Eating Russian Food by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Eating Russian Food by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Before I moved to Monterey County twenty years ago, I read about the history of the area and learned that explorers had come to the area from nations as diverse as France, Spain, England, and Russia to establish whaling trading posts. 

There are still entire Russian settlements in California and Alaska in the United States.  We even have a darling Russian Orthodox Church in Seaside, California.  There is an old whaling station that you can visit outside Carmel, California in Point Lobos State Park, too.

With this historical background in mind, I immediately wanted to try the food at the Pagrovia Café in Pacific Grove, California that advertised Russian and Italian specialties when I was on my way to pick up Florence at her charter Waldorf School in PG.

I called up my editor at the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) and said, “There’s a Russian restaurant in PG.  We need to see what they eat.”

I got the assignment and off I went to write the following article:

A là Russe

As soon as I heard that the Pagrovia Café served Russian food, I took out an atlas to locate the Russian region of Pagrovia to see what influences it might have on the meals served in this new restaurant.

Luckily, before I started doing online searches to find this mysterious region, my Pagrovian friend told me that “Pagrovia” is PG-speak for Pacific Grove.

With that issue out of the way, I invited another friend to sample a Russian dinner.  When we walked into the restaurant, we liked seeing a samovar at the door.  Paintings of icons and St. Petersburg canals by the Italian-American chef lined the walls.  White linen tablecloths and fresh flowers awaited us at our table.

I suspect that co-owner Valentina Rapisarda, a native of St. Petersburg, had a hand in the decorating.  I could easily imagine the early 20^th century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova alchemizing her unrequited loves into poems in this former diner.

But it is not all about Russia at Pagrovia: the oversize menus offering a choice of Russian and Italian foods reflect both owners’ cooking styles – Russian and Italian.

While my dinner mate and I decided what to order, we dipped fresh, warm slices of Parmesan focaccia in balsamic vinegar and olive oil.  (This is a sneaky vegetarian protein combination from Italy).  Then, we ordered our Russian banquet: piroshky and beef Stroganoff for my dinner mate and borsch and barashka (lamb stew) for me.

I love the crimson color that borsch gets from beets, its main ingredient.  What I especially like about Pagrovia’s version of borsch is its savory flavor as opposed to the sweet and tangy flavor the soup usually gets from sugar and lemon juice in the versions I ate at Zukin’s Deli growing up in Detroit, Michigan.  (Zukin’s was by Friends School – my first high school in Detroit.)

My dinner mate laughed about all the vegetable additions to the borsch I ordered: carrots, cabbage, potatoes, celery, and mushrooms.  Moscovites traditionally make their borsch from beets and serve it cold as a clear broth; my dining mate told me that we were eating the Ukrainian version.

I liked the taste of the dill that decorated the top of the soup.  If I were cooking, I would chop it up and sprinkle it on top to combine the flavors.

The traditional accompaniment for borsch is beef.  The soup is based on a stock made from beef and ham bone.  I chose seafood as my accompaniment, because I can never pass up shrimp after suffering a seafood-deprived youth in the Midwest.  However, I can tell you that the borsch was so good that it made the seafood superfluous.

The piroshky my dining mate ordered was a surprise to me.  Where I grew up in Detroit (Michigan), we used to call Polish piroshki “Russian ravioli” to which our Polish friends would yell, “Polish ravioli.”  (2018 Note:  Did you catch the difference between the endings on Polish and Russian word?)

Piroshky are half-moon shaped pasta pockets filled with either cabbage or beef and onion fillings.  I was expecting my dining companion to get a pile of these with melted butter and parsley on top.

What my dining companion got was a piroshky with a college education.  Mounded up like a sculpture with a potato pancake as a base was a cannoli-like crêpe filled with chopped porcini mushrooms imported from Italy, sweet purple onions, and chopped, hard eggs held together with a cream sauce.

My dining companion said he had never eaten such delicious mushrooms in his life and told me not to worry about food pedigrees when things tasted this good.

Trying Russian Food in Pacific Grove (California)


When my dining companions’ order of Beef Stroganoff arrived, it looked worthy of the man it was named after.  Darra Goldstein relates in her cookbook A la Russe that while 19^th century Russian revered all things French, they secretly harbored a love for their own cuisine.

Count Pavel Stroganoff, whose family had made a fortune developing land in Siberia, had an inventive French chef who appealed to his benefactor’s dual tastes by adding sour cream to a basic French mustard sauce.

Stroganoff’s chef added this sauce to tender, sautéed tenderloin strips.

Pagrovia has improved on the basic recipe by adding chopped porcini mushrooms and serving it with perfectly al dente egg noodles.

I liked the Beef Stroganoff my dining companion ordered better than the barashka I ordered.  This dish comes with tender chunks of tender lamb, large slices of carrot, and celery in tomato sauce – all served over mashed potatoes.

I think adding a little salt to the sauce would have enhanced the flavor.  A few renegade lumps in the mashed potatoes let me know that the chef mashed the potatoes by hand, but I wish he had used a little more butter and milk in their preparation.

While I was talking with the chef about how he used to feed 6,000 people a day as a chef on a US Navy ship, my dining mate devoured the tiramisu he ordered for dessert.  He left a little bite for me on a saucer, because that is what I had requested him to do.  (2018 Note – I’m sure he was thinking, “If you ask for two tic tacs that is what you get for dessert.)

I have two book recommendations to make about Russian food:

-The Food and Cooking of Russia by Lesley Chamberlain

-Classic Russian Cooking: A Gift to Young Housewives by Elena Molokhovets

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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