The restaurant critic listens to Zapisi

I described my first attempt in the Sobaki channel — a very sad story. "Yesterday I went to a new bar, a fashionable one, with (already) good reviews — a rating of 5.0. Friday, 19:15, two tables out of six occupied and almost the whole counter. A young lady listens.

— Where may I sit?

— We have reservations.

— For what time?

— Well, eight or nine o'clock.

— If it's for nine, I'll certainly just have dinner within the hour and free the table — could you check what time it is booked for?

— Eight or nine, there are no seats.

Clearly the young lady can't be bothered to check, because it isn't her money and the owner won't lose half the takings from tables standing empty for two hours until 21:00. At six in the evening it's probably easier to refuse the same way, because otherwise you'd have to wo-o-ork. Later, of course, the owner will write that everyone and everything is to blame: bad guests, taxes, the situation, inflation, the long traffic light on Pravdy Street, Vadik the pigeon who soiled the Vespas by the entrance. But right there in the comments the owner turned up — and, like any owner, wondered "can such a thing really happen at our place", promised to fix it all after I helped with the facts. I waited a reasonable period for such repairs — thirty-one days, since the human factor is a very complicated subject — and off I went.

Second attempt: they meet me, they orient me — here, one (good) table is reserved. A vinyl record on it, I'm supposed to work that out. The booking is in twenty minutes or so. OK, we believe it. The second normal table, officially the best in the bar, by the window, is occupied by a laptop, with no food or drink. One table has three live guests, another is occupied by a phone charger. I stayed for dinner. But what was left was either the communal one for ten, or the far one, by the mirror and the service station — an hour of listening, from a metre away, to bar training and to the inner kitchen of the kitchen and the bar. Yet if you set aside comfort and convenience and look at the photographs, it's a pleasant, very intimate bar. My favourite size, the Every Guest Matters size. Where the sweetest spot is probably at the counter. With bar conversation. I remember a couple of places within these walls: the new one is the best, I agree.

The menu reads as though written in a hurry, because even in the country's kindergartens they know His Majesty is called Vitello Tonnato, not with two paired letters missing. But how can one scold it — a delicious menu that irritates the cortex rather than any feeding trough: pies, chebureki, plaice, schnitzel, tart, arancini, langoustines, batuta. Very salivating. Citrus water when you're seated, and I can't scold any of the drinks. Bottled water 450 ₽, dearer than the beer on tap at 400 ₽, same as the lemonades, and the infusions at 250 ₽.

I have a theory that holds in 37 cases out of 38. If the menu says "julienne" spelled wrong, there will be a swindler on the plate, an impostor, from a man who doesn't know what a julienne is. It isn't about literacy — he hasn't read about it, he's only heard of it, he hasn't even watched the little video with the caption under the player. Here it's "Vitelo tonato" (650 ₽). By the look of it a densely packed, very tasty composition with excellent roast beef. But the capers, apparently, were meant to be "exploded", made into "popcorn", and instead of dehydrating them they de-flavoured them — better not to have touched them, killing the aromatics of the marinade. And the sauce is thin, the consistency of double cream, translucent even on the white walls of the plate; it has flavour but not a hint of tuna thickness — twice as runny as the classic, and super-homogeneous. Because of that the impressions are diluted, and the meat seems insufficiently covered however you bathe each slice. I finished it without forcing myself, but even with a bun it's hard to gather liquid off an uneven plate. Liquid, precisely. Four minus.

Batuta (tartare) of young bull (700 ₽). Let me remind you that the official Embassy of batuta in Petersburg is BeefZavod, and comparison is unavoidable. This one is gorgeous: thick, serious, minced finer than usual, and I understand that parmesan on top is a super-umami thing, but here it acts like some other flavour-enhancing drug — and it isn't the banal, long-boring truffle oil. A wonder. Measure and daring!

Gnocchi with ceps (550 ₽), spelled with both letters and with double joy. You try the first little lump, without mushrooms, and you understand what you're dealing with: the main test for any risotto, noodle or pasta. The cream sauce is well seasoned and not remotely boring. Only ceps, and plenty of them, noticeably, importantly, generously. In build and in bearing — a restaurant dish! At a fair price.

Plaice with a potato pancake (800 ₽). This is some sort of provocation and prank. In twenty-two years I have never seen anything like it, not in restaurants, not in photographs. Except perhaps in a four-star Michelin place as part of a twelve-course set. You see a small plate — the photograph deceives — two fillets between two and three millimetres thick, shorter than a palm is wide. Twenty-five grams each, or less. Then a third one turned up… a layer, a cut, a slice. Everything came together here. Including the fact that plaice gives up its properties, its pleasures, only in the thickness of the fillet. Look at (better, drive out to) the city's benchmark plaice at the Red Fox pub on Pulkovskoye Highway, where it is ten to fourteen times bigger. Here you simply cannot judge it as a main course, the most expensive on the menu. And a fifty per cent over-salting. In something. As often happens in miniatures, everything lies tightly together, and the fish, as you can see, is drowned in the sauce rather than served beside it, and you can't tell whether it's sauce, butter or fish. Never mind. I said my piece. They agreed with me. Shook my hand. But who signed this off? Did they hand over a "generous" hundred grams at the tasting and mislead everyone? Why does this dish stand out so sharply against perfectly decent portions elsewhere — I looked at the neighbours' plates too — and why have guests, thumb-sized creatures weighing 28 kilograms, not complained in two months?

Pear tart with beer caramel (550 ₽). They surprised me. A whole tart, only just baked, of the kind that became obligatory for every good restaurant at the start of the decade. Golden, with an aroma that knocks you off your feet altogether, as though without a gram of sugar — ideal for a bar precisely for that — and salty, biting caramel. This is the case where the menu makes it look expensive for something utterly formal, and I pictured a warmed (or cold) triangle, house-made or bought in. And it isn't like that at all. They surprised me. An unexpected flagship.

Need I say that at 19:00 nobody came to the "reserved" table I was refused on my second visit. I'm not upset, no, I've learned all the jokes, I'm used to it. And at 19:23, when I'd eaten quite nicely and toddled off to bed, nobody had come either. But it rankles, what can I say. Third visit: at the very same hour I'm alone at tables with no bookings at all, with a single guest at the counter. All good, really! The bar is a good one. With food an order of magnitude better than in 17 bars out of 18 in this town. Just with a shambles. Because I had planned seven dishes over three full visits — and after paying for the plaice I cut the programme short.