Subject
Nabokov Mansion on Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa ...
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Date
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Issue #1379 (43), Friday, June 6, 2008
Complete review at following URL:
http://www.times.spb.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=26231
Classic cuisine
By Matt Brown
Staff Writer
Polovtsev Mansion // 52 Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa. Tel: 571 5900. // www.polovtsev.restoran.ru // Open from noon through 11 p.m. // Dinner for two without alcohol 1,850 rubles ($75)
Seen one palace, seen ’em all? St. Petersburg can be like that.
After the Bolshevik coup in 1917, the terrorists rubbed their hands with glee and stole hundreds of the city’s grandest residences and put them to better use. One of the most notorious of these “expropriations” concerned the Nabokov Mansion on Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, the house where author Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899. In his autobiography written in the 1950s, Nabokov wrote bitterly, not of the theft of mere bricks and mortar but of a past despoiled by the thuggery of the Soviet state.
But St. Petersburg’s palaces are now being returned to something of their former splendor if not to their former owners or their ancestors. The Nabokov House survived being made into offices and even a laundry and now houses a fascinating museum about the writer. And the Polovtsev Mansion, on the other side of the street from the Nabokov Mansion, once the residence of a courtier to Tsar Alexander III, became Dom Arkhitektura (House of Architects) under the Soviets. It remains the HQ for the city’s architects but also houses a restaurant that attempts to recapture an Imperial idyll.
The Polovtsev Mansion restaurant makes the most of its magnificent interior. The walls of the first of two halls (seating 60) are covered in cream and white plaster moldings with gilt trim and neoclassical frescoes. The second hall is more imposing, with carved walnut paneling, dark damask wall coverings and Moorish tapestries evoking the early 17th century. The table settings are formal with silver cutlery on starched white tablecloths glinting in the light of a magnificent chandelier. Heavy velvet drapes make the room a little gloomy and the marble floor is hard and cold, while the scarlet carpeting in the lobby where smoking is allowed has seen better days. But the setting is impressive and worth the trip.
The menu, presented to diners in heavy leather binders, contains a deeply conventional selection of classic Russian dishes and reads like an exam paper for first-year chefs. This is either depressing or comforting depending on your point of view. Whether the meal would rise to match the magnificence of the noble ambience would depend on the ability of the chef and not on any culinary novelties.
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