INTERVIEW WITH SERGEY BORTSOV, Azimut Smolenskaya Part 2.

Interview with Sergei Bortsov, Azimut Smolensk Part 2.

We continue our fascinating dialogue with chef Sergei Bortsov!

– If we are talking about the techniques that you use, do you have any favorite technique that you like to use?

– I love sous vide. Sous vide saves us from many problems. Sous vide increases the softness of the product itself and shelf life... You can cook a chicken breast in different ways: fry it, or bake it in the oven, boil it, and it will still be a little dry, due to the fact that it is such a product in itself. In sous vide, you can leave it for several hours, marinate it, and everything remains in this juice. You end up with a wonderful product that practically does not lose weight during cooking. And it will be tasty, juicy, pleasant. You can cook this meat in advance, rest it, and you have everything in a vacuum bag, you can easily take it out, fry it in a hot frying pan and serve this meat in literally 15-20 minutes.

– What is the most important thing when serving a dish, in your opinion?

– I think, in fact, the most important thing is accuracy. Be careful to ensure that where you place everything when serving, that’s where it all remains. So that the dish looks fresh while the waiter is carrying it... so that a minimum amount of time passes before the dish is placed on the guest's table. The longer the dish sits on the counter, the longer you give it away, the worse it gets. It will change its color, it will change its smell, its appearance. This will no longer be what you want to convey to the guest. This, it seems to me, is the most important thing. And so, different techniques, again.

Times change, today it will be, relatively speaking, a “mess,” roughly speaking, and tomorrow it will be “wow, this is the best pitch I’ve ever seen.”

– When I was preparing for the interview, I read about the huge chocolate stadium that you created for the World Cup. Tell us a little about this.

– There is a story in the hotel that for the New Year in different hotels or before some important event, an event such as a championship, they prepare something. A pastry chef or baker is baking something. In the first year, we made our chocolate hotel almost human-sized, very tall. The second thing I decided to do with my colleagues was the Kremlin. We made the Kremlin out of chocolate, out of gingerbread. I have some New Year’s associations: I don’t know why - I wanted a train to go around it. And I went to Detsky Mir, bought a train, and they attached it all to the structure. The train was traveling - the children came up and rejoiced. And I'm glad when children are happy.

– Was he exhibiting here?

– It was exhibited on the fourth floor, in the lobby bar. That is, anyone could come up and take a photo - it’s very nice. Such structures are quite heavy, because they are constantly touched by hands, and their stability must be constantly monitored. Well, of course, for the World Cup, what needs to be done? We need to make a stadium!

We made a stadium and connected diodes there. They did this for a long time: they bought figures, some kind of lawn special for him, so that it would be as close to the real thing as possible. And the guests were pleased to see it all, to take photographs: you arrived at the hotel, and even in the hotel you feel that you came for a reason, but actually came to the World Cup.

We made different dishes to remind us that we were having a championship. All this is great.

– How long did the preparation and creation take?

- Month.

– Does a large team work on such projects?

- Three persons. No, it's small. It’s just that the three of us almost always do it together. Because when there are more people, everyone sees everything differently. Therefore, we immediately coordinate all the work, and during this time we do everything together. It's actually easier that way.

– Tell us how you select tableware for work, do you have a favorite brand, or maybe an unfavorite brand of tableware?

– In fact, I have my favorite dishes, look... we are dividing: we have a Swedish line, we have breakfasts, for which we use certain types of dishes. We are currently using APS. APS is wonderful breakfast dishes, they are constantly updated, I have all the catalogs, your colleagues constantly send them to me, all the new items. Even in the difficult year of the pandemic, they still had some small new items. We also try to update. It's actually easier to go in sets. If we use APS, we go by APS. They always try to put it together somehow so that it looks harmonious, exactly on the Swedish line. It’s comfortable for us, it’s convenient for us, we like itWe can hardly even imagine what they will do next.

As for a la carte... Favorite companies... in fact, I really like what we took and looked at at your samples - Dymov Ceramics.

– Russian brand...

- And very good. Great utensils, I think we'll be working with them soon. I think we will also order it. Steelite... we're probably a little tired of Steelite, because we've had it for quite a long time, almost all the same color schemes. In fact, right now I’m looking for something for myself, probably newer, maybe Russian...

– Questions for design?

– Yes, this is a design question. Although maybe not entirely... Dymov Ceramics has a very beautiful collection - “Snow”. This is a beautiful white plate, dishes, and we looked at everything that was there in the set. It’s very cool: different gravy boats, small plates, tureens, bowls. In fact, you can even buy and work with it now.

And the dishes all change. Everything is always different.

– Tell me, what kind of dishes do you prefer at home?

– Now I’m planning to move very soon. I was thinking about this. I know what my kitchen will look like. That is, I start from the kitchen by the dishes, I would say like this.

– What kind of kitchen do you have?

– I really want an island in the middle for comfortable cooking. For this I will need, of course, a large kitchen. So that I could have my own island, there would be built-in stoves and a small convector... It’s my dream to have a small convector at home. Mixers are a must. And most likely, I will choose the dishes... Dymov Ceramics, probably. I just thought about it very much: what it would look like at home... Or I will make something to order in this format.

– What is the most unusual dish you have tried in your life?

– When I started, I worked in that wonderful eco-hotel... And it has its own big zoo. Since this is a country hotel, we had a game restaurant. We tried everything there: bear meat, elk meat. And for me, the most unusual thing so far, specifically for the meat, for some reason I remember it... is an ostrich. Ostrich meat is a very interesting product.

- What does it taste like?

– Like chicken, but a little different. We also had ostrich eggs, we had ostriches themselves, they were bred... their eggs are not just a chicken egg, they are a large egg that needs to be drilled, at least with a screwdriver, to make a hole. And you can cook omelettes there for breakfast. Gorgeous omelettes, very tasty. And for some reason I remembered the ostrich meat.

– How to cook it, is this a different approach?..

- It's like chicken. It's not a different approach, really. I was shocked that it looked a lot like chicken! Just very, very strong. Nothing fancy if you're making a stew. It’s all stewed in the same way, it’s all fried in the same way, it’s all boiled in the same way. They didn’t use anything supernatural, it’s a classic.

– And the banquet menu, is it significantly different from the regular menu?

– It differs in the dishes, it differs in the presentation. We try to do this: if we are hosting a banquet or wedding, we first set the table with just plates to understand how it will look and whether everything will fit. Because the tables are different, and our eights and tens are different. We take all these components, put them on the table and then look further: so, what doesn’t fit there? Let's remove this and put something else in. And we are already starting to proceed from this. What dishes should there be? These are, of course, slices, salads, some individual snacks - like pastes, portioned... pies, maybe some kind, if this is a Russian table. This is how we approach it.

– What is the biggest event you have ever worked on?

- Gazprom food, two and a half thousand people, Media Center in the Glade... this is the biggest. We were serving a banquet: two thousand adults and 500 children. It was very interesting, interactive... hard! But we did it, everyone was happy, both children and adults. It was quite an interesting project.

– Do you experience a slightly higher level of stress when you are involved in just such events, big events?

- Certainly. I always worry about the product, I try to cook it as close to the return as possible. Because I don’t like it when it sits in the kitchen for a very long time, or lies in the chef - the product becomes worse and worse every minute.

If it’s a buffet, we don’t always try to cook everything at once: we cook some part, and then they comesti, and let’s finish the second part. We always practice this - we don’t prepare everything at once. I’m more worried about this part, that people like the product, what we do.

– Well, judging by what we have already discussed several times today, time plays a huge role in the work of the chief. How do you build your timing, how do you distribute your time?

– It’s very simple, I come to work, go to breakfast, because breakfast is just about to be served. I've been working since seven in the morning. This is more comfortable for me because I can easily get to work. I come to the breakfast and see if everything is fine. I ask the guys: how are they doing, is everything okay with them. I take the contract and look at the day and what events there are. I go downstairs - every day we have a general meeting. Plus I always read reviews. We have a special application that forms a database of all reviews. I read them every day, there are almost always some requests for the menu, and we change something. If there are any events, we prepare them. If not, then in our case, we make dumplings, because, no matter how trivial it may sound, homemade dumplings are eaten uuuh...

- Yes? Is this one of the most popular dishes?

- One of the most. It is not always possible to make many thousands of dumplings. When possible, we prepare them in large quantities. And they are ordered very often, very often.

– So this is a popular dish, one of the most popular in the restaurant, right?

– Very popular, yes. Homemade dumplings will always be popular. Because people have arrived, not everyone has the opportunity to even make dumplings at home. Our hotel is a business hotel. People go on business trips, they don’t sit at home, but they want to eat something homemade. As I also told you before, it should be something interesting so that they cannot cook it at home, but also something banally simple, homemade, so that they can eat it.

– And second after dumplings, what would be the most popular dish, in your opinion, that is ordered at Azimut Smolenskaya?

– I think it’s probably borscht. Again, this is a dish that cannot be removed from the menu because it is so popular. Borscht with marbled beef is gorgeous. When you have two beautiful buns with garlic, with herbs... In our case, now we don’t serve lard, because I don’t particularly like lard... But the rest, yes, it’s gorgeous.

– During the World Cup there was a large flow of tourists from abroad. Have you noticed the difference in what foreigners prefer and what guests from Russia prefer to order?

– Well, actually, foreigners eat the standard stuff: pizza, pasta. A lot of pastas, a lot of pizza. Soups... they don’t have any particular preferences, it doesn’t matter to them: borscht, pumpkin, cream of mushroom, they eat all the soups very well. This is what the person himself wants to eat. What else? Burgers are a favorite dish for Europeans, it seems to me, at the moment. And for us too, in fact, for the Russians. Fish... salmon, they love salmon very much. Salmon is their thing and they eat salmon a lot. And so I didn’t notice anything else supernatural.

– So there is no particularly big difference in the preferences of foreigners and Russians?

- Not particularly. Someone, on the contrary, came and wanted to try something Russian, they wanted dumplings, they wanted... well, this is not very Russian - chicken Kiev. In fact, towards the end, since they love pasta and pizza, the guests started making their own pasta and pizza. We just changed the ingredients because they ate a lot of them.

– Tell us also, which of the chefs you would like to meet, talk, discuss, treat with something that you have come up with? Do you have someone with whom you would like to discuss your achievements?

– In my case, if you invite me to our place, it means to a hotel. This means that the chef must understand... so that he understands that everything is prepared differently at the hotel. Most likely, in my case, it is Andrei Shmakov, because he is basically my hotel idol. Most likely, he would be here. And so, I like... I watch a lot of people: I watch Vladimir Mukhin, and Igor Grishechkin from St. Petersburg’s “Kokoko”. These are more my preferences - it’s interesting to see how they do what... it’s very cool, beautiful. Look at what we can't do here, for example, because we have a hotel. They are doing more in the Russian style, it is very interesting.

– What about foreign chefs?

– At the moment there are a lot of interesting foreign chefs, but they are not popular. If I say names now, they will not be so well known. There are a lot of chefs in Europe that you watch. They are really cool, and it really makes me happy. Of course, I also have a dream to go there, work somewhere, and have a look. With good chefs in Europe, this would, of course, be cool.

- And if I offered you right nowand go to any country in Europe?..

- To Italy!

- ABOUT! Go straight to Italy! Why?

- Pizza, pasta. I love.

– There are many different ways to make pizza...

– They are all different, I read a lot of books about it. In fact, pizza was poor people's food at the time of its invention. It’s just that each region, each village did it differently. That's all. Basically, the essence is a bread flatbread, tomato sauce, or white sauce, it didn’t matter...that’s all there is. That is, they can open the refrigerator, see what is there: a piece of sausage, a couple of tomatoes and a piece of cheese, and it will be a wonderful pizza, and it will be the most delicious. And for a neighbor who starts the dough differently, keeps it for 24 hours, not 12, it will be complete disgusting. But it’s prepared the same way, exactly the same.

– Do you have any recipe?

- Yes, different recipes. For the hotel, we now rest the dough for three hours. Sometimes, when there is an event, when there is an opportunity, we stand idle for a day. We keep it all in a warm place for a day, then we cook from it. It turns out more airy. In fact, I always try to cook it myself, rolling out the dough with my hands. Don't use rolling pins or anything like that to cook. This is very interesting and wonderful. Just not in blue uniform! In white only.

– Well, the last question: at what moments in your work do you feel truly happy?

– The most wonderful moment is when the guests are happy, in fact. When you have served the banquet, everyone has eaten, everyone is happy and they convey through the waiters that everyone is delighted, everyone is happy. Or - when you are invited to the hall. Many times, thank God, it happened that they invited us and said that this was the most delicious thing they ate. And this is the best compliment for a chef. Nothing more is needed. This is how it really works, and I think it will always be this way.