Travel
May
Restaurant review: Mari Vanna, London | Jay Rayner
Mari Vanna, a wildly over-the-top take on Russian cooking, is a delicious carb-fest not to be taken lightly
116 Knightsbridge, London SW1 (020 7225 3122). Meal for two, including vodka and service £150
Spare a thought for the poor soul tasked with dusting the tchotchkes that cram the shelves of Mari Vanna in Knightsbridge. It’s a Forth Road Bridge painting job, that. The place is crammed with knick-knacks and crockery, with white-painted farmhouse dressers and chandeliers. There are vintage photographs of the Russian family you never knew you had and partitions of artfully distressed wood in the loos, as if you’re going for a slash in the outhouse of a tumbledown dacha you never knew you owned. It is over the top, shameless and curiously effective. Mari Vanna, the branch of a small chain with outposts in Moscow, St Petersburg and New York, bellows “I’m charming” at you until you surrender. Which, assuming you can swallow the prices, is what you do.
By the time I went it had been running for more than seven weeks, but still claimed to be on a soft opening, possibly the longest in London restaurant history. And if these are the soft opening prices, God help us if they crank it up. Humble starters are near a tenner or more, mains double that. On the menu it said: “We appreciate your understanding and patience as we work towards perfecting our menu, service and atmosphere,” which feels like getting an apology in first. Not that there’s much to apologise for. Mari Vanna, named after a fictional hostess, is what it is: a kitsch and loving take on the culinary traditions of Russia.
These, it should be said, are an acquired taste. It is, depending on your point of view, either the very essence of homely, cupboard-love cooking, or a combination of death-by-carbs and leftovers. The cult of the Russian salad has always baffled me. How cold cooked vegetables, here with the addition of cubes of sausage, all bound in mayo has managed to attain the status of classic is beyond me. Russian salad is what happens when it’s late, the fridge is almost empty and you are very, very drunk. Here, it’s done about as well as it can be done, the ingredients still having bite rather than disintegrating unto slurry.
Far better is a layered salad of salted herring, beetroot and potatoes. We order a bowl of pickles, which are big chunks of vinegar-cured crunchy things, and a couple of their pirogi, the classic bronze-burnished filled pastries. The minced beef and pork is the sort of thing that will see you through a snowed-in month. The more delicate sea-bass version will merely get you through a weekend.
For the main courses we stick to the classics. We have a dish of pelmeni. The silky little meat-stuffed dumplings come with a cooling bowl of soured cream and are completely compelling. We have golubtzi, the cabbage leaves stuffed with a big, butch mix of pork, veal and rice. At Mari Vanna everything is stuffed, including the diners. There may be friendly young Russian waiters who look like they work out a lot, but really you’re being fed by a grandmother who doesn’t understand the words “enough already”. At Mari Vanna it doesn’t matter what month it is. Winter is coming. Winter is always coming. So eat.
And drink, of course. There are many vodkas, sold by the 5cl shot at outrageous prices. So we slug Russian Standard vodka and chilli vodka and feel gravity take hold.
It says much for the food that it is the fabulous pastries, made of cream, sponge, cream, pastry and cream which bring lightness to the meal. The Napoleon is layers of puff pastry with heavily whipped cream, crusted with toasted almonds. The honey cake is a dozen thin layers of dark sponge with more cream and a slick of honeycomb. At which point your pancreas nails an “I quit” note to your small intestine, and curls up to die. Mari Vanna is completely bonkers, but in a sweet way. It really is charming. Now please do excuse me. I need to go for a lie down.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
May
Following the footsteps of Steve Jobs in California
Steve Jobs was the ultimate tastemaster, but the Apple co-founder lived in surprising suburban ordinariness in Silicon Valley. Follow Jonathan Margolis on our interactive map as he follows Jobs’s trail
May
Skiing in Scotland, bluebell walks and sunshine on a budget
A late snow flurry in the Cairngorms, blue skies and bluebells and a cheap week away in June – with everything
Take me there: Cairngorm, Scotland
To say that the Cairngorm (cairngormmountain.org) in Scotland has had an unusual season would be an understatement. Warm weather meant there were no snowsports in March – unheard of in previous years – then from out of nowhere, in mid-April and throughout May there has been increasing snowfall, meaning that winter sports fans have been heading for the mountains every weekend this spring. The late snow has been popular with snowboarders and freestylers, for whom the Cairngorm has been laying on special features in its Quiksilver Roxy Freestyle Park, such as a new 9m ledge rail, with an MC encouraging everyone to have a go by offering prizes for an attempt.
Travel clinic: sunshine on a budget
The dilemma I would like to go somewhere sunny for a week with my partner in late June/early July. We’d like to stay in or near an interesting old town, and not far from a beach. Ideally we’d stay in a rustic but beautiful villa, apartment or small hotel with space for sunbathing. Our budget is quite tight, but we’d prefer somewhere other than eastern Europe. Debbie, Whitstable, Kent
Sicily claims the highest average daily rate of sunshine in Europe, with June temperatures registering in the high 20s. Taormina, a historic town perched loftily above the sea and which Goethe called “a patch of paradise”, has an amphitheatre that hosts the Taormina Arte (taormina-arte.com) – a summer-long festival of concerts, theatre, dance and film starting in July – and is within sniffing distance of Etna, birthplace of the granita. But stay at the more down-to-earth fishing village of Letojanni, 5km down the coast, which has some lovely beachside restaurants. Owners Direct offers Villa Jasmine (sleeps two to four, from €560 for a week, ownersdirect.co.uk/italy/it341.htm), which has a spectacular sea view and a terrace with garden and is only two minutes’ walk from the beach. EasyJet flies into Catania from £76.49 one way in June.
Three of the best: bluebell walks
There may be precious little blue in the sky right now, but we’re not struggling at ground level – the damp conditions have given rise to some of the best bluebell carpets in recent memory
Ashdown Forest, Sussex Home to the heritage Bluebell Railway – climb aboard the steam engines to see swathes of the flowers along the tracks (bluebell-railway.co.uk)
Rievaulx Abbey, North Yorkshire You’ll see patches of bluebells on an inspiring walk that includes strolling through woods and meadows and over a bridge (tinyurl.com/bmy7ahz)
Vicarage Meadows, near Abergwesyn A nationally important wildflower meadow with an amazing display of bluebells in May and early June (tinyurl.com/cmqsvs3)
May
Viewfinder competition: win a £150 hotel voucher
Name the place and win a £150 voucher from Hotels.com, letting you stay at thousands of hotels worldwide
May
On the trail of Steve Jobs in California
He was the ultimate tastemaker, but Apple co-founder Steve Jobs lived in surprising suburban ordinariness in Silicon Valley. Jonathan Margolis follows his trail
• Click here to see an interactive map showing Jonathan’s tour of the valley
The bestselling biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is most notable for revealing that the innovator and aesthete genius behind Apple – the world’s most successful company – was in many ways a giant, semi-autistic toddler. With his boundless egomania, temper tantrums and quirks like refusing to wash, Jobs does not come out as your everyday hero. Yet Steve was my hero. His wacky idea of making computers easy appealed to me as a technology writer. That, along with his maverick unpredictability, made him the Brian Clough of electronics – Clough being my other hero.
The second most remarkable thing about Steve, though, was that for someone who changed the world so fundamentally – it’s because of him that we all have computers – he seemed to have been brought up, worked and died within a small radius of his childhood home near Palo Alto, California. Somehow I always imagined Steve – barefoot Buddhist, design guru, tastemaker – not as a hometown boy, but someone more metropolitan or bohemian, or who would seek out a remote “spiritual” place to live.
His background also sounded surprisingly suburban. I’ve always been intrigued by the incongruity of extraordinary people coming from ordinary backgrounds. And when I peered on Google Street View, the addresses Isaacson lists in Palo Alto – where everyone from Apple to Google has their HQ – looked as mundane as Esher or Altrincham. So I had the idea of taking a couple of days out of an upcoming US trip to visit the key spots in Steve’s life. I also thought it would be kind of cool – OK, not cool, but amusingly geeky – to be photographed with my iPad at each location. To call what I proposed a ”pilgrimage” would be too strong, a “curiosity” too tepid, while to say it was “to seek insight” would be too earnest. It’s the same reason I’d love to visit John Lennon’s childhood home – a case of informed interest in someone of my generation, who was not only a million times more successful, but who I also wouldn’t actually have minded being.
First stop on my personal Via Dolorosa was 2066 Crist Drive, Los Altos. The modest bungalow where the Jobses came to live in 1967 and the garage in which Steve started Apple with his friend Steve Wozniak is as suburban as America gets. What happened here was immense, but there were no signs or tour buses, and someone seemed to live there, so I was emboldened to knock on the door. What a coup if, at my first Station of the Cross, I could get a picture of me, with my iPad, in the founding garage.
An elderly lady answered the door. I apologised and said she must get bothered a lot. No, she said, a couple of hundred a week take photos, but none had knocked until me. Slightly miffed that I wasn’t even close to being the first Steve tourist, I was nonetheless relieved that it clearly wasn’t that eccentric a thing to be doing.
“I’m Marilyn Jobs,” she said. “I married Steve’s dad, Paul, after his mom died.” This I hadn’t bargained for, but she was so friendly I began to think I stood a chance of getting into the holy garage. It turned out Marilyn loved England, especially Harrogate in North Yorkshire. So we spoke at some length about Bettys Tea Rooms there, and I may have agreed to send her some teacakes in the post.
So, how about a peep in the garage? “No,” said Mrs Jobs, “there’s really nothing in there, just a washing machine and a car. There wouldn’t even be room to take a photo.” As I was setting up a tripod for an exterior photo of the house, a young guy in a small rental car pulled up. He was from Tooting, wouldn’t you know it, and between job interviews was doing the same Steve tour. No, he wouldn’t give his name – he didn’t want to appear a sad geek – but was happy to take my photo, while two more drive-by tourists slowed down for a shot. “It’s so normal you forget that everyone here is living ahead of the curve,” said Tooting man. “There are people here who know what the iPhone 6 is going to be like, let alone the 5.”
My next stop was 2101 Waverley Street, Palo Alto, the current Jobs home and another surprise. Not only was it quite twee, but it was also relatively modest – and remarkably exposed for a “celebrity” home. One of Steve’s trademark grey Mercedes sports cars was parked outside, looking a bit forlorn and splashed with bird poo. I wouldn’t have dreamed of disturbing the family, but in case I had any ideas, Donald from Apple security leapt out of a black van to introduce himself. I explained that I just wanted to see where Steve lived and take a photo, and he kindly took it for me.
“We log about 100 to 150 tourists a day,” Donald said. “People expect he would have lived in a fortress or a castle, not right here.” Donald revealed that although he hadn’t been inside the house, “it’s apparently in the style of an English cottage”. The great taste Nazi and minimalist, living in a Country Living interior? I was shocked. Donald also revealed something else quite bizarre – he’s not really called Donald, he’s Steve. “So you can’t be called Steve if you work for Apple?” Steve/Donald said nothing, but smiled.
Next, the Whole Foods Market on Emerson Street. (It was in the store’s small car park just before the iMac was launched in 1998 – a signal event in Apple’s history that started the company’s rise – where the detail-obsessed Steve was spotted sitting in his car screaming into his phone: “Not. Fucking. Blue. Enough!”) Then Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (Parc) at 3333 Coyote Hill Road, where, in 1979, Steve saw a prototype computer mouse and graphical computer screen with icons and “borrowed” the idea for Apple.
On the way to Jobs’s favourite lunch restaurant, Jin Sho, on S California Avenue, it occurred to me that Steve had been wise to maintain a modest, normal lifestyle in a suburban house with a front lawn rather than the celebrity life he could have led. The fact that, as a zillionaire whose company and counsel presidents sought, he could pad around the (organic) equivalent of Sainsbury’s unmolested because he’d, well, always been around and was just Steve must have been a secret delight to him.
“Funny, Steve hasn’t been in for a long time,” my Jin Sho server, Noriko, said. The present tense was unnerving. Should I tell her? Maybe not. “Would you like to sit where Steve has lunch, or where he goes with his family in the evenings?” she asked. I went for his spot on the lunch bar, where she volunteered to take the now standard goofy photo with my iPad. The $ 16 special was delicious, but had to be one of the smallest lunches ever served in the US.
At Apple’s huge but still oddly underwhelming HQ on Infinite Loop in Cupertino, where I expected security to be all over me, I was wholly ignored. The computer store, the Byte Shop at 1063 West El Camino Real, where Jobs and Wozniak sold their first Apple machine in 1976, turned out to be a sex shop in a dodgy part of town. The woman running the place said she had been there 30 years without knowing the store’s connection with the world’s most successful company.
My last stop was the cheekiest. I wanted to be photographed with my iPad on the stage of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, an hour from Palo Alto, on Mission Street, San Francisco. This was where Steve publicly launched the iPad and many other Apple products. To my amazement, I was allowed in and permitted to go on to the stage, and one of their staff even took the photo. There was only one proviso: that I didn’t show the set of the classical play currently on the stage. So with a soupçon of clumsily applied Photoshop, I turned the set black. Just like it always was when Steve strutted the same stage.
Being Steve Jobs, I concluded, standing up there, thinking what it would have been like to have your words and ideas beamed round the world live to breathless geeks like, er, me, must have been, as he would say, kinda cool.
Essentials
Travelbag (0871 703 4701, travelbag.co.uk) offers direct flights to San Francisco with United Airlines from £694
May
Writing competition update: Win a trip for two to Italy – plus have your travel story published in The IoS
The Independent on Sunday has once again joined forces with Bradt Travel Guides (bradtguides.com) to offer readers the chance to win our travel-writing competition, with a top prize this year of a holiday for two to Abruzzo in Italy and publication of the winning entry in the travel section of the paper.
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May
Stephen Bayley: Prison, hospital … airport: surrender your dignity now
Air travel? To paraphrase Dr Johnson, it is being in prison with the added disadvantage of the possibility of crashing. But that’s not really so. Most of us are soothed by aviation’s impressive safety statistics. The horror lies elsewhere. Do you have a looming sense of dread, a barely stifled urge to panic, the feeling of being a mute and useless walk-on in a play written by Kafka on a bad day? You must be thinking about an airport.
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May
From the Observer archive, 24 May 1964: Mods v Rockers: Britain’s summer of discontent
Originally published in the Observer on 24 May 1964
The Mod and Rocker season will probably last in its present form until August Bank Holiday. It will feature renewed forays to the south coast and possibly to Southend. Last Monday’s fighting at Brighton and Margate, followed by skirmishes throughout the week in London, is then expected to enter its final phase. That, in any event, was the opinion of a Mod who stood outside the Scene, the rhythm and blues club off Great Windmill Street, early yesterday. It was raining and dark and he wore sunglasses.
He was a smallish boy who came from Liverpool to find work and had got a job loading crates in a London milk depot. The languid Merseyside tone underplayed the alternating exhilaration and disappointments of his life – the T-shirt he got by “chatting up a Yank”; the purple heart pills he could buy at 18s 6d for 20; the singlehanded fight he almost had in Paddington with three Rockers; and the battle of Margate. “We just charged up the beach. There were 800 of us and 100 Rockers. I didn’t see what was going on because I was at the back with my tart.”
Last week’s fighting in London isolated both factions even further from the public, which welcomed the hearty talk about “hooligans… rats… and miserable specimens” from the seaside magistrates’ bench. The heavy sentences handed down last week have led to some ominous threats of retaliation. “If anyone fined me £75,” a Mod said, “I’d go back and do some real damage; put a few windows through with a hammer.”
Mods and Rockers have co-existed comparatively well for a year or so – the Mods, neatly dressed and on scooters, the Rockers in studded leather jackets and on motorbikes. The Rockers may have jeered at the Mods’ fancier ways (sublimating sex, as one Mod’s father put it, to the problems of motorbike clutchplates) but they had been slowly copying the Mods’ form of dress. When, for example, the Mods’ high-heel boots went out of fashion, the Rockers started wearing them.
Mods are losing interest in their scooters but they do care about changing fashions and spend £4 or £5 a week to keep up to date. The latest trend is towards American crew-cuts, T-shirts with big letters, Y for Yale, H for Harvard.
Seventy-five per cent of the Scene’s members are reckoned to be middle class and can usually afford to follow the trends; the rest tend to say that fashion is no longer so important.
Four of the Mods outside the Scene at 2am yesterday – two still carrying their Margate war wounds – said they stayed out all night because they wanted to enjoy themselves while they still had time. One said: “My old lady raised hell the first few times. I’m not going home tonight. I might go in for a wash-up tomorrow but I’ll be out again all tomorrow night.”
This is an edited extract