The Greatest Showman

Meet Vladimir Mukhin, the instrumental force behind Krasota, Dubai’s new mesmerising gastro-theatre

WORDS: JOHN THATCHER

The white rabbit conjures myriad thoughts. There’s magic — that classic trick whereby the magician pulls a bunny from a seemingly empty top hat. Alice In Wonderland , the always-in-a-hurry, clock-watching rabbit whom Alice can’t help but follow through the land of wonder and disbelief. And The Matrix , where it appears as a tattoo, a symbol to follow one’s insatiable curiosity.

All of this is relevant to Krasota, the mesmerising, magical, and wonderous gastro-theatre dreamt up by the Moscow-based White Rabbit Family and brought to Dubai by its acclaimed chef, Vladimir Mukhin.

Accommodating just 20 diners at a circular table, eight alwaysinventive courses are served against the backdrop of a visual feast involving interactive installations, 3D projections, and custom AI designs. It is a thrilling show underpinned by art, specifically paintings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Mikhail Vrubel, and Marc Chagall, whose work comes to life everywhere around you while its meaning is explained by your clued-up waiter and reinterpreted in the accompanying dish.

Krasota debuted in Moscow. How did Mukhin ensure nothing was lost in translation when it opened an outpost inside Dubai’s Address Downtown Hotel? “Our main challenge was to source ingredients from a new region. In our homeland, we grow our own produce on farms we know well. Luckily, before we started creating the menu, I had the chance to visit some farms near Dubai. From them, we order delicious local tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and even seedless avocados with edible peel. Further afield, in Pakistan, I discovered unusual nettle sauces. And it was in a market in Jordan that I fell in love with Lumi. Locals use these fermented limes in tea or to season stews, and we’ve used them to add a tart, tangy flavour with very interesting musky undertones to our crab dish. Then, from my country's forests, we use wildpicked strawberries, sea buckthorn, cloudberries, and green gooseberries. I have the feeling that when you come to Dubai, you have to bring something new, and definitely the best.”

That’s certainly the case with Krasota, a culinary experience currently without equal in the city. “The Krasota performance is not just about the film and the interactive table visuals, but also about finding through the menu a new narrative adapted to an audience that is both Arabic and global, as Dubai is an amazing and effervescent cultural melting pot. I am still inspired by the ingredients and dishes I discover in the UAE, along with the ancestral preserving techniques used by

Bedouins, which go back centuries.”

Such traditions have fascinated Mukhin throughout his culinary journey. “My cuisine speaks both to the future and to the past, from a creative present. Cuisine, just like our history, is a continuum. One needs to acknowledge his or her roots to spread branches. Being solid and firmly rooted is important, so as not to find yourself lost. There are hidden treasures in the past of all cultures. Ancestral technologies were developed by men and women even before fire was discovered. They are, for me, as interesting as the recent AI innovations applied to cuisine. Today, innovations will become traditions for future generations. Isn’t it fascinating? I’ve been resurrecting traditional recipes from my homeland using all the techniques of modern gastronomy to bring them into the 21st century for the past few years. By establishing these bridges with the past, we also contribute to curing and caring for our heritage and help preserve one of the most precious treasures of humanity: our culture.”

Mukhin has done much to preserve the heritage of Russian cuisine, which he says was “trampled on” by the Soviet era. “During that period, it was illegal to cook from anything other than the Stalin-approved 1939 cookbook, The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. Before then Russian food had colour. The Soviet period was grey. Everything was grey. Everybody was grey. When the wall broke, my father rebuilt a restaurant with his hands, and it was the first restaurant in the city after the Soviet Union dissolved. I will always remember what my father told me that time: “Forget about money, forget about being rich, just try to combine ingredients.” Colour, freedom, and creativity. And from the very beginning, my personal goal was to present real Russian cuisine to the world. Traditional Russian cuisine has everything it takes to become a gastronomic cradle: unique ingredients, our own techniques of cooking — salting, soaking, and baking in the Russian oven. It has a lot of surprises, even for sophisticated foodies.”

Mukhin is a fifth-generation chef, first working in a restaurant kitchen aged just 12, the same restaurant in which his father worked in the small town of Essentuki, at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains. In Moscow, he would work his way up from dishwasher to make his first dish at a restaurant called Rosemary: chicken with an almond crust and sour cherry sauce, which impressed his fellow chefs. He hasn’t looked back. Does he think his cooking style is still evolving? “I think every chef looks to achieve the maturity of his or her style during their career. I feel like I've already found mine. I would call my style ‘controlled chaos on a plate.’ I consider myself a sensitive human being that absorbs what he sees and feels around him, passes it through the sieve of consciousness, to then serve to the world under the prism of beauty. This is also how any metamorphosis occurs for me. There is no distance between what I cook and how I live.”

He speaks like an artist, in the manner of the painting greats Krasota lauds. “Paintings have always inspired me. As Kandinsky said, ‘There are two ways of perceiving colours: when they are combined, and when they are not combined.’ It is applicable to taste as well. The art of a chef is to create harmonies of flavour and to stimulate the palate through different taste stimuli. I've always felt that gastronomy is art, ephemeral and edible art. This gives it a very interesting dimension. A dish could be considered a painting. Indeed, the first perception a diner has is visual. Then smell follows, first as an external signal coming up our nose, to mingle with taste. The dish’s textures and temperature play with the sense of touch through the different receptors on the skin. Sound can be conducted with external sounds and music, as in our gastro-theatre, but can also be smartly suggested through the textures that will sound inside the oral cavity — melting, crunching, sparkling, and subtle or loud. So a dish is a multi-sensory creation.

“One of the things a chef and artist have in common is the reflection of themselves in their creations. This is a big responsibility, as your creations contain messages, feelings, and emotions that your guests will receive. Even if you try to be as objective as possible, you will always reflect in what you create; it is a part of you.”

One such dish at Krasota is a beautifully flavoured black cod, plum and fig, which represents Ivan Aivazovsky’s 1850 painting, The Ninth

Wave. “It has a special, vivid meaning to me,” says Mukhin. “I had the chance last winter to experience what it is like to be sailing in the middle of a storm in the Norwegian fjords. It was like being inside Aivazovsky’s painting, despite the fact that I was on a ship with an experienced crew and not clinging to the wreckage of the ship’s mast, like the characters in this painting. I had a choice: go and meet natural forces or stay inside. I went to meet the fierce sea with the rest of the crew, and many of the feelings and impressions I faced there are expressed in that dish. In the painting, the sun opens a path of light and hope in the darkest sea storm, the promise of life radiating on sunripened fruits. Here, I chose a plum and a fig to represent the fruits, and it was impressive how they matched the colour palette of the dark waters that Aizakovsky masterfully painted. To bring into motion these waves, with all their beauty, we cut thin slices of plum and curled them. The fruits represent the comfort of faith and the light of the sun, in contrast with the raw saltiness of the scene: a group of shipwrecked people facing the ninth wave, the most intense and devastating wave in a storm sequence. The black cod represents the wreckage of a boat, with its layers falling off inside your mouth, while the almost crunchy texture of the firm plum slices reflects the sound of the cracking waves. A beautiful synesthetic moment.”

Much like all the moments you’ll experience at Krasota, it’s also magical.

JOURNEYS BY JET