
An Eldar’s Kitchen dumpling, pictured in what we assume is its pure habitat.
I agree with Anthony Bourdain on an awesome many issues, amongst them that meals tastes higher whenever you’re not carrying sneakers. Whereas he goes on to sing the praises of feeling the seaside under your toes, at Eldar’s Kitchen, the Federal Means restaurant the place I sat all the way down to a plate of khinkali in my socks, the grains on the ground have been extra of the wooden selection than sand.
Eldar’s Kitchen sits on the highest ground of Palace Spa, a co-ed Korean-style assortment of sizzling swimming pools, chilly plunges, saunas, steam rooms, and extra. After working up an urge for food alternating by means of the therapeutic properties of the ice, clay, salt, and jewel rooms, spa-goers can pad upstairs within the scrub-like outfit Palace provides for the mixed-gender areas and sit all the way down to a meal of specialties from across the former Soviet Union.
The Western European and American concept of spa meals embraces the aesthetics of haute delicacies with the ascetics of Lean Delicacies. Khinkali, the thick-skinned steamed dumplings from Georgia (the nation, not the state), with their meaty filling and wealthy broth, signify the other. Wellness comes as consolation right here, moderately than deprivation, within the type of Uzbek samsa buns and fizzy cans of darkish rye kvass.
Whereas I really like a Korean spa, this time I arrived with solely skewers of shashlik and pillows of piroshki on my thoughts. The entrance desk pointed me towards a staircase alongside the north facet of the constructing. Getting into by the busy kitchen, my buddy and I discovered our manner right into a largely unfurnished front room–like space, with a far too small shoe rack within the close to nook.
The naked flooring, unadorned tables, and counter-service felt at odds with even the Korean concept of a spa. It felt extra in step with the type of place the place it seems they’re out of half the menu gadgets always (they have been, presently) and the place the workers visibly loosen up when a buyer speaks to them in their very own language (as our server did when my buddy spoke to her in Russian).
There’s a slight oddness to all the things at Eldar’s Kitchen: the Russian restaurant inside a Korean spa, the tough lighting in such a soothing place, that half the purchasers are carrying the shapeless scrubs of the spa, and no one is carrying sneakers. The menu is a jumble of Uzbek pastries, Georgian dumplings, and Russian classics, plus generic restaurant gadgets that appear to have little to do with the restaurant’s style, nor with the dish identify itself, judging from the caesar salad I noticed land on a neighboring desk.
None of these mattered: The sweetness of brilliant inexperienced tarragon soda smoothed over any tough edges. The savory steam escaping from the buttery greens contained in the bun of my cabbage piroshki was a spa expertise by itself, a facial dipped in dilly bitter cream. As I slurped the silky soup contained in the light folds of my khinkali, I got here to a conclusion I ought to have reached after so many rounds of mandu on the eating places inside the realm’s different Korean spas: Dumplings are the right spa meals.