STYLISH:  Olinjkis Restaurant gets five stars on all counts

Baklayzania farshirovany
Aubergines baked in their skins and stuffed with ikra of aubergine, herbs and spices,
tomatoes, coating of ewe's milk cheese and browned under the grill
Chakhobili
Chicken vegetables, beans chick peas, okra, cilantro tomato, etc, cooked in a clay pot
Paklava
Almond and pistachio paklava
As seen on The Food Guide, Anglia and Central TV

The Sunday Telegraph May 24 1992
Where 'Glas-nosh' rules
Byron Rogers enjoys the taste of Tsarist Russia In the Northant's countryside.

CONSIDER THE village of Byfield in Northamptonshire. The main Banbury-to-Daventry road tears through, and the village writhes about it like a transfixed snake, being just somewhere on the way to somewhere else. It has one pub (where once there were 11), two general stores, one petrol station and one post office. Ah yes, and one restaurant (Russian).
I remember the opening, for it is only 10 miles from where I live. I drove by sniggering, and who wouldn't? When one day a man in the middle of England gets up and decides to open a Russian restaurant in his house, 'there is no knowing what form next week's whim will take. But time passed, and to my surprise I found the restaurant had not become a Hindu temple or even a cat-food superstore. The Nine-Day Wonder of Byfield ("Glas-Nosh" burped the local evening paper) is now 18 months old, and Olinjkis is very much in business. There are some odd ironies to this tale. The first is that a Russian restaurant opens in Europe just as Europe is ferrying food aid into Russia. As one satisfied customer said earlier this year, "I am now returning to Moscow where my mother and I will put garlic into water and call it soup. The second is that Adrian Olinjkis is the grandson of Tsarist refugees from Kiev, so the recipes are based on what they ate in that bad old world which they were lucky to flee. "The recipes are all pre-Revolution," he said.
"No, you are wrong," said · his wife, Fay, who does the cooking.
"Well, it's not all potato soup, is it?"
"No, but these dishes are the ones they would make now if they had the ingredients."
The third irony is the oddest of all. Fay Olinjkis's father was Field Marshal Haig's chef and cooked banquets for him in quiet chateaux far behind the mud. and murder of the Western Front. The unreality of that will be over-taken when the first: takeaway opens on the moon. Even the Russian restaurant in Byfield does not come close.
The family moved to the village 10 years ago. Adrian was making TV commercials then, while' Fay bred Gloucester Old Spot pigs and did con-tract catering for local firms: just two more exotics becalmed in rural England. The restaurant was her idea, an old ambition shelved but not forgotten.
They opened on a Thursday in a converted stable, and their friends from London came. The following night they waited and waited but the only person who came was an old farmer who had walked over the fields to see if they were all right; they gave him a bowl of soup. Only about four families of the village have ever come.
With the exception of the wine list, everything is Russian, except that nothing, apart from vodka and caviar, actually comes from Russia. And the vodka they flavour themselves, not even trusting the former comrades with pepper or cherries or buffalo grass. Fay smokes her own salmon, marinates herring, makes Georgian sausages (not for the faint-hearted), and bakes her own flat bread as well. You get the impression these are castaways in Northamptonshire. She has now found a dealer in game who, when encouraged, produces things - like wild boar. But to her alarm the man went on to produce squab ("It took me days to get rid of the blood") and then on St Valentine's Day called round with a dead ostrich. "And how do you make an ostrich Russian? .1 did my best; but whatever I did the ostrich tasted of pig-feed. In the end I curried the lot."
Chicken Kiev and beef Stroganoff are on the menu but as a concession to those who are too shy to ask about the zharenrniy porosyonok and the basturma mtsuadi (the sucking pig and the grilled beef). Even the greediest find themselves off all known maps when they come to this place. "But really there is some' thing for everyone here, from the pickled herrings of the Baltic to the dumplings and noodles of the Chinese border to the pilafs of Persia - and it couldn't be otherwise, given the sheer size of Russia. In the cities some French influence survives; and then there is the Jewish food of the Ukraine."
As she has gained confidence, so she has tried to cook as though this were a Russian home and guests had just turned up. The elaborate dishes like salmon with vermicelli have gone. Now, she plays for time, hoping that most people will start with a mixed hors d'oeuvre. This gives her 20 minutes to prepare the main course, which is an amazing dish in itself. At £13~50 for two, it consists of deep fried squid; ikra (the fish and vegetable mock caviar, stuffed vine leaves and forshmak, a sort of kedgeree made with potato, apple and sour cream and the famous smoked salmon liberally dressed with caviar.
Main dishes start at £11 (mixed sweet fish served with horseradish and beetroot sauce) and go on up to roast goose served with apple and buckwheat at £l6~50. The buckwheat, like an old character actor, makes many appearances. There is also whole baby chicken Georgian- style, which I had, cooked in sweet butter and served with a plum sauce. It was delicious. You can, if hungry opt for the six-course banquet at £29-50, starting with the hors d'oeuvre, after which you proceed through soup, shaslik (fish or lamb), kissel (a sorbet) before the main course looms up before you. At Christmas there are Caucasian and Baltic banquets.  Occasionally the old world calls: a Polish gentleman wildly adding black pepper to his vodka - and now even the first Russians have come.  A party of engineers recently chain-smoked through the entire meal, and in that nostalgic fug Byfield floated even further away. As they were leaving they presented their hosts with a single rouble note which, at the current rate of exchange, would be part payment on a bread roll.