Back at Babushka’s

Moscow New York Deli is more market than restaurant, and way more Moscow than New York.

The food leans toward Russian Jewish, meaning pure nostalgia for anyone who grew up with a Yiddish-speaking grandmother from Eastern Europe. I did, and eating here took me right back to the ‘50s, when I visited my grandmother’s house every weekend.

Everything is on display in a huge deli case that is imperially stocked with imported and domestic cold cuts, composed salads, fancy meat dishes, smoked fish and stunning pastries. You point to what you want; the clerk passes your order on to the kitchen, where a shy babushka stands at the ready. The best strategy is to pick a table and sit patiently. A few dishes are merely plucked from the deli case and reheated. But many are cooked to order, and the kitchen can be painfully slow.

For an appetizer, the sour cream-topped borscht looked so appetizing that I ordered a bowl. It’s a deliciously meaty soup based on beef and shredded cabbage, with lots of beets and potatoes, and considerably heartier than the traditional meatless Jewish borscht. I can recommend the chicken noodle soup, made with good egg noodles and tiny chicken meatballs. There is also a thick mushroom barley soup, not unlike what you’d find in one of our better-known Jewish delis.

At lunch, you can get sandwiches on locally baked Russian rye. The possibilities include such American favorites as turkey and roast beef, but I’d order one of the exotic meats: Estonskaya, a pale brown salami with a mild pork flavor, or Sovietskaya, a fatty beef sausage with a garlicky finish.

There are a slew of hot entrees, if you have the time to wait. One is chicken Kiev, chicken breast stuffed with butter and herbs, rolled in bread crumbs and fried. It’s reasonably tender and the buttery filling oozes out satisfyingly when the chicken is cut.

Perhaps chicken tabaka suffers from not being cooked to order. This is a game hen, flattened and then fried. Although the skin is nice and crisp and the flesh tender, the flavor seems to have gone right out of it. You won’t have that problem with the chicken cutlet. This is Jewish comfort food: a dense, blandly satisfying oval patty of pure chopped chicken meat.

The menu’s shining star is golubtsi, better known as stuffed cabbage. Moscow New York Deli stuffs the cabbage leaves with a remarkably light and fluffy chopped meat-and-rice mixture and serves them in the sweet-and-sour tomato gravy that marks it as the Jewish version.

To balance all the brown foods, the kitchen offers several good salads. In addition to that smooth Odessa eggplant, there is a classic Greek salad of feta cheese, Greek olives, tomatoes, onions and cucumbers, and also vinigret, a salty peasant combination of chopped potatoes, beets and pickles in (of course) a vinaigrette dressing.

For a real Russian-Jewish experience, get a bowl of kasha varnishkes. It’s gritty buckwheat groats served with bow tie pasta. How farfalle showed up in the Ukraine is anybody’s guess, but kasha varnishkes is as mystical a part of Ashkenazi culture as the Kabbala.

If you fancy dessert, there are the creamy, multilayered tortes that Russians nibble in the afternoon while drinking glass after glass of tea from the samovar. Moscow New York Deli serves its tea in plastic cups, but the sweets aren’t compromised one bit. The best are Tort Napoleon, seven layers of alternating crust and custard, and Tort Vishnevski, a burnt-sugar layer cake with a sour cherry filling that puts Vishniev on the culinary map.

BE THERE

Moscow New York Deli, 19550 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana. Open 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday. Dinner for two, $9-$14. Suggested dishes: Odessa-style eggplant, $3.99; Russian borscht, $1.99 (cup)/$2.99 (bowl); chicken Kiev, $4.99; golubtsi, $1.99 each. FYI: No alcohol. Parking lot. MasterCard and Visa. Call (818) 708-1095.