THE DISH: Teatr

27 Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa//Tel. 240 2496//Open 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.//Menu in Russian only//Dinner for two 2,100 rubles ($65.84)

By Luisa Schulz

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: August 22, 2012 (Issue # 1723)

Playing with food

Stepping into Teatr, a new restaurant-cafe next to the Theater Estrady, guests may be caught by the prickling discomfort sensed when entering a restaurant that is almost completely empty. At nine in the evening, there were only two other diners, who had tucked themselves away in one of the corners of the single rectangular room. The white interior with excessive stucco and trendy chandeliers dragging down the high ceilings did not help to ease the cool atmosphere. If the cafe resembles a theater, it is only because guests themselves feel as if they are entering a stage.

Polite waitresses stood around a little superfluously, trailing diners’ every gesture like spectators of an intimate play. In the high, echoing room, filled only by low but not very soothing chill-out-music, they could follow every word of people’s conversations, even from afar. On the upside, this means that the staff can be addressed from anywhere in the whole room. This strategy was used to request an English menu, which the servers brought immediately, though it turned out to be only a drinks menu — rather unhelpful as not only was there no wine on offer, but no alcohol at all was available, as the restaurant opened in May and has not yet obtained a liquor license.

The menu options were of a more colorful variety, ranging from borsch to gazpacho, from Polish zander to beef Stroganoff, from panna cotta to a berry cocktail. The prices — between 450 and 690 rubles ($14.10 to 21.60) for a main — were as lofty as the interior. A disappointment for vegetarians is that all hot dishes on offer contain either fish or meat. A consolation was the summer menu, which featured cold soups and salads that were as original as cold spinach with a fruit sauce.

An advantage to being such lonely diners in the restaurant was that the dishes were served swiftly. The champignon cappuccino soup (320 rubles, $10) had an interesting spumous consistency and was a whirl for the mouth, though the aftertaste was less refined. The gazpacho (290 rubles, $9), was nicely decorated with herbs and a Grossini bread stick, and slid down the throat more like tomato juice with a pinch of onion and pepper.

An arriving plate that held what resembled rosy beige-colored marshmallows with a kraken-like, undulating array of sauce traces turned out to be the salmon and zander medallions served with a vegetable puree and wine sauce (450 rubles, $14.10). The medallions had an agreeable unobtrusive taste, but were slightly dry, and the salmon and zander flavors were disappointingly hard to detect, as was the wine in the sauce. The vegetable puree, on the other hand, was delectable and a larger portion of it would have certainly been appreciated. A more guarded alternative turned out to be a simple salad with yogurt sauce (290 rubles, $9) that the vegetarian in our party reverted to given the lack of meat- and fish-free mains.

For want of alcohol, the dishes ended up being accompanied by fruit cocktails (ginger-lemon and strawberry-pineapple, both 150 rubles, $4), which dominated the counterpoint with the savory courses, as they were bursting with glucose. The desserts were the late denouement of the dinner at Teatr. Not only were they served to us when the restaurant had officially already closed, but the panna cotta and berry cocktail with vanilla ice cream and wine had a fine, discreet taste that smoothed out the former imbalances and enabled us to leave the restaurant almost appeased.

Although the restaurant resembles a playhouse overcharged with stucco and chandeliers, the costumes of the dishes were nicely decorated.

Had it not been for this panopticon effect of the vacuous room, and had indeed some of the neighboring theater’s actors dropped in, as an employee said they sometimes do, the experience might not have been too bad.