• Food on film

  • By John O'Connell. Photography John Wildgoose

    Posted: Tue Sep 4 2007

  • Silvena Rowe, a cook and food writer specialising in eastern European food, entertains Time Out's John O'Connell with her tales of cooking up blini and borscht for the ’Russian mafia‘ (on a film set in east London)

    Food on film

    Cronenberg's lavish restaurant creation

  • ‘David Cronenberg’ and ‘lunch’ is not a positive association; his movie version of William Burroughs’ novel ‘Naked Lunch’ was enough to put anyone off their sandwiches and popcorn. Yet Cronenberg’s new film, the London-set thriller ‘Eastern Promises’, plunges audiences into the heart of London’s Russian restaurant scene – and the Russian mafia. It tells the story of an innocent midwife, Anna, played by Naomi Watts, who finds a diary in the handbag of a young Russian girl who dies after giving birth in the hospital where she works. Her quest for more information about the girl leads Anna to a restaurant called The Trans-Siberian – a hub for rich expats offering a taste of the old world in dusky-plush surroundings.
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    This is where Silvena Rowe comes in. An expert on – and longtime champion of – east European cuisine, she’s executive chef at Baltic in Southwark and the author of ‘Feasts: Food for Sharing from Central and Eastern Europe’. It was on the strength of this book that Rowe was employed to design and cook the food that would be served in the 90-seat Trans-Siberian, whose interior was built on a sound stage at
    3 Mills Studios in Mile End.

    Rowe was on set for 12 days, starting at 5am and finishing around midnight. She and a single assistant cooked out of a catering van parked next to the studio, turning out an incredible array of starters (or zakuski), salads, pastries and main courses – all of it edible, though in photos it looks so perfect you’d swear it was ornamental. There are blini topped with beluga caviar; small tomatoes stuffed with fish mousse; whole salmon bedecked with little roses and cubes of chopped egg glazed in aspic; preserved fruit; pickled herrings; a whole trolley’s worth of creamy cakes…

    The food needed to look perfect, but also be true to the story– to look as if it would satisfy the restaurant’s demanding clientele. The same dishes had to be made again and again, either because they were eaten during takes or because they had deteriorated under the hot lights. For the scene in which Watts and her co-star Viggo Mortensen converse while eating blini, Rowe had to keep up a constant supply of the tiny pancakes. ‘I must have cooked 5,000 of them,’ she says, only half-joking. She also had to cook the food that would be shown being scraped off plates into the bin – perhaps the world’s most thankless task?

    ‘Mr Cronenberg isn’t really known as a foodie,’ she says, ‘but as the food started appearing I noticed he was changing the camera angles so that he could get more of it into the shot. Every day at 11.30am, one of his assistants would come into the kitchen and ask for blini with caviar for Mr Cronenberg. She’d say, “We’re having a Mr Cronenberg Blini Moment” – which obviously I loved! The reason I went into food is that I’m a show-off. It’s the only thing I can do. My food is good, and for it to impress people matters a lot to me.’

    At one point in the film, Watts goes into the kitchen and is invited by the restaurant’s owner Semyon (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl) to taste his borscht. ‘In the script it said “She tastes his gravy”, but,as I explained to Mr Cronenberg, there is no gravy in Russia. So we changed it to borscht. I made my special borscht, which is a light consommé flavoured with juniper berries. I’ve made some for you, actually…’ (She has, too. It’s sensational.)

    The fact that all the extras in the restaurant scenes were Russian meant Rowe’s food came in for constant criticism. ‘They say in Russia that there are as many borscht recipes as there are babushkas,’ chuckles Rowe, who is half Bulgarian, half Turkish. ‘I thought that expat Russians living in London would want a light, modern spin on traditional food, so instead of making massive blini I made them smaller. But all the extras, all these old women, were going “That’s not blini! That’s alodushki.” It’s a very east European attitude: “I can do this better than you.” ’

    When Rowe first came to London 21 years ago, east European food was the little-eaten preserve of Polish restaurants like Daquise in Kensington. All that is changing, thanks largely to the massive wave of immigration over the last few years, but also because of the enthusiasm of people like Rowe.

    By a strange coincidence, just weeks before ‘Eastern Promises’ is released in mid-October, a big, new Ukrainian restaurant – London’s first, we think – is set to open. Divo, as it is to be called, will open in St James’ with ‘an eighteenth-century baroque look’ and will serve a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian food in opulent surroundings.

    ‘For me it’s been a tall order over the years,’ says Rowe, ‘knocking on editors’ doors and saying, “Do you want a feature on east European food?” and having them say, “No, thank you, it’s brown, it’s boring”. But I like to think everyone involved with “Eastern Promises” went away thinking not just: Russian food is edible, but Russian food is good.’

    ‘Eastern Promises’ is released in the US on Sept 14, will open the London Film Festival on Oct 17, and will be released in the UK on Oct 26. Silvena Rowe’s ‘Feasts: Food for Sharing from Central and Eastern Europe’ is published by Mitchell Beazley at £20.

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