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Dining

Lexington Herald-Leader
Friday, August 31,2001

21

Natasha's food lives up to lovely new locale

By Howard M. Snyder
HERALD-LEADER RESTAURANT CRITIC

Now that most of the retail businesses have fled downtown for the 'burbs or just plain closed, it's kind of nice to see one restaurant-retailer pull up its suburban stakes and move downtown. Natasha's Cafe did just that. It closed its Southland Drive location and moved to Esplanade
    Natasha's Cafe is one of the loveliest new spaces I've seen in a long time.  Its interior is more like an art gallery than a cafe.  It's spacious, loftlike and very urban.  At night, pierced Morrocan lanterns throw out a lacy light-and-shadow pattern.  It's a place here it's somewhat easy to to get lost in the shadows.
    Natasha's menu isn't a big one, but it's certainly a unique one for Lexington --international with leanings toward Russian. 

     Our dinner for three was nearly perfect. We started with baba ghanouj($4), an eggplant dip made with tahini and plenty of garlic.  The dip was garnished with chopped calmati olives and served with garden-fresh tomato slices and toasted French bread.
    Another appetizer, which was really a salad, was fried okra served on a bed of fresh spinach.  The fresh okra had been dredged in a coarsely ground white cornmeal and fried until crispy.  Southerners have been frying fish and green tomatoes that exact same way for centuries, too.
    The soup of the day was chilled tomato.  It was simply pureed and sieved tomatoes with lemon juice, a couple of sprigs of fresh thyme and a dollop of sour cream.  It was a perfect summer soup.  Also it was included with my entree.
     Our entrees were surprisingly good.  		We got ghivetch marinated tofu ($9).  I've never been a fan of tofu, but this tofu dish was good.   It is Japanese tofu sautéed with a medley of vegetables -- onions, green pepper, baby squash, potatoes -- and then permeated with dill, including the tofu.
    The best, however, was the mushroom stew ($11). It was beefless stroganoff -- button mushrooms, onions and red potatoes in a slightly thickened sour cream sauce.  It was rich, rich, rich.
    Dessert started with cafe Cairo($2), a Turkish-style coffee, spiced with cardamom.  Desserts ($3 each) were a rich chocolate mousse cake, a luscious  hummingbird cake (or Italian cream cake)  and three rugelach, crescent-shaped sweet biscuits stuffed with ground pecans, currants and cinnamon.
    Dinner for three, including four imported beers, but not tip, was $67.

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