MatreshkaSee Address

Seventy years ago Shanghai was home to a 25,000-strong anti-Bolshevik diaspora – Russian cuisine was widespread. A 1945 guide to the city for the American military referred to a ‘multitude of places’ serving Russian food in ‘Frenchtown’. In the wars and years since then however, Russian culinary choices have all but disappeared, boiled down to a risibly puny legacy that currently adds up to The Flying Elephant in The Bund Hotel, Red Square at 1933, and now this amusingly sadsack opening in Jingan district.

Russian food can be inscrutable, so for this review we enlist the help of a gourmand from the Ukraine (a country from which many Soviet-era standards are magpied – Moscow food writer Vilyam Pokhlebkin notes in A Century of Cooking that borscht originates from the Ukraine).



In the event, the menu isn’t as un-navigable as we’d feared – chef Pavel, from Khabarovsk, pays dutiful homage to the favourites in a menu with numerous recognisable dishes. Successful ones include the light, well-salted herring salad (35RMB), where grated layers of egg, potato, fish and beetroot combine well; the bright ruby-red borscht, served with sour cream (35RMB), which passes muster with our Slav sidekick who deemed it worthy of a return visit; and the weighty, addictively comforting pork aspic (27RMB), which gets a zingy lift from fresh horseradish.

And that’s where the good news ends: garnished with the same uninspired clump of parsley (presentation runs circa 1970s), the remaining dishes we try, including pasty-textured Siberian dumplings (38RMB), a so-so chicken Kiev with a small, cheese-less cavity, and bland Russian pancakes with smoked salmon (27RMB), are all as listless, ho-hum and sad looking as the decor.

With its beiges, creams and browns, small stage and DJ stand, Matreshka looks like a Kazakh function suite. Half way through our meal, the music expires and the atmosphere feels desolate. No matter, a Russian couple switch on the telly and watch a dubbed version of Brief Encounter.

And that’s the gist of it here. Matreshka is a kind of Russian social club (we were the only native English speakers there). But that’s no bad thing: for non-former members of the Soviet bloc, there’s an ironic sort of fun on offer here. And with everything around 35RMB, it’s a cheap-ish adventure into a lesser-found cuisine. It doesn’t cost much to tick Matreshka off your list – sense of humour required.

Alexander Barlow