The restaurant critic looks for something fancy in Nothing Fancy

I hadn't been to the chain for four years, and it isn't my fault — they opened nothing (in Petersburg) for four years, since 2022. So: interesting!

The new building on Bolshoy (again, only a different island), put up next to the fire station by Gorny Institut, is only starting to fill: so far it's posters saying TO LET and COMING SOON (Lili New Wave Sushi), and of course the soundtrack of hammer drills drowns out the music. But that's temporary, surely? Or else there's a terrace for those most sensitive to building work: tables simply set out in front of the facade, with no umbrellas and no railings. As an option it's probably fine! Inside it is modern, recognisable, easy. Mirrors and wood as the main landmarks of the design, and everything in working order. One thing grates: fashionable and clever people, supposedly experienced — and sconces along the walls, which in 100 per cent of cases throw shadows from your back onto the table, whether the guest photographs anything or not. Why? Sometimes it is better without light like that than with it. All the more so as it argues with the daylight in those huge windows; in summer it would be better switched off entirely, without mixing "lights". Otherwise it is a proper continuation of the Petrogradka style, where you walk in and run straight into the counter, and there are no questions about the format or about "screening" new arrivals. I like it!

There is a lot here that surprises, that seems too strange even to me. The familiar big chilled display of ready-made goods in plastic, which doesn't interest me in the slightest — but a new shop with dog and cat bowls at 5,000 ₽ is already… what, exactly? The prices were always high, of course, but we used to be talking about food, not merch. The menu is not small; many sections, as before, in the worst sense. Three ways to read it: a QR code, as if we were still hugging covid; four tall screens with forty dishes and their descriptions; and the drinks — on a card — SCREWED to the metal at the till. Which means you cannot choose calmly: at your table, thinking it over, weighing it up, without your phone and without the shaking of your cervical spine, without a crowd at the terminal. Or this: the cashier enters your order, but you are asked to confirm it on a touch screen. The logic is odd: either I choose and/or pay at a self-service terminal, as everywhere else, or the staff do everything and I merely check that the screen is right. One or the other.

Steak bowl (990 ₽). The rice is brown, coarse, real — but you still have to dig down to it. While I dig through the top: red cabbage, simply dry; a mix; one floret of broccoli; prettily pickled onion; a green sauce, of which there is too little to colour the whole thing, in flavour and in volume alike. I wouldn't order it again: Nothing Fancy — nothing fancy. Food. Not bad, yes, but no particular joy the way there used to be, apart from superbly cooked meat. By the way, Roman, here's my question: at Khlebozavod you sell a piece one and a half times smaller, of meat one and a half times worse, on its own, on an empty plate, with only a sauce, for 1,200 ₽. What went wrong?

Banana hotcakes with berry confiture and cashew cream (850 ₽) used to cost 490 ₽, but in every other respect they are the same: big, thick, light yet not hollow pancakes, the sort I'd praise without any filling at all. There is enough flavour to earn the word "tasty", and almost none of the primitive sweetness: banana between the pancakes, and that is enough. Excellent!

On my second visit, unexpectedly, a month after opening, the pleasant, chatty staff began telling me phantom tales about things that aren't on the menu. I try to encourage them: "show me what you're talking about?" "Oh, yes, we don't have that on the menu." Even within one shift the service differs: some people ask your opinion of what you've eaten, others simply take the plate away. Or this: I asked at the till what makes the three new Power Bowls different from the ordinary ones. "There's more protein in them." I believe you — but more from what, in a way the guest would notice? If the composition is the same, judging by the photographs? Yes? Silence. I'll buy one and check.

Power bowl with squid (990 ₽). Where's the Power, brother? Almost everything is the same: cherry tomatoes, sliced cucumber, red cabbage, and here the Queen of the Bowl, with a hot romesco-style sauce. Two differences, as far as I can see: appetising little heaps of chickpeas and of roasted pepper. It's all decent, but the squid is dreadful. And I don't know whether it arrived dry and lifeless, already scratchy, or became so as it cooled. Unlike the first visit, both dishes were brought together, and I began with the warm benedict. It seems a simple enough rule: if a guest orders more than one dish, just ask how to fire them. A simple move, no extra cost, and it changes the quality of the food. It removes the doubt. Did it reach the table dead, or die in front of me, in the five minutes it took me to eat?

Benedict with salmon on green pancakes (890 ₽). I didn't quite understand what the cream cheese was doing there: there isn't much of it and it doesn't spoil the harmony. The main thing is that the pancakes are well seasoned, and eating them on their own would not be dull at all; the poached egg is half hard, but I don't feel like picking holes. Tasty, very tasty.

What else. The producer is once again that sketch-show character Danila Feofanovich Bzdyukhov. It was he who suggested the little signs on the cutlery holders — in English. "Oh mai gudness": I thought they'd been brought to me by mistake, since with age I have come to look like an Englishman. Whom they are evidently expecting here in numbers, sanctions notwithstanding. But no, I asked: "ALL our notices are in English only." "Splendid. So 51 per cent of your guests don't speak Russian, and the news that we are not velcome here with laptops cannot be conveyed in plain Pushkin's Russian?" "Yes, we get a lot of foreigners." "Then why is the menu in Russian only?" You know, when the arguments are like that, even the devotees of the strange have nothing to say. Better they'd written (in German) that dogs may not run about on the sofas. Dog-friendly is the tradition here, and that is a good thing, but surely it means something else? The chance to be inside, not to bark through the whole dinner, to get a bowl of water on the floor. Not on the sofa.

So! A month in, there is rather too much that surprises. And I could not make sense of it. Tasty in places. In places it feels lower and poorer than the former Feast of Flavour. Either we have changed, or the time around us, or the chain.