Feed Me - Food and drink in Russia

(Shchi soup with bread and sour cream)

One of the unpredictable expenses of solo travel is food and drink. Without proper planning, one ends up eating restaurant meals several times a day. On the other hand, restaurants are a good way to sample the local cuisine. Our policy was to eat out once a day and buy from markets or grocery stores for the other meals. My father's caffeine addiction also forced us to stop twice a day for coffee.

First I'll talk about Russian food. Their dishes are often based on fish, mushrooms, beets, or cabbage along with garden vegetables, sour cream, and bread. Prices are about half of those in Canada. However, because of the rich/poor divide, the price of staples (bread, produce, kefir) is lower while luxuries such as restaurant meals are more expensive.

Most Russians seem to buy their food in markets. Cities usually have one central market, a few smaller markets, and a sprinkling of individual vendors. Markets consist of 10-500 indoor, specialized kiosks selling meat, bread, fruit and vegetables, sweets, sausage, dairy products, nuts, etc. as well as trinkets, clothes and accessories, cells phones, artwork, and so on. Makeshift markets have a cluster of 5-10 handmade kiosks outdoors with cheaper goods. Individual vendors are usually old women selling a handful of garden vegetables. Alongside this was a variety of corner stores and supermarkets. Sometimes we saw roast chicken, kvass (bread-based drink), or blini (Russian pancakes) kiosks.

Kiosks selling vodka, beer, and soft drinks were at nearly every intersection. They did good business--at all hours we saw people drinking on the street. We were generally in our room by 9 pm, so we missed the worst of it. A related nuisance was smoking, along with the resulting wastebin fires. Luckily most buildings were smoke-free.

Our typical grocery store meal was bread, cheese or ham, carrots, cucumbers, and juice/beer/wine, all for about $3. A two-course restaurant meal would be about $12 each. For breakfast (when the hotel didn't provide it) we had kefir with muesli and dried fruit. During the day, we would drink disinfected tap water. I brought a $100 UV lamp for that so we wouldn't need to constantly buy bottled water.

Here is my father, hard at work peeling carrots.Our standard supper plus a roast chicken wrapped in some kind of thin bread.
Here is breakfast at a restaurant. My plate has fried bananas in cream and some sort of sour-cream-based buns. They sure love their sour cream.

Our best chance to taste day-to-day Russian cuisine was in cafeterias. They would always have borscht, shchi, and pelmeni soups; pirozhki; lamb and chicken shashlik (shish kebab); baked potatoes; rice; and salad. Fancier places would have fish dishes like solyanka or ukha. Often restaurants were Caucasian, so they would also have mutton stews with rice. Other cuisines were rare and expensive.