The most foody bit of this involved going to Manchester's best attempt at a Russian restaurant, "Saint Petersburg" which is on Sackville Street (down at the UMIST end). Now... this was with a little trepidation as a friend of mine had earlier in the night told us that she had been served an inedible steak there, but not to be put off and based more on the comment "but the Vodka is great and the entertainment really peculiar" we went anyway.
And yes the Vodka was varietous and riotous. Several pages worth in fact, covering any kind of eastern hooch you can imagine, including much to my delight several plum-based varieties and to my date's delight Zubrowka. The entertainment (short of watching the peculiar movements of the waiters) was non existent but then it was a weekday and not very busy at all and clearly not worth them shelling out for midget-dancers.
So we down a few drinks and along comes some food. Actually pretty good food. I had some kind of minced chicken wrapped in cabbage leaves and she had a salmon steak topped with a generous helping of caviar. Oh and there was lots of sour cream involved in both. This was exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. Given the earlier comments I figured the cabbage/chicken thing would be a safe bet and really I had no complaints other than that I could probably have had a starter too. It was tasty, homely and brought back happy sensations of a previous life beyond the iron curtain. To the slightly riskier option, believe it or not, the fish was moist and tender and cooked just right. And caviar is caviar. Top stuff.
I'm guessing there's a trade-off to be made here: go when it's quiet (or choose carefully) if you want good food, go at the weekend for a crazy riot à la Rasputin.
As to the girl, well had a good time eating and drinking and yakking but a few weeks later despite a couple more meetings we rather came to the simultaneous conclusion that there was not much going on. There was a bit of me wondering if the whole "big red warning sign" above my head was a major issue, and another bit thinking that I was being played games with - both apparently not true. I guess the lesson has to be to (a) go easy on myself, which I wasn't, and (b) just be upfront about how I feel about stuff, which somehow even though it involved sending a rather drunken facebook-message, I was.
So it goes, little to show for it but a full belly but hey I'm not complaining!
