Opened in 1965 by a war refugee. Six decades of borscht, balalaikas, karaoke, and a secret garden full of shisha.
Borshtch ‘n’ Tears has been on Beauchamp Place since 1965, which makes it, by its own account and most others’, the oldest Russian restaurant in the United Kingdom.
It was opened by a war refugee from Eastern Europe, and for sixty years it has done the same thing: borscht, live music, vodka, and an atmosphere that reviewers reliably describe as electric and occasionally as chaotic.
The island of home
The restaurant’s own history describes what it was for, and it is worth taking seriously before we make jokes about the karaoke.
For immigrants, it was a little island of home – a place to hear familiar songs, taste childhood flavours, and feel the warmth that was missing in a foreign country. For Londoners, it was a door into flavours from a long way away, in a room where strangers ended up at the same table, laughing, and occasionally falling in love.
That is what a good restaurant actually is, underneath the food, and Borshtch ‘n’ Tears has been it for six decades, through the entire Cold War and out the other side, four hundred metres from Harrods.
The dark red room
It is dimly lit, red, low, and completely unbothered about being fashionable. There is a hidden garden out the back. There is a shisha bar out the front. There is live music every night and Russian karaoke in private rooms, and the reviews divide, as they always do, between people who wanted an opulent interior and were disappointed, and people who understood the assignment and had the night of their lives.
The Rolling Stones have been. Rod Stewart has been. The place has hosted royalty and, on any given Friday, a table of strangers who did not know each other at eight and are singing together, badly, by eleven.
The name
Borscht and tears. The beetroot soup and the crying – of homesickness, of laughter, of vodka, of all three at once. It is, we would submit, one of the best restaurant names in London, because it tells you the exact emotional register before you have sat down.
The Institute for Nominal Honesty in Erith, which has spent a hundred and twenty articles ranking the names of London drinking establishments, places Borshtch ‘n’ Tears near the very top, on the grounds that it promises soup and weeping and delivers both.
Verdict
Go hungry, go late, and go prepared to sing. Order the borscht, obviously, and the beef stroganoff, and the honey cake. Do not expect chandeliers.
Beauchamp Place
The street itself is worth a word. Beauchamp Place – said “Beecham,” as every local knows and no visitor guesses – is a short run of Georgian houses just off the Brompton Road, and it has spent most of the last century as one of London’s more discreet luxury shopping streets, full of boutiques and small restaurants in the shadow of Harrods.
Into that genteel setting, in 1965, arrived a loud, red, vodka-soaked Russian restaurant with live balalaika music, and it has stubbornly refused to leave or calm down for sixty years. There is something magnificent about that – a place of joyful chaos holding its ground on a street built for quiet money.
Verdict
Go hungry, go late, and go prepared to sing. Order the borscht, obviously, and the beef stroganoff, and the honey cake. Do not expect chandeliers.
Sixty years of exiles have cried and laughed in this room. You can too, for the price of a bowl of soup and a shot of something cold.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Read this on the Central Line where someone was loudly explaining planning procedures to nobody who cared. Institutional indifference.