The Seaside Café Metropolis

  • Pages:240
  • Publisher:Cormorant Books
  • Themes:Soviet Union, USSR, Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania, Eastern Europe, 1950s, recipes, restaurant, communism, socialism, chef, mother-son relationship, hospitality, wine and dine, café culture
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  • Available:09/27/2025
Paperback
9781770868106
$24.95

Reluctant Canadian restaurateur Emmet Argentine is stuck in Khrushchev-era Vilnius, Lithuania, trapped under the tyranny of two equally formidable forces — the Soviet Union, and his staunchly socialist mother.

Raised in the kitchens of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel, Emmet’s talent for hospitality catches the attention of a high-ranking architect, who hires Emmet to helm a magnificent new restaurant. The Seaside Café Metropolis, though located neither by the sea nor in a major metropolitan area, aspires toward elegance without pretention, bohemianism without vulgarity. Evading the repressive communist regime through guile, wit, and charm, Emmet assembles the menu and the staff to create a sophisticated and atmospheric fine dining experience in the heart of the Soviet Union — all while KGB operatives listen in on the restaurant from the basement.

“Antanas Sileika has invented a new genre: the culinary picaresque. Throw in the Cold War, dissident shenanigans, an ideologue mother, knife-fighting love story, iron curtain Bohemians, and more than half a dozen traditional and innovative Lithuanian recipes and you get a sense of the many flavors Sileika blends to perfection in this sad, funny, insightful, propulsive banquet of a novel. This is a rare dish served by a master chef.”

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“A delicious peek into the world of spies, artists and food at the fringes of the Soviet Union. Sileika’s prose is wry and wise, and conjures up a place and time that glimmers like a bittersweet memory.”
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“Antanas Sileika is a born storyteller. He turns the postwar Vilnius café of the title, with the Soviet menace all around it and even in it, into an oasis of civility — good food, good music, good wit, good poetry and, above all, hope — hope for better days to come. Stories flow through the café, even if they are sad or tragic, like a cleansing river. The author succeeds in making us want both to visit and to flee his fictional establishment, in equal measure — that alone is an achievement to be enjoyed and celebrated.”
– Joe Kertes, Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour–winning Winter Tulips, and Canadian National Jewish Book Award and U.S. National Jewish Book Award for Fiction–winning Gratitude