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)

Notes from Tashkent

By Raul Dias

I’m technically still on Indian soil, sitting ensconced in a giant metal tube that’s taking the form of an Uzbekistan Airways’ airplane, en route from Mumbai to Tashkent. But I’m also instantaneously being made aware of the fact that remnants of the former USSR are very much alive and kicking in the country I’m to be deposited in, four hours later. The cabin crew greet me with a hearty “dobro pozhalovot!” in Russian. The safety briefing is a trilingual English-Uzbek-Russian one, the rather robust wordage and flat intonations of the last language not lost on me. But that’s just the tip of the proverbial ‘Soviet-influence iceberg’, constant montages of which reveal themselves to me at almost every turn I take over my next two days in Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent.

Past Perfect
An hour after I land, I find myself on the brink of a mini meltdown as I try to navigate my way through block after block of bleak, Khrushchyovka-style residential buildings in the Tashkent suburb of Chilanzar. Bereft of a charged cell phone, I’m trying desperately to locate the elusive building number 26 where Yura Vedenin, my friend of Russian descent has promised to let me spend the night in his tiny, two-room apartment. Named after Soviet statesman Nikita Khrushchev—in whose era these low-cost, concrete-panelled apartment buildings were developed all over the former Soviet Union during the early 1960s—the ‘Khrushchyovka’ is a suburban Tashkent mainstay.
The next day, at the city’s glitzy Tashkent Janubiy Vokzal southern train station, I try to make sense of the indecipherable Cyrillic alphabets that form alien words printed onto my bullet train ticket to my next destination, the ‘Silk Road’ city of Bukhara. God bless the kind-hearted ticket counter lady who takes the effort to pen down all the vital details on the back of my ticket in Roman numerals and alphabets. Without her intervention, I’d surely be in Cyrillic blunderland!
On my way back to Chilanzar from the train station, I burrow my way underground to experience for myself the brilliance of the Tashkent Metro I had heard a lot about. Opened in 1977, the metro today has 29 stations, each a shining (pun intended!) beacon of the former USSR’s legendary hubris. ‘Opulent’ as an adjective doesn’t really do justice to the grandeur and scale with which each of them has been built and decorated, with everything from pink marbled walls to be-chandeliered ceilings. One of the most beautiful of these is the Kosmonavtlar station where Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova—and the first woman in space—is immortalised with a mural, wherein the ceramic wall panels surrounding her portrait fade from blue to black in imitation of Earth’s atmosphere.

Spaces like no other
And speaking of space, just like this station that was influenced by the ambitious USSR space program, Soviet architecture in Tashkent too greatly references the cosmos and science fiction. One such building in Tashkent is the turquoise-domed Tashkent Circus built in 1976, that pays homage to Yuri Gagarin’s epic journey into outer space with its flying saucer like appearance and alien limb-like pillars.
But it is the typical soviet, brutalist style of architecture that augments the USSR’s overarching influence over Tashkent, 27 years after Uzbekistan declared its independence as a brand-new nation in 1991 post the historic breakup of the Soviet Union. It was the devastating Tashkent earthquake of 1966, that gave rise to this style of utilitarian architecture where form and function trump ostentation and ornamentation of any kind.
Seemingly caught up in a time warp when bell bottoms and acid rock ruled, the gargantuan Hotel Uzbekistan, centrally located at Tashkent’s Ground Zero—Amir Timur square—is the perfect specimen of 70s Soviet modernist architectural style that’s associated with social, utopian ideology and influenced by the works of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Though a tad tired and scruffy looking today, this icon of Tashkent’s Soviet past draws in nostalgists by the busloads eager for a morsel of melancholy…however brutal. 

(An edited version of this article first appeared in the 20th January 2019 issue of The Hindu newspaper's Sunday Magazine section on page 7  https://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/travel/notes-from-tashkent/article26035588.ece)