Hanging out with my siblings at Babushka Restaurant

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Some hobbies don't just disappear despite a move to a different country. One of them is trying the food out in different restaurants. For this particular outing, Anna, Biboy, and I went to a restaurant called Babushka in Walnut Creek. It features nouveau Russian and French cuisine. Apparently, it's been in the list of recommended restaurants in the 2017 Michelin Guide San Francisco Bay Area and Wine Country. It's touted to be the home of the best Russian food to the west of Moscow. Babushka's simple façade and simplicity was definitely matched by the warm welcome we received from the on-duty server, Nicholas. 

We started our dinner with piroshki. These are puff pastries drizzled with a mustard sauce and  accompanied by a salad containing shaved root crops. This dish was quite heavy for a starter (if we didn't share the piroshki) but it was a good introduction for the dinner that we were about to experience.

Piroshki 

The piroshki was followed by a main dish containing wild boar on a bed of grains, carrots, onions, beans, cucumber, and herb sauce. I expected the wild boar to be on the tough side; hence, I was pleasantly surprised that it was so tender. The tanginess of the vegetables contrasted well with the savoury flavours of the meat. I'm not sure what the grains were, but definitely, they're not rice. 

Wild boar 

Aside from the wild boar, we also tried the vareniki. To me, these dumplings looked like ravioli. The vareniki contained either mashed potato or cream cheese. Though the dish was delicious, it was difficult not to compare it with the wild boar (which was quite impressive)... and I liked the wild boar more than the vareniki. 

Vareniki 

We finished our meal by sharing the honey cake. It had different layers of sponge cake with vanilla cream between each layer. The sauce had what I thought was honey, some chocolate sauce, and some strawberry sauce. It was delicious! 

Honey cake

Over all, our meal at Babushka was good. I don't think that I've tried Eastern European cuisine previously so eating at Babushka helped me get a good impression of the dishes from that part of the world. 

With the Bay Area known to be the home of many restaurants featuring different cuisines, I'm excited by the prospect that I could possibly travel virtually around the world, one cuisine at a time.

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