The restaurant is closed.

Imagine you have just blasted off inside a space ship; you slowly open your eyes to a world of dazzling clinical whites, a vacuum-like space and gently soothing music. Now picture a romantic meal with good food and fine wine. Now take both images and visualize an evening at Sketch Cafe, the latest start-up on Moscow's intolerably cool restaurant scene.

Located directly opposite the Christ the Saviour Cathedral, the restaurant has made a bold statement with its interior design. As you walk in the restaurant the first thing you notice is the lack of colour. Everything is white: the walls, the tables, the bathrooms, the cutlery, the napkins, in fact all but the vivid red flower decorations. Designed by local architect Vasilisa Astrakhan to be the latest in cutting edge minimalism, the restaurant's decor is a little too cold for my liking. It is like a blank canvas that needs to be finished.

Fortunately the menu, which is also futuristic in its design, is more successful. It is divided into two sections, the ordinary restaurant menu, and a low-fat alternative indicating the number of calories of each dish. Although complicated to work through, it has an impressive range of European inspired offerings.

The cold starter menu takes fresh ingredients and serves them in unconventional and innovative ways. I opted for the roulette of rabbit stuffed with minced liver and served with onion jam and pineapple jelly (150Rb). It was a tasty affair of tender white meat set off well by the sweetness of the jams and a salad of slightly bitter lettuce. My dining companion played safe with an enormous offering of carpaccio ham served on a bed of chilled melon (270Rb). The ham was sliced to perfection and was so big it could have constituted a meal in itself.

To wash down our first courses we ordered a glass of the house white, the French Baron Phillippe de Rothschild (220Rb) and the house red, a Beaujolais Village (150Rb). Both wines were perfectly adequate and set us up nicely for our second courses.

The crab bisque (150Rb) was the highlight of the entire meal. It was a wonderfully creamy soup with a velvety consistency and a delicate aroma of the sea, which my dining partner claimed took her back to the Cornish fishing villages of her childhood holidays.

I decided to try the unusual asparagus and berry salad (270Rb), which I was reliably informed contained only 255 calories. I was initially slightly concerned how asparagus, the most aristocratic of all vegetables, would fare when combined with what appeared to be a glorified fruit salad with raspberry sauce. Thankfully my worries were quickly dispelled as soon as tried one mouthful of this marvellous creation. The savoury of the asparagus balanced perfectly with the sweetness of the strawberries and raspberries.

After another glass of the house wines had been quaffed we were ready for the main course. Having already been enraptured by the smell of the crab bisque I had no other option than to go for the "Chatka" chicken filet (340Rb). It was two chicken breasts stuffed with generous pieces of kamchatka crab and served with wild brown rice in a creamy crab sauce. The chicken was moist and the crab was a most welcome surprise. The combination of flavours worked well, although the accompanying rice was a little on the hard side.

My better half chose wisely with the simple filet of steamed salmon served with a selection of steamed vegetables and pesto sauce (350Rb). The portion was again impressive, hardly managing to fit on the plate although at 950 calories it may not suit everyone on a diet.

With three courses already under our belts, we rather reluctantly conceded defeat. The creme brulee (80Rb) and the coffee parfait (90Rb) were both tempting but we could not eat another mouthful. Instead we finished the meal with a glass of the intriguing Japanese plum wine (250Rb). It was definitely a dessert wine but the usual cloying sweetness of a French or German dessert wine was absent. It was certainly pleasing but also unusual. It was, I suppose, an appropriate end to our meal in this restaurant of unexpected contrasts.

Sketch is designed like an exclusively chic club and therefore the high quality of the food and the comparatively low prices are slightly out of place. The nightclubbing public, who the cafe is keen to attract at the weekends, would not necessarily come to eat here. Likewise, couples looking for a cosy place for a romantic date would find the service and prices to their liking but possibly not the decor. It is a situation the management believes it can successfully overcome. To be fair to Sketch cafe, it has only been open a few weeks and when it resolves its identity problem it could become one of the hotter spots on the capital's gastronomic scene.

10.03.04