Notes from St. Petersburg

By Raul Dias

My metal tray slides along the purpose-built rails generating a loud, clanging sound as it collides with the person’s in front of me. I mutter a feeble apology and swiftly move ahead. The grumpy lunch lady behind the plexiglass screen glares down at me, grunting every time I point at something that catches my fancy on the buffet counter she’s manning. Plonking down a bowl of luridly pink soup and a quarter plate of the greyish hamburger patty onto my tray, she all but ‘banishes’ me to the cashier with a wave of her mighty arm.
Now, before this begins to sound like some dystopian, boarding school-meets-prison lunch hall memory I’m conjuring up, let me set the record straight. I’m in St. Petersburg, trying out a dining experience that I had been wanting to have a go at ever since I had heard about it. Lunch at a Soviet era stolovaya is slowly becoming something of a tourist must do when in the most western city—culturally speaking—of Russia.
And so, there I was at the Ligovsky Prospekt branch of Stolovaya n.1 Kopeika, a popular stolovaya chain in St. Petersburg, where both, the brusque service and the pink-tinted beetroot borscht are said to be equally legendary!   

Servings of Nostalgia
The word stolovaya simply means “canteen” in Russian and is a nostalgic leftover (pun intended!) from the Communist USSR days when providing an “adequate” level of care and provision for the population in all areas of their lives was the well-flogged mantra. The Germans even have the perfect name for this—ostalgie. Loosely translated, this implies a sort of nostalgia for the bygone communist days.
While these are public cafeteria-style restaurants that can be found everywhere in Russia, it is St. Petersburg that boasts the most number of them—both old and more recent, 21st century iterations. Each trying to distil the bleakness and “dark” atmosphere of the older ones into them. Right down to the Soviet style prints hanging on their walls and work staff that are mostly from the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia.
In St. Petersburg, most stolovaya are open 24/7 and are cash-only establishments. And in a city where buying groceries and cooking one’s own meals can be a rather expensive affair, eating all three meals at a not-so-friendly neighbourhood stolovaya is the norm. For here, a hearty lunch of a soup, a soft drink, a main and a dessert can often be bought for as less as 200 roubles (Rs 218 approximately).

Herring under Fur Coat!
Speaking of dishes, the food on offer at most stolovaya are simple, homestyle, fill-your-belly kind of no-frills stuff. Here, one can expect to find dishes like the ubiquitous mayonnaise-doused fruit and veggie Salad Olivier that is known to the world as Russian Salad. Apparently, the salad was named after Lucien Olivier, a Belgian-origin chef who invented it at Moscow’s Hermitage restaurant in the 1860s.
Equally popular are other dishes like the kotleti hamburger-style patty and the beetroot borscht–both of which I’d tried earlier and loved. Not so much the insipid, watered down kompot, however. This soft drink is said to be a stolovaya mainstay and is made from synthetic ‘fruit’ syrup with tiny bits of fruit flotsam bobbing along its room-temperature surface.
But then there are some stolovaya specimens that are so confounding to a non-Russian that seemingly innocuous dishes like the pickled fish and boiled eggs shuba salad end up with weird translations such as ‘herring under fur coat’ on menu boards. The traditional Russian dish of yezhik (literally, hedgehog!) is another example, where the rather tasty side dish of rice-spiked meatballs has a strange-sounding English translated name.
Interestingly, breaking away from the traditional stolovaya model as far the food is concerned seems to be the latest trend in Russia. I was soon to find out that there are a bunch of speciality stolovaya options in St. Petersburg such as all-vegetarian (Rada & K on ul Gorokhova 36), organic and even a few where the emphasis is on ethnic cuisine. Puris in St. Petersburg, anyone?


(This article first appeared in the 10th February 2019 issue of The Hindu newspaper's Sunday Magazine section on page 7 https://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/travel/notes-from-st-petersburg/article26212860.ece)