What to drink with your caviar
The very idea that choosing a drink to accompany caviar might be traumatic is laughable. These fresh, silky, softly explosive and tantalisingly savoury fish eggs are such a delicacy, and the eating of them such a privilege, and the amounts placed before one generally so small, that drink barely has time to enter the equation.
That said, it's true that a gulp of Coke or swig of Red Bull would, effectively, spoil the experience, and that would mean that a netful of thrashing Caspian sturgeon had died in vain. We owe it to their memory, thus, to treat the matter with at least some seriousness.
When I sat down to eat The Tsar's Menu at the Cafè Nikolaj, I had three drinks to choose from. The sparkling water was, in many ways, perfect (it was the neutral Maldon), since nothing distracted from the luscious sunderings of the oscietre eggs into the sour cream with which they were enrobed on my horn tartiniere.
Cafè Nikolaj's own house white was a relatively full and oaky white Bordeaux: a pleasant partner of well-judged unobtrusiveness. And then there was the CafÈ Nikolaj vodka, a glass of which is thrown in gratis (as passing tsars, of course, expect).
Vodka is often thought not only to be the most authentic partner to caviar, but the best. Authentic, perhaps, if your caviar is Russian; but if it's Iranian the sparkling water might be more appropriate. And the best? It's perfect, as Fay put it, "to close down the taste-buds and tell them that it's all over", but actually sipping neat vodka as you eat spoonfuls of caviar seems to me to prize ritual over sense.
No matter how deeply chilled and oily the vodka itself is, the experience of swallowing neat spirit is a caustic one, scouring and burning the mouth and making your throat feel like a petrol pump. The eggs, I'm afraid, lose out.
Champagne is the other classic partner; this is better than vodka. The type of Champagne doesn't matter greatly, provided it is not sweet, but best of all would be a poised blanc de blancs, which is made from chardonnay alone and generally has a fine, incisive line and plenty of Cossack cutandthrust to it.
A quick survey of friends whose income or prodigality leads them to trial caviar combinations more often than I do also threw up the remarkable Savenniëres as a good partner (this is France's greatest dry white wine made from the chenin blanc grape variety) and a dry pinot blanc from Alsace. I have more than a hunch, though I haven't put it to the test, that a chilled Manzanilla sherry would be superb, too. There are, in other words, plenty of options - but make the vodka the final trump.
Cafe Nicolaj
161 Piccadilly, W1V 9DF
