Warmest greetings, comrade

This review was first published in December 2001

When it's miserable outside, your body craves comfort food: stodge, in other words. And the emperors of stodge are from cold and clammy countries - Russians, Eastern Europeans and the like.

So pulling our (fake) sables around us, we headed off for the steppes of Primrose Hill, where Trojka has been quietly providing fuel to locals and emigrès for many a chill month. It's a funny little place, kind of melancholy: maybe it's something to do with the lighting or the sombre attempts at decor but it's easy to imagine a clientele of grizzled types huddled round shots of vodka pining for their homeland.

Certainly the food, as my mama used to say, would stick to their bones. Blinis topped with smoked trout and salmon tasted excellent and had a gorgeously chewy texture, but there was a definite miasma of animal fat about them - not to mention the mandatory dollop of artery-ossifying smetana.

Pelmeni - rather heavy pasta dumplings filled with pork stuffing - were doused in melted butter and soured cream: leaden, but strangely soothing. Minced pork came wrapped in cabbage leaves to form two dense, meaty cannelloni shapes, one robed in what appeared to be Campbell's Mushroom Soup (aka 'stroganoff sauce'), the other in Heinz Cream Of Tomato: a rather pleasant nursery food experience, although that may have been coloured by my several distinctly non-nursery chilli vodkas.

We left about £20 a head lighter and what felt like several stones heavier.