Florian P.
Yelp
Caspiy, in Sheepshead Bay, is a restaurant that's realized it doesn't need a humongous menu. You should still find something you'd like among the forty or so dishes that run the gamut of Russian cuisine and beyond.
Salads and cold appetizers feature various fish, pickled vegetables, and a special Pineapple "Monte-Krista". The hot appetizers and soups show some Caucasian influence with the lamb kutabs and kharcho. There's also a fish section where Seafood Pasta "Palermo" (the chef's specialty) appears next to Chilean sea bass (the most expensive item on the menu at $32.99).
The house-cured salmon had a rich taste without being too salted. I would have liked to have some blini or bread with it -- I guess I could have asked!
The assorted mushrooms were marinated, and the overly salty and acidic brine made the clamshell and oyster mushrooms all taste the same.
The barskaya ("lordly") appetizer was nice enough though not particularly opulent. What kind of lord eats sliced tomatoes with Polly-O grated mozzarella mixed with a tiny amount of smoked salmon, garlic, and scallion?
The lamb kutab was featured on the menu as one of the chef's specials. The thin layer of ground lamb cooked inside a flatbread tasted good. I wouldn't necessarily call it special, but maybe the restaurant's Ukrainian chef found it exotic.
The blinchiki Caspiy, another chef special, consisted of ground meat and a sauce with mushrooms, white wine, and cream (and blini, obviously). The meat was a bit bland and reduced to a paste reminiscent of dog food. The sauce would have been better if the wine had been cooked off some more.
The kharcho was a somewhat simplified (Ukrainized?) version of the Georgian recipe, only containing, as far as I could tell, rice, beef, onions, and peppers. It tasted pretty good, but we had to watch out for small pieces of bone.
The menu offers kebabs of lamb, chicken, or pork. I chose the latter, a typical Russian shashlyk. The wine from the marinade could be tasted in the meat, a characteristic which I'm not very fond of, and while the meat was cooked properly, with just a hint of pink, the chunks were too lean, and therefore a little tough. The onion on top of the meat was thinly sliced and actually marinated with vinegar and hot pepper. Way to go! The home-made fries tasted of potatoes, but were rather soggy. I guess one has to rationalize that what Russian restaurants call French fries are usually just fried potato batonnets -- this way one doesn't get too disappointed.
There was also a chalakhach, the famous rack of lamb with the name of dubious etymology. Indeed, I'm still looking for a restaurant outside the U.S. where the menu features lamb chops under that name! Anyway, I ordered my meat medium rare, and the cook delivered... except he seemed to have forgotten to clean his grill, and one of the chops tasted a little bit funky! Same onion mixture and soggy fries (even less crispy) as the kebabs.
Now here's a dish that's both a chef special and endowed with a questionable name: the chicken Béchamel. Any self-respecting culinary school graduate would tell you that béchamel sauce is a roux cooked in milk, and would agree that this is a strange name for a dish consisting of stewed chicken meat with a mushroom sauce and served in a bread loaf. However, this was a very satisfying dish overall. The chicken, both dark and white meat, was properly stewed until fork-tender. The sauce, similar to the one on the blinchiki above, paired well with the poultry but was a little bit scarce. The fresh bread loaf was toasted and airy, perfect to mop the sauce.
On to another group of chef specials: the cutlets. We skipped the chicken Kiev and its butter projectile in favor of the cutlets Caspiy. The meat (veal, I think) was once again flavored with white wine that should have been cooked off first, but the texture was airy. it was also more than slightly burnt. And I'd bet my shirt that the mashed potatoes were made with potato flakes.
The stuffed veal was another kind of cutlet. Veal blended with bread, then coated with somewhat sup-par breadcrumbs and deep fried, formed the outer layer. Cutting the cutlets revealed a sauce with mushrooms and crab in the middle, a potentially good idea if only the crab had been more flavorful. The side of boiled kasha was bland.
There are a few desserts on the menu, none of them Russian. We tried the Vesuvius, a kind of cheesecake base with various chocolate things on top, all frozen. This was good enough to satisfy a sugar craving, but nothing more. The textures were funky, everything was very sweet, and the dessert was only saved by the fact that chocolate (almost) always tastes good.
One can eat rather well at Caspiy, but I humbly recommend that one reads my review to help pick the right dishes. Some simple improvements, such as cleaning the grill more often, more fully cooking off the various wine preparations, and changing the dessert menu, could make the experience better.
