Eat Like a Prole

In the build-up to its tercentennial, St. Petersburg expended great effort to restore its image as the only truly European city in Russia, turning its back on its soviet-era moniker: “cradle of the revolution.” But is effort alone enough to bring about such a magical transformation?

Much has changed on St. Petersburg’s gastronomic front. In recent years, hundreds of new restaurants, bars, cafes and coffee houses have sprouted up along    

Petersburg’s byways. Idealnaya Chashka (“Ideal Cup”), a russified Starbucks knockoff, is a chain of coffee houses that seeks to connect coffee culture with the city’s cultural life. It meets the demands of the young and active, offering cheap and tasty coffee starting at just 50 cents, and allows visitors to chat and smoke for hours in an authentic coffee house environment. Petersburg has also seen a hundred national cuisines bloom. Well, perhaps a dozen, anyway. There is of course the indispensable Chinese and Japanese fare, but now this has been joined by a smattering of Tajik, Armenian, Kazakh and Kyrgyz restaurants.

Yet, despite all this trendy competition, old Soviet-style stolovye (cafeterias), zakusochnye (lunch-rooms), pirozhkovye (snack-bars serving pirozhki—pies—with a variety of fillings) and other pillars of a bygone era do not seem in a hurry to disappear.

Not surprisingly, while such places may evoke a certain amount of “sociological” interest, they tend not to attract a foreign clientele. Their shabby signs and humble interiors do not evoke  confidence nor reek of the “authentic Russian flavor” which tourists seek.

True enough, the dinosaurs of obshchepit (public catering) aren’t really interested in satisfying the whims of foreign travelers. They have plenty of regular customers and never seem to be empty. Yet there is always room for one more … So here is a guide to grabbing a bite Soviet-style in St. Petersburg. But you better try these places soon; there’s no telling how long before they become extinct …

On a foggy spring morning, there is nothing quite like a warm pastry to start your day. If this is what you need, follow the wonderful aroma of warm confectioner’s sugar as it wafts out of the Pyshechnaya (donut shop) on Bolshaya Konyushennaya ulitsa, 25. There is also the democratic Pirozhkovaya on Liteyny Prospect 47, which seems to have been here forever; nearly every Petersburger will tell you he has been there at least once.

If, however, you need to start the day with something a little stiffer, say with a bit of the hair of the dog, then you need a ryumochnaya. These are small, hole-in-the-wall canteens where you can drop in for a minute, have a shot of vodka at the counter, and quickly return to the daily grind. The Ryumochnaya at 22 Stremyannaya ulitsa is a mere fifty meters from the glamorous Nevsky Palace Hotel. But don’t go here expecting to be transported back to the soviet era in a time machine. The bar may be a physical hold-out, but the clientele is a better reflection of today’s Petersburg, where social strata coexist peacefully, despite a superficial dissonance.

In fact, there is no longer a species we might call homo-sovieticus. But we do feel strangely akin to that vanished breed upon entering a ryumochnaya. Here everyone is equal. Property and intellectual differentiations fade after the first sip. Three militiamen talk loudly on your right, a lonely old man on your left secretly takes a bite from a sausage hidden in his paper bag, a long-haired youth in a beret chats with another wearing glasses alongside him —all move aside as a sullen-faced old dishwasher picks up glasses and runs a wet cloth over the counter.

The history of a bifurcated system of public catering goes back to the 1920s—years saturated with utopian spirit and the frenzy of collectivism overrunning “private life.” New “kitchen-factories” were to do away with the routines of home cooking that had long enslaved Russian housewives. But utopian dreams always look different in reality. The real canteens of the early twenties reflected more a collective poverty than the ideal of a collective prosperity.

The cafeterias served cabbage soup and tea during the hungry twenties. They hosted Sunday family meals in the thirties — the years of a “rising level of culture.” By the 1950s, they were part and parcel of the ideal of a collectivist cuisine canonized in The Book of Delicious and Nutritious Food. The Book (still found in most Russian homes) was not only a source of gastronomical advice, but also material evidence of the country’s steady movement towards the myths of abundance and prosperity. The Book prophesized that the luxuries of restaurant dining, inaccessible to most Soviet citizens, were about to become part of everyone’s diet.

Ah, utopian dreams …

Unlike the luxurious soviet era restaurants which catered primarily to foreigners and the cream of socialist society, average cafeterias and snack bars were grittier, true-to-life affairs. By the end of the soviet era, they had become proverbial for their inedible fare, brave cockroaches (not to mention flies) and rude waitresses. And that may be why some of them turned into highly conceptual places. This was certainly the case with Saigon—a coffee-shop on the corner of Nevsky and Vladimirsky avenues (now occupied by the Radisson hotel). During the 1970s and 1980s, all strata of Leningrad bohemia could be seen here: rock musicians and abstract painters, black marketers and drug-dealers, hippies and punks. Dissident poets Joseph Brodsky and Evgeny Rein, as well as Leningrad’s informal artists, like Mikhail Chemiakin, reportedly visited Saigon in its early days. In the 1980s, underground rock-star Boris Grebenshchikov was a regular.

But what did the famous Saigon look like? According to one of its former habitués, soundman Sasha, now 44, “it was an ordinary Soviet-style café attached to the ‘Moscow’ restaurant, which specialized in white coffee [a chicory beverage boiled with milk and served as a coffee substitute] served right from the boiler. A glass of coffee cost 26 kopeks. That was a sum of money that even someone you did not know could bum off of you. Of course, Saigon was not the official name. It was a local militiaman’s invention—the only word he could find to describe his attitude to the public here. [An alternative version attributes the name to a politically-astute cleaning woman: “It’s as dirty here as in Saigon” – Ed.]. In my time in Saigon, there were only tables there and no chairs, though veterans said they could remember customers sitting at the tables and playing chess. I don’t know why they took the chairs away. Perhaps to make people leave as soon as they were finished with their coffee … Anyway, it didn’t help, for people settled down on windowsills and could stay for whole day, only leaving for a minute to have a cigarette outside. No, you couldn’t smoke there. And you couldn’t have anything substantial, just coffee and a sandwich. But you didn’t come there to eat, you know…”

By the time Saigon was closed in 1989, it had become a legend. That was the main reason that the name was borrowed for a music shop, a club and a café (all in one) opened at the end of Nevsky Prospect (Nevsky Prospect 7/9) some four years ago. Its owner—a Saigon veteran and the frontman of the famous band “AuktsIon,” Oleg Garkusha, sought to emphasize the continuity of cultural tradition. But you cannot recreate a legend. The new Saigon has not become a significant cultural event, if for no other reason than that it is quite expensive and fairly formal, thus attracting an entirely different clientele.

And yet, Petersburg is far from lacking in cheap obshchepit. The survivors usually have one “specialty of the house” that gives the cafe its generic name: kotletnaya serves cutlets, pyshechnaya—donuts, pelmennaya —pelmeni (meat dumplings) and cheburechnaya—chebureki (Caucasian meat pies). Very often they do not have chairs, just high round tables with an open salt cellar (for “dipping”) and a plastic glass stuffed full of rough cut paper to serve as napkins. Some cafés now offer napkins instead of paper, but the truly authentic ones stick to the Spartan traditions. You cannot buy vodka or any other alcohol in a kotletnaya or a cheburechnaya, and this tradition is deeply rooted in the soviet past. The fact that some of these cafes now sell beer should be perceived as yielding to the capitalist competition they have to survive.

Commonly, however, customers are allowed to bring liquor with them. A woman who has worked behind the counter at the Kotletnaya at Moika, 32 said, “I knew every drunkard in the neighborhood who came here for a cheap bite. I didn’t approve of their drinking here, but I didn’t mind, until they got  totally drunk. Then I drove them out. Today we sometimes have groups that want to have a drink in here and warm up a little. They usually buy several cutlets and bread and something else, and then ask me very politely for a glass.”

If drinking in snack-bars has been semi-legal, ryumochnye are places where one can drink as much vodka as you can “stand.” There are no seats. It is standing room only in a ryumochnaya, and smoking is not allowed. This ensures a constant turnover of clientele, and keeps staff from having to deal with clients who have fallen asleep in their chairs. Almost all ryumochniye clients are men.

Finally, there is a category of “legal heirs” of the Soviet public catering system: cafeterias in factories and plants. Not surprisingly, the proletariat is the last bastion of the bolshevik system. But, factories tend to be closed, self-contained worlds. The dining-rooms are off-limits to outsiders; you may only get a taste if you are a visitor of the zavod, but then you will not likely be taken to the worker’s mess, but to the decidedly more upscale stolovaya for management.

With all of this as preface, on the following pages we list a half-dozen nostalgic eateries that are both authentic and open to the general public, even those of non-proletarian descent. RL

“Urban factory workers and workers of our socialist fields value their time a great deal and do not want to waste it standing by the kitchen stove or oven for many hours.

“Today, all Soviet women demand ready-made factory foods, to be able to use their time not only in their households, but mainly at work, on cultural activities and raising their children.

“Therefore, ready-made factory foods and public catering establishments — stolovayas, tea houses, lunchrooms, mobile buffets, etc. — should be given an even more significant place not only in the city, but also in rural areas.”

“It is a distinguishing characteristic of our revolution that it gave the people not only freedom, but also material comforts, and also a chance to lead a prosperous and cultured  life.”

Josef Stalin

Aimak Cafe

Kazanskaya ulitsa, 6 

If you have been a student of Russian in St-Petersburg, you certainly know this place well: it is inside the Hertsen University Hotel, to the left of the reception, down the corridor, next door to the hairdresser’s. This is the perfect place for hanging out with your Russian friends and for striking up new acquaintances: many Russian students (mostly the alumni of the State Pedagogical University named for Hertsen) drop in at this café. Everything is very cheap, but your quick-witted Russian companions will teach you to make it even cheaper by buying your alcohol in the food store to the right of the reception. (Photo: page 44)

(soup – starting from 20 rubles, 

main course – starting from 22 rubles)

Cheburechnaya

Bolshoi prospekt 4, Petrogradskaya storona 

The cafeteria is popular among Petersburgers for its felicitous combination of relative tidiness, low prices and an unassumingly Spartan interior. Through a large window in the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room, you can see the kitchen’s huge aluminum vats and women in white gowns bustling about, as if they are cooking not just chebureki, but a magic meal for you. (There are two other snack bars just round the corner, but if you are not in the mood to establish a close contact with the dregs of Petersburg society, refrain from exploring them.)

(1 cheburek – 10 rubles)

Pirozhkovaya

Liteyny Prospect, 47 

Like many other “soviet” obshchepit places that have survived, this pirozhkovaya goes well beyond the assortment implied by its name. It offers not only pastries, but also salads, soups, meat and fish dishes, and a large choice of beverages. Its interior (which might have felt a designer’s touch at some point, but now seems to have gradually become a product of the personnel’s collective fantasy) is worth mentioning for the plentitude of artificial flowers covering the walls, hanging from the ceiling and cluttering up the counter. The make-up of the woman behind the counter reminds one of the “Sturm und Drang” of the punk movement. But hopefully you will have become a mature “soviet customer” by now and have learned to ignore unimportant trifles. Instead you insist on enjoying your meal, which, in fact, is not that bad.  

(1 pirozhok – starting from 5 rubles)

Pyshechnaya

Bolshaya Konyushennaya ulitsa, 25 

As you enter this extremely small snack bar, you will see a long queue snaking back from the counter. The café is always crowded and, since most customers are very young, there is plenty of loud talking and laughing. Pyshechnayas generally have a flavor of festivity and celebration and thus present a contrast to the gloomier pelmennayas or kotletnayas. Pyshki (doughnuts) are not a meal, but a luxury, and for many children a journey to the pyshechnaya is a special treat on a Sunday afternoon, after visiting a museum or seeing a matinee. When these children grow up, an incurable nostalgia brings them back to the pyshechnaya again and again. This is one of the city’s best.

(1 pyshka – 3 rubles)

Stolovaya

Vosstaniya ulitsa, 35 

While pyshechnayas or ryumochnayas are places where sociability and eating go hand in hand, a pelmennaya’s or stolovaya’s primary purpose is to assuage one’s hunger. For many, the price of a helping compared to its size is the strongest argument for frequenting a place. In fact, running a stolovaya would not be profitable, but for the “birthday parties” or “wedding parties” held in them from time to time. The stolovaya on Vosstaniya is a large hall with two rows of tables, most of which are mainly empty during the week. On the weekends, however, you will often see a sign “Closed for private party.” If you happen to be among the guests, you will be surprised to see an atmosphere of informal, unrestrained merriment contradicting the humbleness of the surroundings.

(soup – starting from 18 rubles, main course – from 23 rubles)

Pelmennaya

Ulitsa Vosstaniya 12 

If you have been to one pelmennaya, you have been to them all. True products of factory cooking, every pelmennaya looks the same, as if stamped out by a big restaurant factory. In each one, the pelmeni will always taste exactly the same (because they are in fact all made in the same factory production line). Everything is predictable and unchangeable: menu, price, quality, and service (or absence thereof). And yet, in this reign of monotony, there is still space left for fantasy and refined taste: an acquaintance (a bachelor and a typical pelmennaya habitué) has chosen this one as his favorite and tries to persuade everyone that the pelmeni here are absolutely special. 

(1 portion of pelmeni – 23 rubles)