The Russian House in Downtown Austin

 The Russian House is a restaurant in downtown Austin on 6th street. We decided to give this one a try and see what it was like.

It is on 6th street in downtown Austin, which means parking is going to be a pain. Parking is always a pain downtown. But that's just how it goes.

The first part of the restaurant is the bar area, and then behind the bar area is a small space for the actual restaurant. It's a bit of a dark place, in that the way the place is situated there are no windows anywhere other than the front door. So you do feel a bit like you are walking into a cave. I did not find the ambiance off putting though. It was more interesting than anything else.

They have a fairly large menu, though most of it were things that we were not familiar with. They do have good descriptions of what the dishes are. 

They also have a large selection of caviar should you choose to get super fancy. They have a lot of fish, sauerkraut, and meat. Essentially most of the food seemed very hardy - a good eat and potatoes kind of place where you are going to leave feeling full.

We started of with a Piroschki - it's essentially a stuffed roll. You could pick your filling, so we went with meat and pork. The bread part was soft and sweet, and the meat filling was good. It wasn't full of spices, or sauce. It was rather plain, but still tasty. It reminded me a but of an English Pasty. 

For the entree's  I got Schnitzel. I love a good Schnitzel. It's a thinly pounded piece of pork that's been fried. It came with potatoes and sauerkraut. It was really quite good. And I was really full because I basically licked my plate clean.

Justin got the Chicken Kiev, which is chicken, wrapped in butter, coated in breading and fried. Obviously we were going for healthy options here. It was also rather tasty. His only complaint was that he wished he had more of it to eat, though we were both rather stuffed by the portions we got. 

For dessert be tried a Babushka Rosa. I'm not really sure how to describe this. It's chocolate, and has walnuts in it. It's really rich and very tasty. It's kind of like fudge, but much softer, but then it's kind of like a brownie, but not as cakey. Very hard to really contextualize this into a dessert I'm familiar with. All you need to know is if you like rich chocolate, you will like this dessert. 

As I mentioned above the menu is quite extensive. Based on what we chose on this visit we would absolutely come back and try some of the other options as well. 

If you want to take a chance on something different, but very hardy and very good, I would totally recommend coming here.

We gave it 4.8 out of 5 stars.