The legendary "Hermitage" - a Moscow tavern, where you could taste "Olivier" from the author and squander the whole fortune

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Hermitage restaurant is one of the few legendary Russian taverns with excellent cuisine and food cult, which could not be called a simple eatery. But the Hermitage also had its own zest: it was a restaurant of European author's cuisine, and it was here that the famous Olivier salad was born.

European chic and democratic

In the middle of the 19th century, the Frenchman Lucien Olivier, who lived in the Russian capital, was known to all of Moscow as a skilled culinary specialist. He was often invited to make dinner parties at the homes of wealthy people. There are two versions about the origin of this chef. According to one, he actually came to Moscow from France. According to the second version, Olivier was born into a family of long-term Russified Frenchmen who lived in the First See, his real name was Nicholas, but then he changed it to a more euphonious one - Lucien.

The co-founder of the restaurant was a young merchant Yakov Pegov, who managed to visit abroad and therefore, in his gastronomic preferences, he combined the habits of old merchant dynasties with newfangled tastes gleaned in European restaurants.

Olivier and Pegov met in a tobacco shop on Trubnaya, buying there "bergamot" from the merchant Popov. New friends got to talking and in the process of communication arose the idea to open a restaurant on Trubnaya. Very soon in this area, unfavorable in terms of crime ("Pipe", as you know, was a hot spot in those years), a chic institution "Hermitage" appeared, which Muscovites began to call "Hermitage Olivier".

In this "museum of food" guests were served oysters, lobsters, Strasbourg pate, and the expensive Trianon cognac was necessarily accompanied by a certificate stating that it was delivered from the cellars of Louis XVI himself. The waiter brought out each dish on a silver tray. Some of the halls were decorated with marble, massive columns added to the grandeur. However, despite the overall chic, the Hermitage was considered a fairly democratic restaurant. The waiters looked like a brand and were very courteous and agile, but at the same time unobtrusive and behaved without hypocritical fussiness.

The mysterious history of salad

Only here, in the Hermitage, one could taste the famous salad invented by the eminent chef, which in Moscow began to be called in honor of its creator - Olivier. That “New Year's” salad, which is so familiar to us, modern “eaters”, is only a pitiful likeness of a real “Olivier”. As contemporaries recalled, the taste was simply incredible, and the creator kept his "correct" recipe a secret. Therefore, attempts by Muscovites to repeat this dish were not very successful.

The first recipes for "French" salad were published in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. Initially, hazel grouses were indicated as a meat ingredient, but then other recipes began to appear, where it was noted that veal, chicken, partridge and even caviar can also be added to the salad.

In the restaurant, Olivier was the manager and almost did not do the kitchen (except that sometimes he could prepare his signature salad for the distinguished guest). The chief chef at the Hermitage was the Frenchman Duguet. He raised a whole generation of excellent chefs within the walls of the inn, many of whom later became the founders of culinary dynasties themselves. In total, dozens of cooks and cooks worked at the Hermitage.

Cultural bohemia walked here and not only

Very soon the restaurant became a cult place in pre-revolutionary Moscow. Moreover, it did not lose its popularity even after the death of Olivier, when it passed into the possession of the Hermitage trade partnership.

The institution was chosen by many cultural figures. Composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky played a wedding in the restaurant, writers Turgenev and Dostoevsky celebrated their anniversaries. Here, in 1999, the so-called Pushkin Days were held, which brought together the full color of the classics of the time. And in 1902 at the Hermitage the troupe of the Moscow Art Theater and Maxim Gorky celebrated the premiere of the play At the Bottom. The restaurant was even jokingly called the cultural center of Moscow.

Young merchants and foreign businessmen, industrialists and artists squandered all their money in the Hermitage. This restaurant was also very convenient because, in addition to the halls, it had separate offices in which one could walk secretly from prying eyes. They were filmed either by important officials or merchants to deal with private business issues, or by less cultured wealthy visitors (for example, provincial uncouth merchants) who wanted to relax to the fullest, not thinking about the rules of good form.

According to legend, in one of these offices, wealthy drunken visitors ate a famous trained pig. In a drunken stupor, they stole the "artist" from the Moscow circus on a dare, brought her to a restaurant and told the cooks to fry her.

During the noisy spree of visitors in the "Hermitage", local policemen had an unspoken rule not to interfere with what was happening inside the institution, because very often important officials were the initiators of fights in the restaurant. It was especially noisy here on Tatiana's Day, January 25, when Moscow students, as well as teachers and professors, walked in the restaurant. Employees took out all the furniture from the halls and put simple wooden tables and chairs, and visitors could not stand on ceremony in observing table etiquette and external decency.

The proletarians did not need a restaurant

After the revolution, the Hermitage fell into decay. By this time, the famous Olivier had long been dead, and the chef Dughet left back to France, so, fortunately, they did not see how their restaurant died. During the NEP era, they tried to revive the Hermitage, but it was not the same “food museum” anymore.

According to the recollections of contemporaries, the dishes, although they were called by the former names, were prepared from products of disgusting quality and did not closely resemble the original in their taste. Well, the new contingent, which consisted mainly of ordinary peasants, workers and the urban poor, in other words, people who were completely unfamiliar with gastronomic culture, only intensified the contrast between the old Hermitage and its “copy”. So the official year of the closure of the Hermitage can be considered 1917.

At various times, the walls of the former restaurant housed an organization to help the hungry, a publishing house, "House of the Peasant" and even the theater "School of Modern Play".

If we talk about carousing in Moscow taverns, the most frequent visitors were merchants. However, not all of them squandered their fortunes. Some, on the contrary, multiplied their capital. and even engaged in patronage, remaining in history as great benefactors.