Food and drink blog

Or maybe not. The first sign that all might not be as expected was when I called to make a reservation and the voice on the other end sounded audibly shocked by my request.

Naturally, we turned up and it was completely empty. And there were laminated photos of chips and baps outside. Oh, and it wasn’t really a Russian restaurant. Or a Ukranian restaurant either. It was standard by-the-beach tourist fare with about six Eastern European dishes in amongst the steak and chips. However, we were powerless to turn away because the waiter sprinted outside to welcome us in and had such pleading eyes that we couldn’t refuse.

Badio, the Ukranian waiter, turned out to be charm itself. Warm, informative and keen to extoll the virtues of the food on offer he almost had us believing everything was going to be okay. Then he switched the music on: a Euro-disco version of 'Back in the USSR' segued into 'Boys Boys Boys', 'Volare' and so on, ricocheting relentlessly off the peach-painted walls.

The wine list was a short run-through of supermarket favourites at a 300 percent mark-up so we asked him what the house wine was but he said he didn’t know because it came in large containers with no label. When asked to describe it he only said that, “nobody had ever complained”. I would venture to suggest that this is only because anyone who got through a whole glass of it did not live long enough to do so.

Seeing as we had come for an Eastern European experience we dutifully ordered from the Eastern dishes on offer. They were not great but nowhere near as indigestible as the soundtrack. A tapa of Russian salad was surprisingly light with plenty of cucumber, onion and gherkins but spoiled by the inclusion of nasty packet ham; the vegetable blinis were nicely crunchy and flavourful, if a little oily, and the borsch would have been a meal in itself, with big hunks of gammon sunk under scads of sweet red beetroot, cabbage and a globule of sour cream.