We didn’t even notice how vegetables began to be served not only as a side dish. Completely independent gastronomic stories – this is what vegetables have become in restaurant kitchens. Carrot gazpacho, sorrel panna cotta and lettuce taco are dishes where vegetables have ascended to the gastronomic Olympus.
Carrot gazpacho with stracciatella and roasted seeds
At Kokoko, the ingredients are turned upside down in almost every dish. Why not put carrots in gazpacho instead of the canonical tomato, chef Igor Grishechkin thought and turned the Spanish cold soup into Russian. The plate contains a seasonal version of gazpacho with young carrots in two textures, in the form of puree and crispy slices, plus herbs, toasted seeds and a couple of drops of unrefined oil.
Eggplant with yogurt mousse
According to intelligence reports, Duo Asia is going to remove this dish from the menu, so lovers of the “little blue ones” should hurry up. The main thing about eggplant is not that it is steamed and then fried until the coveted golden crust, the main thing is the hand-made sauce that is generously coated with the finished vegetable. There are hardly fewer ingredients in the sauce than in Worcestershire, including Chinese hoisin and black soy. For balance, the mousse is made from yogurt and lemon juice.
Asparagus, potato gratin, morels, parmesan
Asparagus is a seasonal vegetable and will not be on the Birch menu for long, about the same time as morel mushrooms, that is, only until summer. To accompany the delicious asparagus, they chose potatoes, which were refined – together with turmeric and chives they made a terrine. The vegetable tango is completed with a sauce of morels and white wine, the same poached green asparagus and Parmesan.
Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Aioli Sauce
Unlike ordinary potatoes, the fate of which in our country was not easy and did not happen right away, sweet potatoes and yams entered our culinary life as easily as a knife through butter. At Atelier tapas & bar on Petrogradskaya, an elegant orange vegetable is baked in a josper directly in the peel with salt and olive oil and served with aioli – a sauce made with yolks with garlic and chili.
Sorrel panna cotta with celery stalk and mango cream
The Social Club restaurant decided to create a vegetable version of panna cotta. Why did they use celery, and its upper part – thin slices of the vegetable crown the dessert, and sorrel is used instead of milk. Out of respect for those with a sweet tooth, the panna cotta ingredients include three types of puree: cherry, mango and passion fruit.
Warm salad of caramelized vegetables
In the Gras menu, the dish is listed as a salad, which is essentially hot vegetables. Fennel, romaine, green beans and sprouted soybeans are helped to become caramelized and acquire an Asian flair – honey and soy sauce. The chef of the restaurant on Inzhenernaya, Ilya Kokotovsky, cooks vegetables instantly in a frying pan, tops them with fried bread crumbs and serves them with smoked cheese sauce.
Lettuce taco with avocado and wasabi
Duo chef Dmitry Blinov was one of the first in the city to offer vegetables not as a banal side dish, but as a full-fledged dish. And it still offers it – in the restaurant on Kirochnaya a large section of the menu is called “Vegetables”. Avocado salsa is spread on romaine leaves, topped with a spicy sauce made from spicy Japanese mustard wasabi and sweet unagi and finished off with fresh spinach – real Greenpeace. The “taco” in the name is not a flatbread, but a way of eating; of course, with your hands.
Asparagus, malt and plum with seaweed sauce
In the female hands of restaurant chef E.M. Olesya Drobot’s delicious asparagus starts and wins: to enhance the taste, the vegetable is supplemented with rye malt sauce. The second sauce is made from seaweed with the addition of shiitake mushrooms, tofu and port wine. To complete the ambiance, juicy plums fried with miso paste and feminine amaranth leaves.
Salad with Jerusalem artichoke, dates and kale
Jerusalem artichoke, aka earthen pear, aka Jerusalem artichoke – this miracle vegetable is little noticeable on the outside and beautiful on the inside. The author of the salad in Tel Aviv style is the capital’s chef-restaurateur William Lamberti, who headed the Shana restaurant on Karavannaya; In addition to baked Jerusalem artichoke, the plate contains burnt pineapple slices, Israeli tahini sauce and a rare beast in our area – indecently fresh kale salad.
Root vegetable gratin with vegetable demi-glace
A little French tradition and a drop of taste, and a banal potato casserole at the Greneta bar on Radishcheva, 34 turns into gratin, aka gratin. In this dish, everything is vegetable from tip to tail: thin layers of parsnips, celery root, potatoes and carrots are stacked on top of each other and baked, served with a vegetable demi-glace sauce and decorated with fried onions, broken into crumbs.
