Last week, young chefs from the Arkady Novikov Group of Companies met in the open kitchen of the pan-Asian restaurant Nedalniy Vostok. Young chefs presented gastronomic sets consisting of three items to the connoisseurs of haute cuisine: salad, main course and dessert. Each chef had only 20 minutes to prepare a dish, and this was in an operating restaurant, when the chefs of the “Near East” worked nearby and cooked for guests who always have the right to demand perfect service and only the best. After all, there was not a single empty seat that day!

Business FM restaurant critic Katya Kalina

TV and radio presenter Elena Usanova, restaurant critic “Business FM” Katya Kalina, columnist of the “Taste” column Sandra Dimitrovich

Before the fight, all the guests of the evening were able to appreciate the author's mini-snacks, among which special attention should be paid to candy made from Burgundy snails and sablé with eggplant caviar and risette from Sergei Batukov, tuna tartare from Alexander Ibragimov, black cod with miso sauce from Alexey Kanevsky and hummus with sesame paste, olive oil and chili pepper from Dmitry Fedoryaki.

During the event, those interested could watch every movement of the combatants in the open kitchen of the restaurant, and also take part in voting for the “People's Choice Award.” And all this - accompanied by the sparkling jokes of the popular presenter Gosha Kutsenko.

Heroes of the evening

But still, the main characters of the evening and the fight “Best Young Chef 2013” ​​were Sergey Batukov (restaurant “The Country Which Is Not There”), Alexander Ibragimov (restaurant LUCE), Alexey Kanevsky (restaurant “Ju-Ju”) and Dmitry Fedoryaka (restaurant Bolshoi). The jury assessed their gastronomic sets according to three parameters - presentation, taste and originality.

Competition menu

In the culinary duel, Sergey Batukov superbly demonstrated his skills in the field of haute French cuisine. He prepared Foie gras Paté with figs and foie gras creme brulee, Rack of turbot with stewed Savoy cabbage, celery root puree with sour apple and langoustine sauce, and for dessert, Chocolate mousse with nut streusel and pineapple compote.

Alexander Ibragimov served tuna tartare, salmon with asparagus with Asian-style lime dressing and chocolate caramel praline with raspberries.

Many guests were inspired by Alexey Kanevsky's dishes: Roast beef with cucumbers in a Pan-Asian style, Coulotte with Ju-Ju sauce, fried potatoes and confit onions, and for dessert - Garden strawberries with light vanilla cottage cheese.

Baked wild sea bass with artichokes and pesto sauce, Vegetable appetizer with lightly salted cod and Coffeecake with cognac ice cream - such a gastronomic variety was presented by Dmitry Fedoryaka.

Alexander Ibragimov, LUCE restaurant

The taste and presentation of the contestants’ dishes were assessed by a strict jury: Bosco di Ciliegi development director Konstantin Andrikopoulos, radio hosts Dmitry Olenin, Elena Usanova and Valery Eremenko, Business FM restaurant critic Katya Kalina and columnist for the “Taste” column Sandra Dimitrovich.

Comments from the jury: Columnist of the “Taste” column Sandra Dimitrovich, radio host Dmitry Olenin, Development Director of Bosco di Ciliegi Konstantin Andrikopoulos

The jury awarded first place to Sergei Batukov. The winner was awarded a certificate for a gastronomic trip to London. Alexander Ibragimov took second place, Alexey Kanevsky took third place, and Dmitry Fedoryaka won in the Audience Award nomination.

The jury awarded first place to Sergei Batukov. The winner was awarded a certificate for a gastronomic trip to London. Alexander Ibragimov took second place, Alexey Kanevsky took third place, and Dmitry Fedoryaka won in the Audience Award nomination.

Winner

According to the results of the vote count, Sergei Batukov won with a minimal gap - a difference of only one point. I am very happy for Sergei’s victory, because this was his first competition, and a 100% well-deserved victory. Sergey received the main prize - a gastronomic trip to London and an internship at Arkady Novikov's restaurant in London. Foie gras pate with figs from Sergei Batukov was sophisticated and refined. Excellent command of French techniques, experience, many years of internship with Paul Bocuse in Lyon and work in the Parisian restaurant Helene Darroze had an impact.

A rack of French turbot with stewed Savoy cabbage and celery root puree with sour apples and cream was a real delight. Everything is thoughtfully and clearly executed - texture, flavor combinations of celery and apples in the form of airy puree with the addition of cream, serving temperature. Everywhere one could feel the confident hand of the master and the ability to work with the product.

Stepping on your heels

A dish from another participant in the competition, Alexander Ibragimov (LUCE restaurant), left a strong impression on me: Tuna tartare with a delicate dressing with guacamole sauce, goat cheese, avocado and olive soil. Even if there was no cheese and olives, the tuna tartare with guacamole was excellent, very tender, the tuna and avocado complemented each other perfectly. After the sorbet, we were offered the second dish from Alexander for evaluation - Salmon with asparagus. Today there was not the most successful version of salmon - and as a result, the loss of one point (out of 45 possible). The dessert again exceeded all expectations. The chocolate caramel raspberry praline was perfect! I wish Alexander success, and I will certainly come to dine at the LUCE wine restaurant (this is a discovery for me). Frankly, I have never been there before, I only heard about the young and talented chef Alexander Ibragimov from his previous work at the BOLSHOI restaurant.

Good old oblivion

As they say, the new is the well forgotten old. The BOLSHOI restaurant itself is definitely worth a visit. The coffee cake with cognac ice cream from Dmitry Fedoryaki was refined, airy, and long remembered for its pleasant taste, even though it was not the first dessert in the tasting program for the jury...

The editors thank Mr. Novikov for the excellent idea of ​​holding this competition, for the opportunity to further develop and improve the skills of chefs. It was very interesting to follow the creative discoveries of young chefs during the competition, where fish was served as meat, meat as fish, and compliments were served as desserts, for example, Burgundy snail candies from Sergei Batukov.

Of course, there are no losers in this battle of chefs. Everyone who prepared for the competition and improved their professional skills is a winner. As long as we have something to strive for, new experiences are enriching.

Singer Denis Maidanov

Development Director of Bosco di Ciliegi Konstantin Andrikopoulos with his wife

It seems to me that everyone writes about food now. There are 150 thousand people on Instagram alone.

Katya Kalina: Well, if we talk about food bloggers, yes, there are a lot of them.

Anna Maslovskaya: But we’re probably not talking about blogs after all. Not about texts in the style of “I went, there were cool curtains.”

Kalina: Journalists differ from bloggers in that, for example, we often find ourselves in some unpleasant situations, at least I do. People come up to me and say - well, why did you send us there, and we came, and it was so bad, tasteless, we were deceived, we were shortchanged, in your face. This happens very often. It’s unlikely that anyone will approach a blogger this way.

Maslovskaya: If we talk about professional attitudes and specifically about The Village, then initially we had the position that we are an optimistic publication and do not write about bad places. But now it’s not quite like that anymore. We still select places that are close to us, but nevertheless we write differently. At first I was scolded for this, but now I’ve started to get used to it. But Afisha, for example, has always criticized. In my old office there was an article by Ilyin hanging on the wall, torn from a magazine, about Dolkabar. There are some horrors in every sentence, very harsh. And I didn’t understand why you even started writing about them if everything is so bad there?

Alexander Ilyin: I think they changed my life for the worse. This example is typical: Sergei Dolya has social weight and any of his projects attracts our audience.

Kalina: It seems to me that restaurants are the same sphere of our lives as others, so we need to talk about bad restaurants. So that they don’t exist, so that restaurateurs change for the better. Although there are no bad restaurants or good ones. There are tasteless food, bad products, lack of service and atmosphere. There are different shifts, waiters, a lot of nuances. It's like a bad person - in some ways he is bad, but in others he may be good.

Photo: Sergey Kostromin

Daria Tsivina, restaurant critic at Kommersant: If you go to restaurants in the first month of opening, you can immediately kill the restaurant in your review. The staff has not yet been trained, some of the furniture has not arrived, and there are still a lot of problems.

Maslovskaya: Honestly, this is exactly what I've been thinking about lately. In two weeks, several places have opened, with many questions. We have already photographed the interiors, but I don’t release the materials - I go again and think: well, it can’t be that bad, okay, I’ll come back in another 3 days. Am I doing it right or wrong? Don't know. And this is not a question of whose side I am on - the reader or the owner. When you criticize a restaurateur, you are on his side. You do not scold in order to assert yourself.

Zimin: This problem can be considered from different angles. For 10 years I was a completely ordinary restaurant critic at the Vedomosti newspaper, and my position was that I imagined the readers of the newspaper with a budget of 75 dollars and tried to write whether this money was well spent or poorly spent. At that time, the problems and troubles of restaurateurs did not interest me in any way - I was interested in a specific place and what I received in this place. And then I became a restaurateur myself and went over to the dark side, so I don’t write reviews now. Now what’s more important to me is stories, conversations with restaurateurs about their world - and the client, the guest here is just part of the landscape, and not the main character.

Kalina: This is fair, by the way. But I’m definitely always on the guest’s side.

Tsivina: I do not know. It's like asking a centipede how it moves its legs. I dont think about it. I go to a restaurant once, then it settles for a bit, then I sit down and write something. I don’t think about whether anyone will read it, I never look at the reaction to my texts from readers.

Maslovskaya: We have had cases when we wrote about a place during the day - and in the evening all the tables there were already occupied. This happened since recently. And about “Afisha”: Alena Ermakova said that when the material about her Stay Hungry came out, about 300 people knocked on the door of their group in 15 minutes. The influence is there, it’s just impossible to feel it all the time. People in Russia, unfortunately, are embarrassed to say “you have a beautiful dress” on the street. That’s why readers I don’t know praise me extremely rarely—maybe once a month. And it's nice every time. And every time I think how nice it is. Here's an example: I come to Meatball Company. I’m sitting with a friend - we ate, we sit, we’re dumb, we watch some videos, we have a day off. A company comes in: two women and a man. The man is handsome, tanned, big, with a chain around his neck - an exaggerated man from a cartoon. Not at all like what one would imagine my readers to be. However, they order food and discuss The Village:

read my text about this place and came to try it. My eyes widen. What I mean is that the most unexpected people may turn out to be your readers, and critics need to think about themselves, about their inner circle, about like-minded people. I am an idealist, so when I write, I rely on my own taste and values. I would like to awaken people’s interest in what I myself think is right and important. You will always speak one language only with a fairly narrow circle of people. The rest will have to believe.

Zimin: It's like a movie. One might ask, does film criticism influence film distribution? No. Does political journalism influence the election results in our country? The question is how the media works, and how the delivery of information from person to person works, and how a person is used to handling this information. There is a relatively traditional society that was brought up on many years of reading newspapers, one of the genres of which was restaurant criticism. Her instructions were followed or not followed in the case of a negative one. Dasha Tsivina was our first restaurant critic and was quite capable of managing the tiny Kommersant audience that she had at that time. Back then, even without restaurant criticism, people roughly knew by word of mouth where to go. And now you get information about places in a thousand different ways. Friends can tell you whether they liked or disliked all the new places, even if you didn’t ask them about it. Send links to Maslovskaya, Ilyin and anyone else, and you can get a picture of the day at the level of a kind of restaurant RSS feed. Speaking about professional criticism, it is necessary to objectively assess the scale and mode of operation of its influence. Any message that comes from Dasha or Sasha is not stamped in gold letters in the air. This is a word that is valid for a day, four days, while the transmission of this message exists in the network. Then, as always, information spreads by word of mouth.

Photo: Sergey Kostromin

Maslovskaya: The question really comes down to how good the new place is in itself. Further, the critic’s opinion can work, transmitted from person to person by personal message.

Zimin: There is an example of Novikov with his restaurant in London, which received a devastating review in the Guardian. You need to understand the structure of the London media, and that the Guardian is the local newspaper “Zavtra”. An extremely left-wing publication even by Labor standards, which is disgusted by everything connected with big capital. And accordingly, the Guardian's anger was interpreted as praise by Novikov's target audience in London. Plus any noise is somewhat useful. In Moscow, a similar effect is also slowly taking shape: if something becomes a subject of public interest, let it be a restaurant or the premiere of an opera, then you consider it necessary to form your own opinion about it. We already have a lot of people who, like going to work, go to all new restaurants, only to then scold them or, on the contrary, praise them.

Ilyin: In fact, it seems to me that the main problem with criticism is that we somehow try to find something as unusual as possible. In fact, what kind of criticism would be the most correct? Come in, order a Caesar salad and get it, because 90% of people will order that. But we are trying to find something outside of it, so things like United Kitchen warm our souls, and everyone praises it.

Maslovskaya: Here we need to talk in general about why they can and why they should trust restaurant critics and whether they should at all. Do I, Sasha, or Dasha have any special right to speak into a megaphone? We have comments on the site, and commentators always give their review - I went, that's what I think. Everyone wants to be a critic, but we are in these places. Why?

Zimin: This is already a mythological question. Can I accept a glass of beer and not reject God? You can also remember the ending of the cartoon “Ratatouille”. Any criticism is always partisan, and now in our part there has appeared the concept of the force of good, which the critic will largely support, even despite the fact that the forces of good often do things that are not supernaturally beautiful. From the point of view of eternity, discussing new mitballs is, of course, petty shade, and there is nothing to write about it. Ginza would love to open 350,000 meatball stores if it made any economic sense. Luck provokes it. Roughly speaking, meatballs, judging by their state, will not become any important trend for the next 10 years. But if Danila had managed to create a queue from the mitball shop to the Novoslobodskaya metro station, then now all the restaurant syndicates would be launched across the network. On the other hand, there is a convergence of enlightened demands from a new audience and interests from the restaurant community, and all the monsters of the business have begun to listen. Otherwise, Ginza would have neither William nor Christian. After all, Lamberti was once the brand chef of ABC of Taste, where his main task was to produce 4 tons of Stolichny salad per day. The serious capital behind Ginza gave him the opportunity to create relatively signature restaurants and created a great demand for this kind of stories, which appeared after Ragout and Delicatessen.

Tsivina: These are still pseudo-author’s projects... I don’t go incognito, I communicate with everyone - and first of all, of course, with the chefs. At the same time, I understand perfectly well that most bosses are under pressure from the vertical power structure and cannot decide anything. They practically show me from under the counter - I like this, but you understand that I can’t do it, because there is an owner who demands arugula with shrimp. We can discuss this only at the social level. Here's the problem. And, in fact, how can we influence if everything is done in spite of it? We have chef-restaurateurs, but there are very few of them; monopolies still make the difference. There is a mainstream - and there are heroes. Like the opposition and the party in power, there is the same party in power in the restaurant world.

Photo: Sergey Kostromin

Maslovskaya: Then we are completely for the opposition.

Tsivina: Naturally, but everything is decided by the commercial interest of the owner, and the owner doesn’t care about the kitchen ten and a half times. The same Arkady Novikov speaks directly about this. By the way, he is the only one who states this honestly. Intelligent person.

Zimin: He still has nothing against the kitchen.

Tsivina: But he says: “I’m a businessman, I’m not a restaurateur at all.” Because he also understands, since it happens all over the world, what is happening there and what is happening here. And therefore he is well aware that ideally the restaurateur and the chef are one person. And this is a small business, not what we have. And what can a critic do? What if the boss can't do anything? In some semi-underground mode, we can send signals to each other, like lovers, nothing more. Everyone can make it their slogan that Caesar sucks. Or arugula with shrimp - it sucks. Well, what should they do if sales of these arugula with shrimps are going great. It's a business for all of them. Only chefs are crazy because they are creative people, for them food is a way of self-expression.

Zimin: The system of existence of the industry has changed. She had heroes. Until recently, the names from this industry were not only unknown to anyone, but in principle they could not interest anyone. Just like you don’t pay attention to the head of the train or don’t listen when they say on the plane that pilot so-and-so is flying with you. Who cares? And now there is a need to know who is at the helm there, what kind of person he is.

Tsivina: We at Kommersant named the names of the chefs from the very beginning, we tried to make stars out of them from the very beginning.

Zimin: But it was in the last three or four years that name dropping, which was a formal function, became organic.

Maslovskaya: Chefs are the new rock stars. This is another victory for us, just like three years ago we made burgers popular. The popularity of this topic is revealed by the media.

Ilyin: It's time to close, in my opinion.

Kalina: This whole youth-hipster story is less interesting to me, because a burger is not a food that is convenient to eat during negotiations. Novikovskaya “Kamchatka” excites me more as a business format, rather than as a trend. I’m talking about restaurants, including from a business point of view; research on the movement of money is also interesting to my audience.

Maslovskaya: It turns out that we have two camps: on the one hand, “Kommersant” and Katina’s program. On the other - "Afisha" and The Village. We have different audiences, different languages ​​and the angle from which we look at restaurants.

Zimin: Dasha’s column was written from the point of view of respectable publications, for which an event is the opening of a restaurant in a five-star hotel or a change of chef there. For Afisha and The Village, this is not an information feed, since their audience does not follow the changing truffle seasons. And in Kommersant it was quite invented, as we know...

Tsivina: It happens that more punctures happen if you are invited. And I close my eyes to this, because I try to abstract myself a little from specific impressions. It’s not my job at all to rate a specific dish. I never write whether it was tasty or tasteless to me.

Maslovskaya: Zhenya Kuida spoke about this. That a restaurant is not only about the food, but about how I feel there. When I wasn’t involved in food professionally, this was a great point of view for me. But a couple of years ago, Ducasse, in an interview with The Village, said a phrase about the criteria for evaluating a restaurant that completely changed my opinion. “Of course, food, there is no other rating,” he said. If the food is bad, then we give up on the restaurant. If she's good, we talk about everything else.

Zimin: Zhenya Kuida was always interested in food in the last place. She never ate in restaurants. She had the task of trolling a certain petrified situation in the restaurant market - Novikov, Ginza and some other bronzed characters. She was displeased with a certain type of behavior in restaurants, the attitude towards restaurants, the presentation from restaurants and the form of conversations about restaurants. All this irritated her at the level of the famous Dovlatov phrase, when you present arguments to a person, express some ideas, and then you realize that he is disgusted by the very sound of your voice. One of her lucky acquisitions was bringing the narrow and specific restaurant life of that time into the field of wide discussion. Previously, no one was interested in this: the chef and the owner of the restaurant were, for the most part, shadows that did not affect the average person. And she made them enemies and developed a culture of more substantive restaurant trolling.

Kalina: Criticism attracts more people than simple things. When devastating materials come out, I get a lot more calls. This is such a manipulative PR technology.

Ilyin: In fact, what Kuyda did can hardly be called restaurant criticism. Rather, it is a genre of feuilleton.

Kalina: On the other hand, the places she opposed did not disappear. The market has simply become segmented.

Tsivina: And now I realized that it is incorrect to remember the author of “Afisha” Evgenia Kuida without mentioning Svetlana Kesoyan, who for me still remains a like-minded person and a fellow writer, although she has not written for a long time. We always worked in publications with different styles and very often did not agree in opinions; we had a similar ideology. And, by the way, she is one of those who moved from critics to restaurateurs, like Alexey.

Maslovskaya: She was an excellent restaurant critic, but everything that happened next, I think, is controversial.

Tsivina: Well, we won’t do it now, it’s not correct...

Zimin: Trolling can even destroy Nikita Sergeevich Mikhalkov with his film about the war. Moreover, one note from the conventional Denis Gorelov is not enough to bring down the box office even in one hall, but there is a chain reaction - like an exercise in wit or the release of righteous anger. But trolling any restaurant, unless it’s Novikov, no one, of course, will waste their time on it. It is difficult to ignite a flame with this among the masses.

Ilyin: Well, yes, only a sick person would deliberately kill one restaurant.

Maslovskaya: You killed “Dolka”, I hope.

Ilyin: No, everything is fine with “Dolka”.

There are no food prohibitions dictated by religion here. Do you want beef? Eat it in curry! Do you want pork? Let's roast it for you on a spit! Squid, lobster, shrimp in bulk. Today I’ll tell you about Bali, the Buddhist island of gastronomic freedom from prejudice.

Besides the power of the Indian Ocean, practicing shamans and icy waterfalls that wash away city dust and feigned efficiency, there is another reason to fly to Bali, ten thousand kilometers from Moscow - this, of course, is local food.

Chili, ginger and garlic, lime juice and leaves, lemon grass, palm sugar and coconut honey - perhaps it is in Indonesia that you begin to understand the meaning and purpose of these products. Spicy shrimp soup, like Vietnamese tom yum, avocado puree with lemon juice and boiled egg, kebabs in thick peanut sauce and banana pancakes. It’s hard for me to refuse these simple dishes now in Moscow. Only there are no such avocados either in “ABC” or in

"Globe".

And if you remember about tuna, mackerel, lobster and squid, which cost mere pennies here, exotic fruits like snake fruit or papaya, juices and cocktails like seaweed or ginger-mint, you begin to understand that if there is truly heavenly food on earth, then it looks approximately like in Bali. Coconut marmalade and bananas that you pick from a palm tree while standing on the second floor of your villa.

Western civilization is trying to subject the Indonesian Eden to its MacDonald laws. Fast food chains are starting to grow here, huge hotels like “W”, which opened in Seminyak a couple of weeks ago, are appearing like mushrooms, but no Michelin stars seem cooler in Bali than real stars when you sit on the ocean at night, crack shrimp from the local warung canteen and drink their local sparkling from the throat.

Just one day in Hong Kong is, of course, a mockery of oneself. And it’s not even a matter of an inconvenient time difference for the body. Perhaps a day is enough to become infected with the scale and power of this city, but to find an antidote to this scale you will need to return here.

Peninsula is the name of a Hong Kong hotel-planet similar to Floston Paradise from The Fifth Element. A green Rolls Royce from the airport, a spa, after which you shine like the moon, hotel rooms, the luxury of which straightens your back and lifts your head, and endless restaurants where they do not feed you, but pamper you with food.

Breakfast on the terrace by the pool in a wet swimsuit - no buffets or queues for toasters - champagne, fruit, eggs Benedict. Here it is - dragon fruit or pitahaya - an Asian panacea for almost all modern diseases and one of the favorite fruits of the royal couple of Great Britain. Juicy mango, hairy rhombutan.

For dinner we choose "Spring Moon" - a Chinese restaurant in the style of the 30s of the last century. What we ordered and what we ate was erased from memory without a trace by the Peking duck. I think I even licked my fingers. After dinner, we go up to the 28th floor, where the “Felix” bar is a favorite place of the European bourgeoisie in the Peninsula. Maybe because of patriotism - the interior here is from the Frenchman Philippe Starck, or maybe for a more delicate reason - men cannot resist the temptation to pee on neon Asia from a bird's eye view - the urinals in the men's toilets here are located near huge panoramic floor-to-ceiling windows .

After Felix, we go down to the jazz salon of Madame De Ning, a Shanghai fashionista who shone in the world a hundred years ago. Here are her dresses, embroidered with beads, here are her diaries, and here are the jewelry that fans from Paris gave the beauty. It seems that I woke up from a magical dream only on board the Hong Kong-Denpasar plane.

I don’t know about you, but I personally find it very confusing when on the menu of restaurants in Moscow, and, I note, not in Lyon or Brussels, I come across all sorts of duxelles, trifles and flamencuches. In an attempt to shed light on overcooked foods and hard-to-understand words, I wrote a book called Restaurant Phrasebook, which is a must-read for anyone who wants to know what they eat out most often.

A book is, of course, a loud word: “Restaurant phrasebook” is, most likely, a gastronomic dictionary the size of a notebook, notable for the fact that you can enter the names of dishes and their interpretations there independently and alphabetically, thus keeping your own restaurant diary: “Kuzunzei - ravioli with beets - I tried it there, crudit - sliced ​​vegetables, it can’t cost 1000 rubles.”

In the process of my research, it turned out that our brother is most often really fooled in Moscow restaurants, and, just like in the film “What Men Talk About,” they try to sell croutons instead of croutons. That meringue is the familiar meringue, mille-feuille is a cake familiar to us like Napoleon, granite is fruit ice that is put into dishes not so much for taste as for beauty, and that cream soup from something so incomprehensible to us is better than pickles for a hangover. for now a vegetable like an artichoke.

But such a famous dish, thanks to the movies, as “diflape” does not exist in nature at all!

On Friday, a presentation of my book took place at the Kai gastronomic restaurant; the new chef of the establishment, Jean-François Brooke, prepared a seven-course dinner, each of which included some name incomprehensible to the Russian ear. Bok choy, quinoa, guacamole or confit. While eating the traditional Belgian waterzui soup on both cheeks, I caught myself thinking that eating consciously, as well as living consciously, is still very good for health.

Nomadic chefs moving from one Moscow restaurant to another are not instilling new tastes in the capital. They don’t go to Europe to practice, they don’t want to study, but they selflessly teach themselves. Against this background, I am sincerely happy when some metropolitan restaurateur manages to lasso a talented chef with a fresh look at modern cuisine and without euro signs flashing in his eyes, like on an electronic board in exchange offices.

Soviet-era Estonians Andrei Korobyak and Vladislav Dyachuk were brought from Tallinn by the co-founders of World Fashion Café. Finalist and winner of the last Leon Bocuse d'Or, participants in the legendary chef competition this year - 2011 - the guys really surprised the boring Moscow. Jewelry work, delicate taste and presentation, noticeably different from what we are used to. Balantine of lightly smoked salmon with apple cider jelly and Philadelphia cheese mousse, soup a la sabayon of oysters sautéed with shallots, poached quail egg with lemongrass jelly. Lamb with wild garlic puree and demiglass sauce with juniper.

The menu, prepared by the guys at their own send-off before Bocuse, can be read like the opera scores of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Nabucco” - everything is so majestic. For example, dessert-Symphony of chokeberry with meringue cooked at minus 196 degrees. Estonia rules! This is one of the few examples when the form of serving dishes corresponds to their taste content. I strongly recommend that you try the cuisine of the new ones in Moscow.

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FOOD SHOW AWARDS is the first people's award in Russia, which is awarded to the best media projects about food, their authors and presenters in order to recognize those who promote gastronomy among the widest audience. The winners are awarded the “Golden Bun”, a popularly known symbol of Russian cuisine.

The Food Show Awards were first held in 2017. The 2018 voting confirmed the leadership of some nominees and revealed new public favorites. In addition, awards were awarded in special categories.

The Food Show Awards ceremony took place on December 1, at the Sokolniki Exhibition and Convention Center, on the first day of the FOODSHOW festival. Awards to the winners were presented by top managers of partner companies of the FOODSHOW festival and representatives of famous Moscow restaurants.

• Legendary cooking TV program - "At Knives"(TV channel “Friday”)
• New culinary TV program - "Pro100 kitchen"(STS TV channel)
• Best Cooking TV Program Presenter - Konstantin Ivlev(the host of the show “On Knives” won this prestigious award for the second time)
• Best Cooking TV Program Presenter - Marina Kravets(culinary show “Big Breakfast”, which started in 2018 on the TNT channel)
• For promoting the history of Russian gastronomy - Olga and Pavel Syutkin(authors of cookbooks and presenters of the TV channel "Kitchen TV")
• Nomination "Best culinary TV channel - TV cafe
• Best radio program about food - “To exist or not to eat” (radio “Silver Rain”)
• Best Culinary Youtube Channel - “Cooking with Irina Khlebnikova”
• Best culinary magazine - Two laureates: Lenta Magazine and Gastronom
• The best site with culinary recipes - Gastronom.ru
• The best Telegram channel about food - Food&Science
• The best online resource about restaurants - Events-Restaurants
• There were three winners in the “Best Gastronomy Journalist” nomination. They received almost the same number of votes, and the award organizers decided to award three awards:
• Food from all sides- Roman Loshmanov
• Restaurant columnist» - Vladimir Gridin
• Restaurant critic- Katya Kalina
• “For contribution to the promotion of cooking” - Julia Vysotskaya(author of books with a total circulation of more than 1.5 billion copies, TV presenter of a famous program that has been airing for more than 15 years)
• For the series of author’s gastronomic guides “Geography for Taste” - Nika Ganich
• Breakthrough of the Year in New Media - Alexander Sysoev(author of the Telegram channel and the channel on Yandex.Zen “Sysoev FM”)
• Professional Youtube channel" - "On three prongs"(for a series of interviews with the best chefs in Russia)