RESTAURANT REVIEW : Borscht and Perogy Brings Mother Russia’s Cuisine to Tarzana

Borscht and Perogy, a mom-and-pop Russian/Jewish deli on Ventura, has the earthy appeal of a small-town restauran somewhere in the Soviet Union. The only inauthentic note is that it’s so upbeat. Dostoevsky wouldn’t last 10 minutes there.

Yan and Olga Zlatin, a young couple who emigrated from the Soviet Union as teen-agers, run the place and try to bring Mother Russia as close to Tarzana as is humanly possible. The problem is that there is too much food around for it to be any restaurant in Russia.

The restaurant, if you want to call it that, is better described as a bright, narrow deli with a counter and a few tables lined up against a mirrored side wall. The place seats about 12 people at the most and odds are, if you listen closely, most of them will be speaking Russian.

Zlatin tends to most of the cooking chores while his wife handles the counter, which is filled with smoked fish, Russian salads, salamis with names such as Moskovskaya and Estonskaya, and little cakes that are flown in from a bakery named Kiev in New York City.

You wouldn’t come for the service, which is enthusiastic but slapdash. The kitchen is constantly running out of things and dishes come up slowly, one at a time, at the pace of a Volga boatman. But the food is honest and authentic, and the taste of Russia is all over everything. And I don’t mean the taste of the Russian food you get from Intourist.

You might want to start with several of the salads in the glass case behind the counter, such as the creamy Russian potato salad or the spicy eggplant. The potato salad is made with chunks of spiced meat and pickles, and I don’t know of a more satisfying one. The spicy eggplant, a dip that looks like a Lebanese mtabbal , makes wonderful schmear for the dark, heavy Russian bread Olga Zlatin serves in baskets, a Swedish limpa -style bread that stays with you for hours.

Real trenchermen will want to eat this bread with the house chopped liver, a fatty spread made with schmaltz. It’s a delicious, finely chopped liver spread, but as heavy with chicken fat as it is, it’s better suited for a cold Russian morning than a sunny day in the Valley. The surgeon general would put a warning sign on it, if he could.

Lots of Russians come to eat the namesake dishes, borscht and pirogi (the “perogy” spelling is strictly the proprietors’), as well as pelmeni and vareniki , which are respectively Siberian and Ukrainian varieties of dumplings filled with meat, cheese or potato. The borscht, in accordance with Jewish traditions, is meatless, a cabbage and beet broth you eat with heaps of sour cream. Its taste is fresh and clean.

The pirogi are nothing special, just cigar-shaped tubes of rolled dough stuffed with a meat filling. The filling tastes as if it has been frozen. I didn’t get to taste the pelmeni, because the restaurant had sold out whenever I ate there.

The vareniki are something else. These are little lumps of pinched dough, boiled until chewy, with good fillings. The meat ones taste like little kreplach with extra spices. The potato vareniki are almost like gnocchi. I’ll just have to come back another time for the sour cherry vareniki, an intriguing sounding dessert that the restaurant is also constantly out of.

There are a whole slew of hot entrees, too, but don’t order them if you are in a hurry. Most of them end up being too well done anyway, which might be the reason they take so long to come out of the kitchen.

For instance, chicken Kiev, a seasoned chicken breast stuffed with butter and herbs, then rolled in bread crumbs and pan-fried, comes out dry and overcooked. Chebureki are pastry triangles with a minced meat and leek filling, resembling Greek spanakopitas: tasty but overdone. The chicken tabaka is a little less frazzled than other dishes, but this pan-seared game hen is done in by being drenched in salt. The only outstanding hot dish is the stuffed cabbage, a light, fluffy version with plenty of rice in its meaty stuffing. The chef cooks this one with delicacy, something most of the other entrees lack.

For dessert, there is an assortment of the creamy, multilayered cakes that Russians like to eat in the middle of the afternoon, when they are busy drinking tea from the samovar. You might also try their raisin cake, a dense, dry, loaf cake with the sweet, austere taste of Mother Russia herself.

Recommended dishes: borscht, $1.75; Ukrainian vareniki, $3.25; eggplant salad, $1.95; Russian potato salad, $1.95; stuffed cabbage, $5.25.

Borscht and Perogy, 18710 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana, (818) 705-3940. Lunch and dinner 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday to Saturday; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday. No alcoholic beverages. Parking lot in rear. No credit cards. Dinner for two, food only, $10 to $25.