In 2014, a Russian restaurant named Moscow57 opened near my apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. Manhattan was full of Russian restaurants, both classics such as Samovar and parvenus such as Mari Vanna; but the main distinction, as I saw it, was in their flavours of poshlost – kitschy nostalgia and arriviste vulgarity, respectively. And now places like these had set up shop on my walk to the subway. I started taking the other side of the street.
I had grown up going to Russian restaurants. In 1988, when I was nine, my family immigrated from the former Soviet Union to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where the Italians were slowly giving way to Chinese and Russians. My only wish was to transform myself from Boris to Bobby and shed every sign of my heritage, but I was too young to say no when my family packed off to places like the National Restaurant in Brighton Beach, the heavily Russian neighbourhood in Brooklyn, for somebody’s birthday. (Somebody had a birthday all the time.) There, seated at banquet tables worthy of Rabelais, we gorged on fried potatoes with morels, sturgeon, quail and duck liver, and watched elaborate floor shows – dancing girls, costumes, smoke – stunned by the food and the spectacle. I’d had enough for a lifetime.
By the end of high school, I was passing well enough that I was ripe for reclamation: a high school reading of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers And Sons hacked down my little Berlin wall, leading to a Russian literature major at university and a journalism career that never strayed far from Russians, whether there or in the Russian diaspora. My poor Jewish parents, abused by the Soviets into contempt for “that place” and “those people”, wished I hadn’t been so quick to shed my self-loathing, but they kept going to the National, and I stopped. I stopped seeing them, too. Otherwise, how was I to save myself from their trauma?
One rainy late spring Sunday night in 2015, a friend and I made our way through three rounds of cocktails in a neighbourhood bar and, gin in my head, I forgot to cross to the right side of Delancey Street when we walked past Moscow57. My friend was a Russian non-Russian like me, and we probably thought the same thing: whatever affectation we’d find at Moscow57 would at least share nothing with the studied scruffiness of a Lower East Side cocktail den circa 2015. Also, Russian food soaks up booze really well.
It was beautiful inside. Blood-red walls, soft light, decorative chaos: pressed-tin ceiling, blocks of mirrors, photographs hung up with clothes pegs. And the menu was both familiar and not: blinis, but also cucumber and pomegranate salad; borscht, but also pistachio and fenugreek shrimp. The restaurant felt like nothing but itself, an elusive commodity in the city that has everything. To reach our banquette, we had to squeeze past a woman belting Little Girl Blue with the aid of a small band; when she finished, she walked up to us and introduced herself – Ellen Kaye, one of the owners. Her parents had run the Russian Tea Room on 57th Street, hence Moscow57. Then she took a swig of honey and returned to the mic. It was everything I’d always wished to find in a Russian restaurant: warmth rather than pomp. I started walking on the Moscow57 side of the street.
That spring, I was disoriented. The previous year, after years of rejection, I had published my first novel to all the reception a first-time novelist dreams of. So much so that I went on a reading tour that mortals like me must leave to the Coldplays of the world: nine months and more than 100 appearances. Saying the same thing every night while attempting to seem sincere had made me feel like a sociopath. I was once a social animal but trying to engage with readers had drained any desire for human contact from me. In the middle of it all, a woman I loved left me. So, during my last months of readings, I’d sit against the wall of my hotel room for hours before rising to go out and – on autopilot – talk, make jokes, and ask and answer questions for three hours.
I was desperate to shut off my brain, but I could barely leave my bed. One night at Moscow57 (one of the few places I could stand to go to), I joked to Ellen and Seth Goldman, one of her business partners (two of the few people I could stand to see), that I’d always wanted to work as a waiter, perhaps because, food having been scarce in the Soviet Union, for many Russians the prospect of serving it to another can be almost erotically satisfying. (My grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who ate potato peelings as she hid out with guerrilla fighters in the Belarus forests, would move her mouth along with mine as she watched me eat.) Plus, I was good with people – or so I had once thought. Maybe Ellen and Seth would let me serve food now and then? I’d do it for free. “Serve?” he said. “You don’t want to intern in the kitchen?”
They offered what I needed without asking whether I could boil an egg. I said yes before fear could get in the way. I knew how to boil an egg, and more: I was a decent home cook. All the same, my heart was leaden with dread as I walked up Delancey for my first shift the next day. In the kitchen, I discovered a trio of recent arrivals from Russia and Ukraine – Sasha (cold station), Misha (hot station), Nikita (head chef) – all very puzzled why someone would work in a kitchen for free. I was a writer, they’d heard – was I writing a book? No, I said, but also didn’t explain: they didn’t seem like people who would understand about too many readings and a broken heart. A practical person – a Russian person – would have been smart enough to pretend he was writing a book.
I’d read enough Anthony Bourdain and Bill Buford to know that a new body in a kitchen is welcomed by fire: you’re abused and, if you last, you become family. I had feared, but expected, the abuse. What I didn’t expect was that being The Writer would render me ineligible for it, and its rewards. I was steered clear of, even that without hostility. A kitchen is a place of great, joyous hate. Hate for the owners, who don’t understand what the cooks need. Hate for the servers, who always show up at the wrong time. Hate for the diners, who have the temerity to actually order. (The most unprintable language issued every time the order machine whirred with a new one.) And hate for each other – for Sasha, who wore Capri pants and listened to funny music; for Misha, who seemed maniacally focused when it was busy and simply uptight the rest of the time; for Nikita, who failed to understand how lucky he was to have the sous chefs he did. Only I wasn’t worth hating.
And then I understood that I was given a wide berth not because I was The Writer, but because I was a Russian who had become an American. There was nothing we could understand about each other. So I used the authority vested in me by the United States of America. One afternoon, Nikita yelled at Sasha to get him peppers from the downstairs walk-in, even though Sasha had his wrists deep in herring “under a fur coat”, a Soviet classic (layers of chopped herring, roast beets, cold potatoes, carrots and mayonnaise, dusted with grated hard-boiled egg), and I was standing next to him with nothing to do. “I will get the peppers,” I said loudly. No one said anything, or perhaps I ran off before anyone could.
Things changed a little after that. When the machine spat out potato pancakes, now it was I who was asked to go downstairs: two potatoes, one onion, one egg. I grated and mixed them before handing the batter to Sasha, and I shredded my knuckles on the grater because I was trying too hard. But next time Sasha didn’t have to ask, and I didn’t tear up my knuckles. After days of dicing mushrooms and onions for the chopped liver and prepping shish kebab skewers, I was allowed to make my own borscht, blinis and honey cake.
Cooking food in a restaurant is not that different from cooking at home, except for the speed with which you must do it while minding a slew of other time-sensitive tasks, all in a very small, very hot kitchen. But this was my salvation. From 2pm to midnight, my brain powered down to survival mode. After a day of writing, my mind was exhausted but my body was restless, a nervous energy that I tried to waste through exercise. After a kitchen shift, a pound of water weight having left me in the heat – we were entering high summer – my body was wasted, but my mind felt still.
Soon, I graduated to cooking the family meals for the staff at night’s end: a lovely and accurate term for people who were swearing at each other just moments ago, but who also shared an intimate duty. In my family, raised voices didn’t mean crisis; they meant people cared. The confused horror of many ex-girlfriends at the ease with which I passed from peace to war to peace again became more understandable.
I began to join the family in other ways: Nikita asked me to rewrite the menu; Sasha asked me to find him a bride. The restaurant didn’t have a gas connection, and the improvisation this required symbolised its spirit of chaos and vibrancy. In other words: home. By late summer, I couldn’t wait for my shifts, for the three musketeers in the kitchen and their raw, molecular familiarity. I was sleeping full nights, deeply. But I wasn’t returning to my previous garrulousness; rather, I was coming to understand it as the performativeness of an immigrant who was still trying to impress.
I began to feel desire again: for writing, for food, even family. I was realising that, years before, I had readmitted only the high end of my heritage and held my nose at the rest – that is, the people themselves; the broken, crazy people. Maybe that could have worked, were I not actually still so much like them. Meanwhile, my resistance had obscured how much I loved my origins. I felt pride rather than shame driving through south Brooklyn.
The restaurant bequeathed one last gift before I left. One evening, after finishing her set, the beautiful young woman who sang on Thursday nights asked if I had a cigarette. I burst through the kitchen doors, nearly knocking Misha into the deep-fryer, and yelled to Nikita, always good for a pack of Parliaments. He handed me two along with some wisecrack. She and I smoked them outside, continuing our conversation at the bar. Which continued, and continued. Moscow57 closed last autumn – because of the gas issue – but, a year later, she and I are still cooking together.
Boris Fishman’s borscht
I developed this recipe with Oksana Zagriychuk, a Ukrainian who looked after my grandfather and returned home earlier this year. She was all but a member of the family; as for her cooking, we talk about it to this day. When it comes to borscht, her golden rule is: the beet must not lose its colour. And if you can wait, borscht is better on the second day.
3 medium beets
3 litres water or stock
3 medium potatoes, peeled and cubed
1 medium parsnip, peeled and cut into discs, the larger slices halved
1 jalapeño, deseeded and diced small
¼ cabbage head, chopped roughly
1½ tbsp salt
1 medium or large onion, peeled and cubed
2 large carrots, peeled and grated
Cooking oil
1 tbsp tomato paste
4 large garlic cloves, peeled
Coriander, to taste
Curry powder, to taste
2 tbsp vinegar (optional)
1 tsp sugar
1 bunch dill, fresh or frozen
The day before, boil three medium beets, skin on, until fully cooked – 40-75 minutes, depending on size and age. Stick a knife into a beet to check doneness; it’s ready if the knife goes in smoothly. Leave the skin on and refrigerate (this helps the beet keep its colour when it’s cooking the next day).
Bring the liquid to a boil, then lower to medium and put on a lid slightly ajar. Add the potatoes, parsnip, jalapeño, cabbage and a tablespoon of salt. The soup stays at medium heat, lid slightly off.
While the vegetables are cooking (one hour), cover the base of a frying pan generously with oil, and saute the onions on medium heat until golden brown. Add the carrots and saute until fully cooked. Add a heaped tablespoon of tomato paste, then crush two of the garlic cloves and add.
Skin the beets (if you run them under water, the skin should come off in your fingers), then dice into relatively small pieces.
After the soup has been going for an hour, add the spices (adding them towards the end helps them keep their flavour): curry and coriander are just suggestions – use the spices you like. Add the onion/carrot/tomato paste/garlic mixture to the soup, de-glaze the frying pan with a little water or stock, and add that to the soup, too.
Add the remaining half-tablespoon of salt and the diced beets, and turn the heat to low. Check the taste. Does the soup need salt, or a little more acid? To give it more of the latter, you can add a bit of fresh-squeezed lemon juice, or vinegar, or the brine of pickled cabbage.
Add the sugar, a generous helping of the dill and the remaining two cloves of garlic, crushed. Taste again. At this stage, the soup can use a little more salt, even if it doesn’t seem to need it – the second day, borscht always tastes like it needs salt. Turn the heat to high; at the first sign of boiling, turn it off, or the beets will start to lose colour. Leave for the next day. Reheat only serving portions, not the entire pot, because extended boiling will blanch the beets.
• Boris Fishman’s new novel, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, is published by One/Pushkin Press at £12.99. To order a copy for £10.65, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
