Victor’s is a small storefront done up with linen and elegant lacy napkins to suggest a kind of budget-gourmet experience. That’s about what it can deliver, with a little Russian and Ukrainian heartiness and a little French technique for good measure. It isn’t a polished fusion, but there are things about it that cannot be duplicated elsewhere, starting with the sound of rapid-fire Hebrew, Russian, and English, with switching and various accents.
At dinner food starts modestly with small, warm rolls that are mostly good for melting a little butter. But soups and appetizers are a strength of Russian cuisine, and the soups here ($4/cup; $6/bowl) are outstanding. As you might expect, the cup is about the size of an American cereal bowl, and the bowl is a modest dinner.
Not surprisingly, the cabbage borscht (the alternative is spinach) has lots of red beets and a bit of sour cream as well as cabbage, but it’s interestingly flavored with fresh dill. A “vegetable and meat” soup of the day is all of that with dill and capers, too. Another day I had tomato-ham, which also contained vegetables, but this time there were a few batons of potato and quite a few capers.
Other starters include crêpes with various fillings, smoked seafood, and small plates, but we picked out a couple of pickled salads. Sauerkraut ($6) was barely fermented, more like a slightly pickled slaw, and very refreshing, with sweet-pepper slices. Marinated mushrooms ($6) garnished with pickled onion and bell pepper were all enoki and oyster mushrooms, also very mildly pickled to preserve the delicate mushroom flavors.
Dinner entrées escalate to a steak and a rack of lamb, but I wanted pelmeni ($10/lunch; $15/dinner), a baker’s dozen of the dumplings. You’ve always wanted to have an entire dinner of Peking ravioli, right? Well, here you are, with a big plate of the same general meat-stuffed raviolis the Mongols took all over Eurasia, minus the ginger and soy but with the Russian complements of sour cream, butter, and pepper. All entrées come with a fascinating decoration: a long slice of cucumber wrapped into a double cone, with halved grape tomatoes or strawberries as “eyes.” I don’t know if these eyes go with the large-eyed faces in the wall art or represent timeless paranoia, but they are cool.
You’ll need a side vegetable ($4, but included with many dinner entrées), and I had “spring mix,” a typical mesclun salad made special with thinly sliced pickled shiitake mushrooms as good as any in the marinated-mushroom appetizer.
For a more conventional continental entrée, baked jumbo shrimp ($18) are five very large shrimp stuffed with chopped walnuts, in a dandy garlic sauce, served in a scallop shell. This comes with a side dish, and we just had to have the potato pancake. It was almost 10 inches of shredded potato with a little onion, folded over sautéed vegetables, and it was almost as good as one of my own la tk es.
At lunch I tried a chicken kebab ($10; $15/dinner), and it was a best buy. The “kebab” part was four boneless chicken-breast “tenders” in a cream (or sour cream) sauce with green peppercorns. Included was the potato pancake, that day folded over sautéed yellow squash and onions.
The wine list is modest, and modestly priced. We chose both merlots. The Blackstone 2001 ($6/glass; $20/bottle) had some of the depth of a mature St. Emilion but was very soft (which is what merlot drinkers want, you know). The Bogle 2003 ($6/$20) was even softer but quite similar. A decaf cappuccino ($2.10/small; $3.10/medium; $3.55/large) was very good, possibly the answer to the usual stale-decaf problem. Tea ($2), an area in which I expected excellence from a Russian restaurant, was just a bag in a cup. The bag does come from Imperial Tea, a Russian company founded after the fall of the Soviet Union that now claims to be the second-largest buyer in Sri Lanka. It’s a good bag, and in a little less water it might make a fine English Breakfast.
But dessert was excellent. The house specialty is blintzes ($5/with honey, jam, sour cream, or sugar; $8/with banana, strawberry, or pineapple). Either way, the portion is four thin, eggy crêpes (or blintzes, or blini — pick your language), and you can mix, match, and divide. We split blintzes with honey and apricot jam, and both were delectable. Even more so are a series of homemade mini-pastries ($1.50), which were like two-bite cakes. The one that looks like a chocolate turtle candy with some nuts was actually cake-based and delicious. If you catch an early movie at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Victor’s might be ideal for coffee and dessert.
