We had good French bread and butter, then a spicy lamb soup ($7) to take any chill out of the evening. It was a little too salty and greasy, but full of the flavor of hacked-up lamb ribs and barley, with a strong onion base. Pierogies ($8) come with potato, meat, or cherry filling. I was a little surprised they weren’t vereniki or pelmeni, the more usual Siberian dumplings, but these were small and delicate turnovers filled with potato (our decision) and topped with sautéed onions and a dip of sour cream. Margarita salad ($12) is a fantastic invention: cucumber, fresh dill and parsley, onions, smoked salmon, and avocado. If you’re just having drinks, you may want something along the lines of the cold appetizer of smoked sturgeon ($12), which brought about six freshly cut slices only a little leaner than salmon, with lots of flavor.
Chicken Pozharsky ($15) is chopped chicken meat wrapped around mushrooms, and fried with a crust of shredded bagels. (Café St. Petersburg was one of the first to make it this way, and they still have it on their menu.) The sides on main dishes are a slaw of marinated cabbage and cranberries, and your choice of baked rice, steak fries, kasha, and my favorite: roast potatoes. They had been cooked a little too long, so it created a hint of caramelized flavor, similar to that which one gets by roasting vegetables in foil in the campfire.
Duck à l’orange ($17) was a half duckling, with a fine orange sauce and pieces of kumquat or apricot, as well as three slices of spiced crab apple, each with its own maraschino cherry at the center. Like the music, the garnishes are charmingly old-fashioned. Trout with almonds ($16) was a large and full-flavored filet, flattened and spread with a creamy sauce and covered with sliced almonds.
The wine list at Vernissage includes four Georgian reds, and a white, Tsinandali ($9/glass; $35/bottle), that I had sampled at the lamented Samovar. Tsinandali has a mineral flavor and a fresh aroma that cuts through the fish dishes and cream sauces nicely. The list says “imported beer,” but I would hold out for Russian Baltika, one of the most popular beers in Europe. The cranberry vodka ($4) is homemade. Water was refilled almost often enough for the somewhat salty food.
There are desserts, and I would on general experience recommend the blintzes, even when they are called blini, blinchiki, or crêpes. But our group was not up for more music, however enthusiastically rendered.
At Vernissage, everyone knows at least one person at another table — another thing American youth wouldn’t like. (Who wants to get hammered and have cousin Maxim tell everyone in the family?) The night we visited, there was a 30-person multi-family birthday party for a patriarch (“Happy Birthday Yevgeny” sung in English), a handsome young couple, a table of young parents with children, and a middle-aged couple.
If that doesn’t sound like your scene, you can check out the handsome new Café St. Petersburg. (Yes, it’s down a dark alley, but it’s a clean, well-lit place once you’re there, with a nice outdoor patio.) Victor’s Café has a somewhat gloomier crowd but great blintzes. And Stoli, which has the funniest menu descriptions in Boston, had rather good food when I reviewed it a little more than a year ago. Or, caravan to Revere, or even Foxboro (for Odessa, which I loved it when it was in Dedham).
