When I left Moscow for the United States in 1978, the humorists in the city of my birth were fond of circulating a true story about a Politburo member's daughter who, having come down with food poisoning, was greeted at the Kremlin hospital by her mother's reprimand: Ty s'ela shto-to v gorode?! "You've eaten something in the city, haven't you?!" Supplied weekly with enormous food parcels from secret depots, the top party bosses, their children, their servants, and, in the finely calibrated order of seniority, the rest of the nomenklatura--from the military brass and Central Committee staffers to propagandists, writers, journalists, and movie directors--considered suspect anything sold in stores.

At the time, however, Moscow was still better off than the rest of the country, where meat appeared in stores twice a year: around the anniversary of the "Great October Socialist Revolution" on November 7 and "Labor Solidarity Day," May 1. During the rest of the year, one could purchase (with a valid ration coupon) a monthly allotment of "meat products," which in the heyday of glasnost, in 1988, a Soviet newspaper described as 500 grams (about a pound) of "cooked sausage" and 300 grams (11 ounces) of "smoked sausage." In the late 1980s, along with milk and cheese, meat was available at semi-privatized "farmer's markets," but to buy it required monthly food outlays of at least 150 rubles--an astronomical sum in a country where one third of the citizens lived on less than 100 rubles a month (then about $10). By that time Moscow's relative prosperity, sustained by robbing the rest of the country, had collapsed under the assault of hundreds of thousands of hungry visitors from the provinces, where, as a Russian newspaper columnist put it, children had to be told "what was meat and what, in theory, could be done with it." Every day the commuter trains, called kolbasnye elektrichki, or "sausage trains," disgorged the foragers at the capital's seven train stations. In the 1970s an underground joke circulated about a Moscow Jew, who, when asked why he was emigrating, said: "I am tired of holidays: bought sausage--a holiday; found toilet paper--a holiday; got to buy shoes--holiday again. I long for a dreary, non-festive existence." By the fall of 1991, the collapsed state-owned economy had left behind absolutely bare shelves of grocery stores, bread lines around the block, and sacks of potatoes on the balconies of Moscow residents preparing for famine.

Today, the joke has lost its point, and the Moscow Jew would be hard-pressed not to find a party. The streets are brightly lit; the shop windows, inviting. The sidewalks, no longer littered with cigarette butts, are scrubbed clean. At every major Metro station there are gorgeous roses for sale, reportedly trucked in from Holland and flown in from Honduras. The flow of cars is thick and furious, and Audis, BMWs, and Toyota Land Cruisers no longer turn heads. Moscow women, who used to beg their male bosses to bring back a pair of panty hose from a trip abroad, now sport European fashions and haircuts. Metro riders are no longer morose and rude; smiles and jokes are suddenly common. It seems that everyone has a cell phone.

The shift to a more open economy has given rise to a post-Communist middle class, which consists of the young, the college-educated, and the residents of large cities. The tastes and preferences of this modest but energetic and increasingly self-confident population account for all manner of new trends sweeping Russia in the past decade.

The stifling ownership of everyone's livelihood and tastes by an impoverished, corrupt, and autarkic state has gone the way of Pravda, the jamming of foreign broadcasts, compulsory classes of political education, and awful clothes. Nowhere is the metamorphosis as vivid and as easily discernible, even to a casual tourist, as in the national gastronomic renaissance. That gastronomy has been ahead of many other areas of life in the speed and robustness of recovery is due to the fact that the Russian table was always one place where the state receded. The kitchen was a substitute for the public square, the table talk a surrogate for free political discourse. In the long run, liberty creates wealth everywhere, but in Russia it has repaid the debt to the table a hundredfold.

An amazing abundance and variety of food is now available in Moscow. Snack bars and kiosks dispensing not only Russian but Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, Greek, and Middle Eastern fare dot the same sidewalks on which crowds of shabbily dressed men and women, weighed down by bags and bundles, used to shuffle silently and sullenly from store to store in search of food. Menus, cookbooks, lunch counters, and home pantries brim with items discovered after an eighty-year hiatus: pineapple and kiwi, asparagus, squid and baby-octopus salad, frogs' legs, or pizza. People everywhere in the city walk around munching on shawarma, which every New Yorker will instantly recognize as a species of gyro: chicken or lamb sliced off a hot rotating cone, wrapped, falafel-like, in either pita or flat Georgia lavash and dipped in spicy yogurt.

In Moscow's new gastronomic universe everything has to be fresh and hot. Between appointments on my last visit I found myself, a ten-ruble bill in hand, in front of a kiosk selling chebureki, the large Crimean meat pasty. "And heat it up, will you?" an older woman in a white kerchief ordered the vendor. The latter complied by putting the pie in a microwave oven. Inspired by the intrepid babushka, I overcame the inbred fear of Russian salesclerks and requested that my order be warmed as well. Quite apart from being its own virtue, the courage paid handsomely in gastronomic terms when the first bite through the thick chewy skin revealed a hot and smooth meatball of lamb and beef with garlic and parsley in an aromatic gravy.

Will collapses at the sight of vypechka--freshly baked goods, sold for a few rubles on street corners, outside all major Metro stations, and, of course, in bakeries that seem to grace every other block: puff pastry (sloyki) and danishes (vatrushki) with fillings of cheese or prunes or poppy seeds; buns with raisins; tarts with apricots, apples, or blueberries; meringue cookies, éclairs, almond rings (my favorite), napoleons (vanilla-flavored cream between four or five layers of very thin and flaky puff pastry), rum babas, large muffins (keksy), or sochniki: hefty little bricks of sweet cottage cheese surrounded by a crumbly dough shell.

All of the former nomenklatura delights now are to be found in ordinary grocery stores (gastronomy)--like the Razumovskiy gastronom near a friend's apartment in a quiet residential neighborhood on Leningradskoye Highway close to the Airport Metro. In addition to the abundance displayed on the counters, products available from the store's supplier include fifty-four kinds of sausages and nineteen hams, ranging in price from 18 to 146 rubles a kilo (30 cents to $2.43 a pound), and such exotic concoctions as veal sausages, the Sicily with olives or the Lyonnaise with mushrooms, and the precious holiday treats of my childhood: the delicate, smooth, and aromatic doktorskaya and the hard, peppery, fat-speckled salami servelat at the equivalent of $1.60 and $2.50 a pound, respectively. Servelat used to be available either in snack bars set up at polling places on "election" days to attract "voters" or during the week before New Year's Eve (officially, there was no Christmas in Soviet times), and, along with oranges, bananas, or apples, was among the best gifts one could bring to a friend's house. Among the sixteen kinds of cheeses the gastronom displays are the hard, piquant, light-yellow poshekhonskiy; the round and softer gollandskiy wrapped in red wax; the slightly salty and viscous Georgian sulguni; and fetalike brynza. The breads vary from the fat, white, all-wheat ellipses of bulki (which, with soft butter, are the best pedestal for caviar) to darker hues of rye to the dense, crusty, and round orlovskiy and the black, pungent borodinskiy studded with caraway seeds.*

The Razumovskiy carries, among former rarities, smoked or cured sturgeon (osetr, beluga, and sevryuga) and salmon (syomga, gorbusha, keta, and nerka) for between 31 and 75 rubles for 100 grams (or $1-$2.50 for three and a half ounces). Caviar now can be bought in almost every shop, and the price is fairly low. Caviar in small tins and glass jars with metal lids ranged from salmon's red (ripe and briny) at 99 rubles for a 113-gram can ($3.20 for 4 ounces) through osetr's small and firm kernels (300 rubles, or $10) to the luscious, silvery-gray beluga at 500 rubles ($16). Except for holidays, fish was virtually absent from the Russian diet in Soviet times.

For those in need of a serious dessert--for an evening tea at home or, following the tradition, a gift to bring to a dinner party--there are torte kiosks. Chocolate, cream, or soufflé or filled with nuts, layered with waffles, or any combination thereof, these round, square, or loglike concoctions with names like adagio, polyot ("flight"), ptich'e moloko ("birds' milk"), shchelkunchik ("nutcracker"), stratosfera, kapriz ("caprice"), and nezhnost' ("tenderness") weigh between one and four pounds each and cost between 32 and 280 rubles ($1-$9). One of the kiosks near the Airport Metro sold fifty-seven varieties.

Nearby, Azeri vendors sell homegrown tomatoes, cucumbers, honeydew melons, apples, watermelons, large southern cherries (chereshni), as well as imported pineapples, oranges, and bananas. Bananas were the impossible dream of every Moscow child of my generation (most Soviet children outside the city didn't know what a banana was), the ultimate prize our mothers captured once or twice a year after queuing for hours. They were often green and small, and turned black with rot within a few days. No matter: we loved their exotic shape and sweet mushy flesh, which was like nothing else we had ever had. Now they sell for less than 50 cents a pound, and children do not yell and drag their mothers toward the stalls, and no one is surprised or even especially pleased at their availability. People buy one or two at a time and, children and grownups alike, eat them casually while walking and irreverently throw the beautiful yellow skins into sidewalk trash cans.

Another national craving is also now amply supplied by the market: between August and October no Moscow grocery store is complete without mushrooms. There are tall and firm podberyozoviki ("the ones under a birch tree") in dark-brown bonnets; all-white gruzdi ("the heavy ones"); saffron milk caps, or ryzhiki ("little red ones"); yellow maslyata ("little buttery ones"); chanterelles (lisichki, or "little foxes"); and, of course, the noblest fungi of the Russian forest and a dream of every mushroom-picker: the squat, fleshy, tawny-brimmed belyie ("the white ones") on a chubby white stem.

Some mushrooms are used in soups; others are fried in butter with scallions and potatoes, or stewed in sour cream, flour, and parsley and then baked in pies, or salted and marinated to form one of the three best accompaniments to vodka. (The other two are herring and pickles. To make the latter, sprinkle cucumbers with grated horseradish and sliced garlic, layer with dill and currant leaves, and cover with hot saltwater.) The mushroom season having begun early last summer because of unusually heavy rains and cool weather, the Razumovskiy offered half a dozen ready-to-eat mushroom salads: in sour cream or olive oil, and with beets, carrots, and potatoes.

Like the sudden abundance of food, the transformation in the way it is consumed has been nothing short of dramatic. Dull and heavy, like Russians' lives, food used to be gorged on--after months of relentless foraging and hoarding--on birthdays, the November 7 anniversary of the Revolution, and New Year's Eve, and drowned in vodka. The rest of the year, the food was meager but the vodka still plentiful. It was the shortage of food and the cheapness of vodka, which contributed up to one fifth of the state budget both in czarist and Soviet times, that were responsible for the stereotype of Russia as a nation of depressed drunks.

More and better food and the appearance of colorful beer bars, especially the ubiquitous Zolotaya Bochka ("Golden Barrel") chain, are likely to change this stereotype. Whetted by the opening of the market to imports, Russia's thirst for beer has increased by leaps and bounds since 1991. After 1998, when most Russians could not afford the imports because of the ruble devaluation, 1,500 private breweries filled the market with domestic brands, with the Zolotaya Bochka brand among the most popular. For the first time in history, Russians started to drink more beer than vodka--a development immensely beneficial for the national health, the public order, and the life expectancy for Russian men, for whom alcoholism was among the leading causes of death.

The new casualness in acquiring food and the appreciation of taste and freshness are Russian gastronomic trends that were merely interrupted in 1917. Classic Russian literature and classic Russian cuisine were born and reached their golden age at about the same time--between, approximately, 1830 and 1890--and the former has compiled a marvelous record of the latter. Here, for instance, is the "gentleman of average means" from Gogol's Dead Souls, who ordered ham at the first tavern on the road; suckling pig at the next stop; a "chunk of sturgeon or sausage with onions" farther down the road; and finished on sterlet soup with rasstegai--round, open, literally "unbuttoned," fish pies with filling exposed in the center--and kulebyaki--multilayered puff-pastry pies, stuffed with rice, mushrooms, onions, or baked salmon and dripping with melted butter.

Chekhov gave Russian literature its first gastronomic martyr: the midlevel bureaucrat Semyon Petrovich Podtykin, ambushed by cruel fate after what seemed to him an interminable wait for an Easter meal. At last the housekeeper-cook carries into the dining room a tall stack of blini. The hot, thin pancakes are beautiful: crisp on the bottom, white, porous, and soft, "like the shoulder of a merchant's daughter." Semyon Petrovich tears off the top two round sheets, douses them in hot melted butter, and slowly spreads caviar. Spots uncovered by the caviar are covered with sour cream. He looks with an artist's pride on his succulent canvas, pauses yet again to survey the table covered with zakuski (hors d'oeuvres), adds a slice of syomga, then a sardine and a sprat; rolls the blini into a tight tube, drinks a shot of vodka, sighs in anticipation--and, in an object lesson to all perfectionists, dies of apoplexy.

The flowering of classic Russian cuisine coincided with the rapid economic expansion and explosive growth of the middle class in the aftermath of Alexander II's liberal reforms. Moscow offered culinary delights to suit every taste and almost every wallet. For a few kopecks street vendors sold pies and blini, kalachi (white rolls), fried buckwheat kasha, or smoked sturgeon with horseradish and vinegar, to be washed down with hot sbiten' (a mead drink spiced with cardamom and nutmeg) in the winter and kvas (Russia's national nonalcoholic drink, made from rye bread fermented with sugar) in the summer.

Filippov's bakery produced kopeck buns, loaves, and warm little pies, pirozhki (the word deriving from the Russian pir, or "feast"), with meat, rice, mushrooms, cottage cheese, or raisins. For five kopecks one could buy pies big enough to provide, with a cup of tea, a hearty Russian breakfast. The official purveyor to the St. Petersburg court, Filippov bought only the best rye grain from Tambov Province and sent inspectors to watch over the milling. Frozen by a secret method, his kalachi were shipped all over Russia, thawed in wet towels, warmed, and served, according to witnesses, "hot and aromatic."

Muscovites were notorious traktirgoers, and in the capital there were thousands of these tavernlike forerunners of restaurants. The poor would pay kopecks for a bowl of shchi (cabbage soup) with meat and porridge. In the frigid winter, the ubiquitous coachmen (izvozchiki) would warm themselves at roadside traktiry with a pot of tea, fried pork, giblets with pickled cucumber, smoked catfish, and a loaf of bran bread.

Gurin's and Egorov's, the best in the long line of great Moscow traktiry, fed the city gourmands between 1850 and 1890. Gurin's was renowned for, along with its food, the largest organ in Moscow, and people flocked there to listen to the music. Located at the end of the present-day Okhotny Ryad street, Egorov's set the national standard of excellence for blini, which were served right off the huge wooden spatula all day long, plain or with caviar, smoked fish, or a score of other fillings, and for rasstegai adorned, in the center of the top layer, with the crown jewel of a glistening slice of roasted sturgeon or baked turbot's liver. In the seafood restaurant on the second floor, wealthier customers drank their sterlet ukha (fish broth) next to a giant tank of live fish.

Some of Europe's leading chefs worked in Moscow in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of them, the Frenchman Olivier, who owned the expensive and fashionable Hermitage, gave his name to the hearty salad of meat, potatoes, eggs, pickles, peas, scallions, and mayonnaise without which to this day no festive Russian table, no matter how exalted or poor, is complete.

Waiting on tables in the best Moscow traktiry was a much sought-after profession. According to Vladimir Gilyarovskiy's Moskva i Moskvichi ("Moscow and Muscovites"), an apprenticeship began with dishwashing and was followed by six months in the kitchen (to remember "all the sauces") and four years as a busboy. A successful graduate was required to purchase the uniforms, consisting of six shirts and trousers of expensive Dutch linen, to be kept "white as fresh snow" and free of wrinkles.

All was lost when the last vestiges of private enterprise disappeared in the early 1930s. Taken over by the state, a few good restaurants lingered for years, most conspicuously the one at the Union of Soviet Writers on Povarskaya, or Cook's, Street. Yet by the mid-1930s, in The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov mourned the restaurant's decline: "Do you remember sterlet in a silver saucepan, cut into pieces and interlaced with lobster tails and fresh caviar?" he asked wistfully. "Or eggs filled with pureed mushrooms and served in tiny cups? And how about blackbird filets--with truffles? Or quail à la Genoa?"

No major Soviet Russian author wrote in praise of fine food after that.

A decade after the end of the relentless Soviet deprivation, incompetence, universal thievery, and daily indignities--the world Nabokov called "so shoddy, so crabbed and gray"--the Russian capital seems to have been remade into one of Europe's best (and best-hidden) gastronomic destinations. The change in taste, décor, and service is even more startling than the availability of food. Outside of the stolovye ("dining rooms") of the high nomenklatura (closed to ordinary mortals), meals were equally awful in the glitzy Metropol or Natsional (which catered to foreigners, their KGB minders, and "official Russians") and in the "cafés" and "restaurants" for the "masses"--except that in the former the execrable food was dispensed with servility in kitschy chic, while in the latter it was ladled out in rudeness and squalor. All this has been replaced by cleanliness, politeness, good training, competence, and, in many cases, polish and even panache.

Of course, far from all of Moscow's more than 4,000 restaurants are within the middle-class range. For those who, following Dr. Johnson, wish to smile with the wise but feed with the rich (that is, the 5 percent with monthly incomes of over $3,500), there are several dozen superb establishments. Among them are Tsarskaya Okhota ("Czar's Hunt") in Zhukovka, near Stalin's favorite dacha, where in 1997 Boris Yeltsin entertained French president Jacques Chirac; the CDL, in the former headquarters of the Union of Soviet Writers; the Sirena, Moscow's best seafood restaurant, which serves lobsters, oysters, crabs, and giant shrimp in a hushed, wood-paneled décor as enormous sturgeon swim under the glass floor and sea creatures frolic behind the glass walls; and the Savoy, the Grand Imperial, Le Romanoff, the Metropol, and the Grand Opera--with their cavernous dining rooms, crystal chandeliers, silver cutlery, and floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

A step below this grandeur are restaurants that middle-class Muscovites enjoy on special occasions. Across Tverskaya Street from Pushkin Square is Café Pushkin, an example of an intense but tasteful quest for authenticity that characterizes Moscow dining today. The restaurant is housed in a typical early-nineteenth-century Moscow building, quite a few of which miraculously have survived the Soviet decay and demolition. The inside looks very much like a Moscow museum: parquet floors, mirrors fogged with age in heavy bronze frames, a patina of fine cracks on the marble stairs and the walls, a medium-size dining room under a thirty-foot ceiling, and a wide staircase with cast-iron banisters leading to the second-floor library. But all is an illusion: the restaurant is barely four years old and was built from scratch on an empty lot within five months.

The Pushkin offers the mainstays of Russian cooking: kvas and sbiten'; suckling pig with apple gravy (as a cold appetizer); blini with osetr and salmon caviar; mutton Hussar, "stewed in beer for more swagger," as the menu describes it, and baked with mushrooms into a pie; beef Stroganoff; chicken giblets with mushrooms in rye-bread "pots"; salmon and sturgeon (grilled, stewed, or jerked), pel'meni (dumplings) with beef, pork, veal, salmon, or mushrooms; and catfish "baked into a potato puree under a spinach sauce." Appetizer and soups are between $6 and $9, and most entrées are between $10 and $23, with the most expensive--saddle of lamb accompanied by vegetables--at $29.50.

It being July, my hosts (up-and-coming lawyers in their early forties) and I ordered the summer classic of chilled kvas-based soup, okroshka. Thinly sliced scallions, radishes, beef, potatoes, boiled eggs, and cucumbers, dill, a dollop of sour cream; and a touch of horseradish blended harmoniously, each ingredient true to its character and texture. Marinated Baltic sprats were delicate, their sharp briny taste balanced by an accompanying vinaigrette of potatoes, beets, onions, dill pickles, eggs, and mayonnaise. The entrees were faultless: golden-brown veal cutlet à la Pozharsky (a famous nineteenth-century Russian chef, who made the dish from wild game) and crisp grilled sturgeon.

Both in the fare and the setting Beloye Solntze Pustyni, or BSP ("White Sun of the Desert"), on Neglinnaya Street is as far from the lean elegance of the Pushkin as St. Petersburg is from Bukhara or Samarkand. It dazzles with brilliant colors and pampers shamelessly. The restaurant is a festive blend of a Central Asian chai-khana (teahouse) and a movie set. The film that gave the restaurant its name is an irreverent tragicomedy about the Russian civil war, set on a barge marooned on Turkestan's Caspian shore. The movie miraculously made it past the censors in the late 1960s and became a cult hit. The dining room is wrapped in red, gold, and black Persian carpets: on the floor, over the whitewashed clay walls, and on the seats. Female servers wear gold, red, and mauve paisley silk tunics over baggy silk trousers, sharavari, and matching embroidered skullcaps. Life-size papier-mâché soldiers crouch behind a Maxim machine gun. A few feet away swarthy white-bearded elders smoke hookahs on wooden boxes inscribed "DANGER: DYNAMITE!".

In the center of the room, circling an enormous tree trunk, is a dastarkhan: a prix-fixe collection of at least two dozen hot and cold Central Asian dishes, including such standards as lagman (noodles-and-lamb stew); manty (large lamb dumplings); shashlyki of sturgeon, lamb, and chicken; tender and pungent sausage kazy, and baked eggplant stuffed with nuts. The patrons' tables are constantly resupplied with clear, cool, tart pomegranate juice and hot, flat white bread extracted with long-handled wooden spatulas from the ovens through openings in the walls. Plov (pilaf), which is the heart and the obligatory dish in every meal, never stops cooking in the iron cauldrons hung over a low fire, where the rice is steamed with chunks of lamb shoulder or leg, carrots, onions, hot red pepper, and saffron. Although sauteed in lamb fat instead of olive oil and considerably more pungent than risotto, the classic plov is as much a product of constant stirring. Solemnly borne by two sous-chefs, the giant clay pot of plov was placed on a wooden pedestal next to our table and ladled onto the plates by the chef himself, a strapping Uzbek in a monumental starched toque.

In post-Soviet Russia, as in any other country, the backbone of the national cuisine, however, is to be found not in the almost theatrical elaborateness of the Pushkin or the BSP but in places that are "neither chic nor sordid," in A. J. Liebling's immortal classification: the restaurants where a meal is not an event but an uncomplicated and affordable pleasure. An entrée in scores of such places in Moscow rarely exceeds the equivalent of $12. Muscovites stop by after work for a bit of smoked salmon or pickled Baltic Sea herring, marinated mushrooms, fresh kholodetz (pork or veal in aspic), a plate of pel'meni, pirozhki with a cup of chicken or beef bouillon, a bowl of borscht or fish broth, a cup of tea--and, often, listen to live jazz or romantic Russian ballads.

The Bochka ("Barrel") serves pigs roasted on a spit, veal brains with mushrooms in a pot, and grilled salmon. The Oblomov, named after Ivan Goncharov's great nineteenth-century novel, features waitresses and waiters in crinolines and tails and a giant of a maitre d' in luxurious muttonchops and a morning coat who converses with customers in Fyodor Chaliapin's deep bass. Those tormented by nostalgia for their Soviet youth may avail themselves of the New Vasyuki (the name is from the hilarious 1928 satire The Twelve Chairs, by Il'ya Il'f and Evgeniy Petrov), on whose menu one finds "The union of the sword and the plough": two plump pieces of sturgeon with black and red caviar inside and a side of fried potato shavings under cream sauce.

A more elaborate retro gastronomic experience is offered by Club Petrovich, named after the main character of a popular cartoon strip: a plumber who is an incorrigible sovok (Homo sovieticus)--petty, cunning, thoroughly corrupt, and fiercely competitive for meager Soviet amenities. The theme appealed to Russian P.R.-niks--a hardboiled and cynical lot--and the place became the hangout (tusovka) of ad-men and -women, imagemakers, and political-campaign managers. Its walls covered with original black-and-white photographs of Soviet movie stars and hanging toilet plungers, the restaurant is a combination of a crummy communal apartment and a kontora (office): the Soviet shrine and the citadel of sadistic petty bureaucrats on whose bribe-induced mercy untold millions of hapless tenants threw themselves with their tales of leaking roofs, burst sewer pipes, cold radiators, and rusty drinking water. The menu is delivered in the Soviet bureaucrat's indispensable carrying case: a thick, cardboard folder with tassels (papka) stained with imitation grease. Served by generous platefuls, the retro food--sosiski (fat frankfurters), bitochki (small steaks), grechnevaya kasha (boiled buckwheat groats), lapsha (noodles), kupaty (crisp fried sausages stuffed with spicy mincemeat)--is incomparably fresher and better-tasting than the Soviet original but perfectly recognizable.

Still, the most memorable Moscow meal was at Shinok ("Tavern"), Number 2, 1905 Revolution Street, where dinner requires a serious commitment of time and effort. To come here for lunch is a strain and a waste of food designed to be consumed leisurely.

Babel, Isaak Emanuilovich Babel--you gourmand, Jewish cavalryman, admirer of Maupassant and seeker after Flaubertian perfection, rotund little bon vivant in steel-rimmed glasses; you who compared your life to "a meadow in May, the meadow on which women and horses wandered"--where was your soul that night? Your fierce, voracious and restless soul, which left your body in the basement of the Lubyanka in January 1940 after the customary midnight shot in the back of the head, like hundreds of thousands of other "enemies of the people" swept out in Stalin's Great Purge?

We ate cold stuffed fish with horse-radish, like the one your grandmother served on Saturday nights in Odessa--the dish of which you wrote that it was "worth converting to Judaism for." We drank a toast to your Aunt Bobka, in whose jam strudel and poppy-seed pie you tasted "the heart of our tribe, the heart so good at struggle"--and our strudel and our pie were just as stirring.

And Babel's was not the only ghost looking down on us. The fabulous food was a medium of communing with another son of the fat and fecund soil of the Russian empire's southern rim: Russia's strangest genius, a depressive and anti-Semite, who produced some of the funniest pages of the Russian literary canon; a passionate patriot who loved Russia from "the beautiful faraway" of an apartment on Rome's Via Sistina above the Spanish Steps; a gourmand who called the stomach his "noblest inner organ," left unmatched descriptions of Russian and Ukrainian food, and starved himself to death. Gogol was there with Babel, like Jewish tavern owners, shinkari, and their Ukrainian and Russian customers--and occasional pogrom murderers--who had been through four centuries of mutual need and loathing.

Behind the glass wall next to our heavy dark table, two milk-white goats, a red horse, and a spotted pig chewed and slept and walked about attended by a woman of ample proportions in the Ukrainian folk dress of a bright red jacket and a full green skirt with a few inches of linen petticoat showing below the hem, and the customers ate and drank, as they did--minus the glass partition--in Gogol's Evenings near the Village of Dikan'ka.

Here were all the requisite dishes, as if prepared by Pulkheria Ivanovna of Gogol's Old World Landowners for her perennially hungry husband or by lascivious Khavronya Nikiforovna from Sorochinskaya Fair for her cowardly lover: syrniki (cottage-cheese pancakes), pampushki (rolls), galushki, irregularly shaped pieces of dough, white and slippery, served hot with sour cream, known as klyotski in the Russian-Jewish version, and vareniki, ravioli-like large dumplings stuffed with fruit or cheese and served with either sour cream or sweet fruit sauce. Vareniki were served in small earthenware crocks--"little pots," Gogol wrote, "with lids sealed by wax or grease lest some mouthwatering creation of the old tasty cuisine lose its flavor."

Our Shinok waiter put on the table a tall cold pitcher of kvas beaded with moisture. Recalling, again, Gogol's Evenings, we had asked for an elaborate pear-and-blackthorn-berries version. They had it.

Zakuski, hors d'oeuvres, continued to arrive: the velvety forshmak--a soufflé of herring soaked in milk overnight to take away the salt and baked with eggs, onion, and breadcrumbs--with roast potatoes, followed by pirozhki. Unlike the Moscow variety--oval, flaky, layered, and uniformly browned--these gifts of southern Russia were perfectly round brown cupolas on white bottoms. Faced with a choice of nine different stuffings, I recalled Gogol's Old World Landowners and ordered two with liver and two with buckwheat and cabbage, sauteed with onions and dill.

Appearing in solemn silence, the king of Russian soups, steaming borscht, heralded the end of the appetizer prelude. The classic borscht's inimitable bouquet of flavors comes from the harmonious multiplicity of ingredients that are sautéed together in animal fat and sprinkled with lemon juice and a dash of sugar before being ladled into beef bouillon fortified with potatoes: cabbage, carrots, onions, peppers, garlic, tomato paste, tomatoes, and bay leaf. Potatoes, sour cream, and a few pinches of deep-fried flour together produce the thick, almost chewy, but creamy and fluid texture. Our borscht was strong and dark purple, with floating islands of beef and potatoes. It was accompanied by hot pampushki, but we asked for black rye bread and garlic cloves to rub against the crust instead of those gentle rolls.

If borscht is the king and stuffed fish the queen, the prince of the traditional southern Russian (and Jewish) tables is undoubtedly kislo-sladkoe zharkoye, a sweet-and-sour beef stew. A species of tzimmes (generic Yiddish for sweetened meat-and-vegetable stews), the beef is dressed with tomato paste, carrots, and onions. The key to the dish is the elusive and precarious balance between sugar (or honey) and lemon juice. (The sweet side also may be fortified with prunes and apricots; and the sour, with vinegar.) Here, too, the Shinok passed with flying colors: served piping hot, under a thick, dark orange sauce, the cubed brisket was tender but fully textured.

The tea came with an apple strudel of cinnamon, nuts, and raisins; pirog s makom (poppy-seed pie); and smetannik (a sour-cream-and-jam pie). All were freshly baked, their slightly moist interiors harboring the intense sweetness and spice that over the centuries have fortified the Russian-Jewish heart against disasters.

The dessert was accompanied by the homemade digestive nalivka, in its most popular--cherry--version. The juiciest fruits are mixed with the best vodka and plenty of sugar and allowed to stand for at least a month before straining. I found the Shinok's concoction stronger and not as sweet as my Grandpa Abram's homemade version but just as flavorful. "We do not drink vodka," Grandpa Abram used to declare to the bitterly disappointed Russian porters, painters, or plumbers claiming the customary glass of vodka upon the completion of a job. "Vot nalivka, pozhaluysta!" ("But, by all means, please help yourself to the nalivka!")

I silently dedicated the few last drops of vodka to the memory of my grandmothers, Sima Shvartz and Roza Atlas, who had forged delectable masterpieces out of the poverty and strain of Soviet existence.

The next evening, the last of my trip, walking with an old friend and his nine-year-old son along Pyatnitskaya Street in Zamoskvorech'e--Moscow's sedate residential district, populated before 1917 by well-to-do merchants and today home to less important embassies--we saw four tables on the sidewalk. The small restaurant inside, with white curtains on the windows and cheerful Gobelins on the walls, looked like a Moscow apartment.

After a short July shower, the air was fresh and cool. In the soft bluish dusk, a sudden burst of light from the sidewalk signaled a small but safe harbor of friendship and intimacy. What I thought was possible only on the edge of a sleepy piazza in Rome's Trastevere or on a narrow street on Paris's Left Bank was suddenly part of Moscow.

The marquee read Soosy Poosy--the cooing of a Russian parent over a baby. A children's café? No, no, laughed a beautiful young woman. "It's just that we are trying to be like your family's apartment. Also we are a family restaurant: I wait on tables, my parents cook. Are you coming in?"

Full of beer, jambalaya, fried shrimp, and oysters from the Louisiana American Steak House up the street, where waiters wore tight jeans and toy silver guns in holsters, we had to decline.

"Prikhodite k nam koga-nibud." "Come see us sometime," the woman called out. "Pridyom. Pridyom, ob'yazatel'no pridyom." "We will be back. We certainly will," I promised.

Notes

* In 2001, for the first time since the late 1920s, Russia had enough grain not only to feed its people and cattle without millions of tons of American, Canadian, and Argentine wheat but to export at least 5 million tons.