"Saturdays at Eat Market". A new corner: the vareniki bar Lepota. Part one

I never made it to the first site, on Moskovsky Prospekt by the Sennoy market, though I read the blogs with interest. I imagined the chewing to come. And then it all happened at Eat Market: the thing found me by itself. Let me say at once that Lepota is a lovely name — a good old Russian word for beauty, and a nod to lepka, the pinching of the dough. The most important thing in this one-dish format. Seeing that is doubly pleasant.

The portions, as at Sennaya, are six great big parcels by vareniki standards. It says 280 grams, and looking at them you'd believe all 320! Smaller on the list but no less important: cheeses from the Lavra dairy. Admit it, few places in a food hall declare that they work with a craft product and tell you where it comes from. The menu is split into "savoury" and "sweet" groups, which differ in the dough and not only in the sugar of the fillings. Three add-ons: salads, soups and desserts. Convenient. And one last thing before the food. Mayonnaise, fine, is optional — but sour cream is also separate and charged for, 80 ₽. Here I even had an argument with myself. On the one hand, if a guest doesn't want it, why pay for something that goes in the bin and raises the price? When I'm served sauces included in the price with khinkali or chebureki, or sour cream with — Lord forgive them — kharcho, or soy sauce with sushi that has already been brushed, all I can do is growl inarticulately. On the other hand: Boiled Authors, if you believe a dish needs something, some addition, and that without that very thing it loses an important particle of itself, then include it. Do all the vareniki on that list — read the menu again — need sour cream?

Beetroot salad (190 ₽). No. Just bad. They grated a boiled root vegetable to order, juicy and fresh, sprinkled some nuts on it. And that's it. No garlic, no dressing, no salt, no pepper. I couldn't eat it!

Vareniki with beef and egg (510 ₽). Let me quote a classic: "a beautiful crumbly filling, with a contrast of textures — the 'smooth' fragments of egg and the 'rough' meat." And let me add my own: the meat is boiled and then minced — these are vareniki, after all — and it came out very, VERY JUICY! The flavour, though, is ordinary, plain, without a raisin of an idea. Good, better than many, but what if you coloured it with spices? Both the meat and the egg love spices. And yes, you can look up the difference between vareniki and pelmeni yourselves, without AI-Boris.

Crescenza with sun-dried tomato and coriander (470 ₽). Guess for yourself that this is the Lavra cheese. Or read the description! Let me try: bright, simple and utterly lovely. By simple means: salt in measure, the classic flavour enhancer, everything natural — in the cheese, in the dried tomatoes. Full of umami, from the cheese and the tomatoes; I don't know who could dislike this, or be left cold by it.

Choux-pastry vareniki with cherry (510 ₽). A classic impression with almost no sugar — or none at all. I'd praise it in a restaurant, too. And what a colour! Not the "cherry" colour they slap in at places with no imagination.

Choux-pastry vareniki, dried apricot and pumpkin (480 ₽): my favourite of this part of the article. First bite — well, first I cut a varenik open, looked, saw the pumpkin, and on tasting it the pumpkin seems to come first. By the second bite: how could I have been so wrong — the soul of it is the dried apricot, standing on a lighter, pleasanter pedestal. What a duet they make. If I were taking a frozen kilogram home, it would be these.

Let me finish with one of the three soups: okroshka (490 ₽). They don't say so, but it's made on kefir — to avoid fights, presumably? A four out of five. Thick, but within reason; plenty of herbs; everything chopped evenly; egg together with potato and sausage, the sensation of you-know-which salad. But without the overload of filling you get at Smoke BBQ, where there was almost no liquid left. I wouldn't order it again, but I finished the portion.

End of part one.