For starters, the beer taps are right there on your dining table. You can pour as much as you want, whenever you want, while meters on the wall count your consumption. The light and dark house brews are both excellent at 16 rubles per 100 milliliters.
The food at Pyaty Okean is light and delicious, a refreshing change from the usual boring, fried, greasy stodge that most Moscow beer restaurants favor. The menu emphasizes seafood and tasty morsels that complement beer, but there's also plenty of meat and chicken. Many of the most appealing choices fall into the category of starters, so we ordered a selection to share.
The olives here might just be the best in town. We ordered a bowl of fat, juicy green ones in olive oil with capers and feta (128 rubles). Sublime. Equally tasty was the Srednezemnomorsky, or Mediterranean, salad (298 rubles) -- crabmeat with tomatoes, corn, lettuce and purple olives in pesto sauce.
Next up we ripped into Rechniye Volky, or River Wolves, which is what Pyaty Okean calls its crayfish (95 rubles per 100 grams), along with some boiled prawns (169 rubles per serving).
The waiters consulted us on the timing and order of the courses and brought out individual finger bowls for each diner; what's more, they gave us fresh individual finger bowls for the soy-sauce marinated spicy chicken wings (Ostroye Delo o Pelikanakh, 185 rubles) that we tucked into next.
To the accompaniment of live acoustic guitar music, we shared a main course: Rybnaya Skovorodka (290 rubles), or salmon chunks baked with potatoes, mushrooms, broccoli and red pepper in bechamel sauce -- very Russian and very tasty. For dessert, we enjoyed Pyanaya Grusha (240 rubles), a pear marinated in red wine syrup with jelly and cream, plus Tvorozhny-Slivochny Tort (198 rubles), a commendable cheesecake, along with more of that fabulous beer.
The only difficulty diners face at Pyaty Okean is self-restraint. The beer is so irresistible and so easily accessible that one diner fell off his chair.
20 Ulitsa Marksistskaya, Bldg. 1. Metro Taganskaya. Tel. 912-9617. 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. (or until last customer). Credit cards: V, MC. www.fifth-ocean.ru
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