The Random Restaurant Tour — XLVIII

It’s autumn, folks — a beautiful and wonderful time of year in central Ohio (especially when compared to, say, winter). There are many great restaurants in the Columbus area where you might celebrate this season, and we decided to head to one of the finest — Veritas — to enjoy its autumn tastings menu. That’s because some of the best things about fall are the foods and flavors that are available to be enjoyed this time of year.

Veritas is, in a word, fabulous. It’s the kind of restaurant that you like to take out-of-towners to, because you know they will leave with a positive impression of our city and its culinary attributes. The food at Veritas is reliably spectacular, filled with interesting flavor and textural combinations, and a treat for the eyes, besides. Add in a welcoming ambiance, and nice attention to every little detail that can move a meal from great to greater, and you’ve got a restaurant that can do autumn, or any season, proud.

The Veritas autumn menu is five courses. You start with a mandatory broccoli and cheddar cheese tart, then make your choices from options for the other courses. Starting with a broccoli dish was a challenge for me, because in my view it is one of the most unholy, vile, unpleasant smelling and foul tasting vegetables in the land of greenery. Any yet, the wizards in the Veritas kitchen found a way to minimize the broccoli flavor and cushion it delectably in a flaky crust and a mound of cheddary scrumptiousness. When a culinary genius can turn a food you loathe into something that you would gladly eat again, it leaves you ready for more.

For the next course I went for the carrot, yogurt, and curry leaf soup, which thick, and rich, and creamy, and introduced me to multi-colored carrots that I had not seen before. Let’s just way that these were not Bugs Bunny’s kind of carrots. And speaking of hares, the follow-up dish was a rabbit, paprika, and creme fraiche combination that featured some delectable dumplings and perfectly cooked, supremely tender rabbit. That triumph was followed by the filet medallions shown above, framed with multiple kinds of potatoes, and a root beer infused sauce that I would have gladly eaten straight with a spoon–except it went incredibly well with the spot-on medium rare meat. The different kinds of potatoes were wonderful, too.

We ended our fall feast with the almond, banana, and sourdough concoction seen below, which is the best dessert I’ve had in a long, long time. What’s that, you say? Bananas aren’t an autumnal dish? To that I say you’re wrong, because any Midwesterner knows that the fall season is full of surprises, Just as the weather can suddenly turn cold, or warm, or blustery with rain, so can a banana creation suddenly grace a fine meal.

The autumn menu at Veritas was so good that I want to go back again, to try some of the dishes I didn’t choose this time around. If the chef can make broccoli an enjoyable treat, even cauliflower is worth a try. in fact, the seasonal tasting menu almost makes me look forward to what winter might bring.

Literally Robbing Themselves Blind

War often exposes otherwise unknown things about one of the combatants. That has been the case in Russia, where the invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing fighting have exposed a huge problem with outright theft of the supplies that were supposed to be used to clothe and equip Russian soldiers. The theft problem is so acute that the Russian men who have recently been conscripted to fight have to buy their own uniforms, boots, and other gear–and what they are given by Russian authorities is often obsolete. “The army has nothing,” one of the conscripts said in a recorded call.

The BBC has an interesting story about the official records concerning supplies stolen from the Russian army and the staggering scale of the thievery. One member of the Russian Duma complained that 1.5 million sets of soldier kit, consisting of basic items like uniform pants, shirts, and flak jackets, summer and winter boots, helmets, and other essentials, have vanished even though, for years, Russia has been allocating huge sums toward its military supply budget. One popular item for theft is the night-vision goggles that soldiers obviously need for operations under cover of darkness–which means the Russians are literally stealing themselves blind.

The BBC report suggests that most of the stealing is being done by members of the Russian army, so much so that theft from military stores seemingly is a way of life. Commissary officers are adept at pilfering goods, creating fake stock lists, invoices, or reports to cover their tracks, and writing off perfectly good supplies as damaged by mold or poor storage conditions. Russian army records of the thieves whose schemes have been discovered reveal that the larceny ranges from spur-of-the-moment decisions to boost available items to systematic schemes to take goods in such quantities that trucks are needed. In addition to clothing and protective equipment, the light-fingered Russians are filching food and petrol–which may be why so many Russian vehicles in the Ukraine seem to be running out of gas.

The prevalence and vast scale of the crime makes it likely that the official records of theft barely scratch the surface of what has really happened in Russian supply depots. And the extent of the theft likely would not have been detected but for Vladimir Putin’s ill-conceived decision to invade Ukraine, which revealed that the cupboard was bare when it was supposed to be fully stocked. You have to think that the invasion of Ukraine not only was opposed by the civilized world outside of Russia, but also by the supply officers and soldiers in the Russian army whose criminal schemes suddenly were at risk of exposure. Supply officers who have been stealing for years make for good pacifists.