Russia's Restaurant Boom

In case you weren’t aware of it, Russia is in the grips of a restaurant boom (and not just in Moscow) that has combined with a local produce movement to create a “new Russian cuisine.” This would have been hard to imagine just ten years ago, but here we are.

This is how it happened.

First, some background. For the average Soviet, a restaurant visit was rare, usually as a splurge to celebrate some momentous occasion. People either ate at home or in cafeterias scattered around cities under the auspices of enterprises and organizations. While prices and quality of products were higher in Soviet restaurants, the menus were largely lackluster.

After 1987, as market reforms took hold and expats started to descend on Moscow, private restaurants started popping up. But these new establishments (“coops,” mainly) made the restaurant experience even less accessible to the average Soviet, as many would only accept dollars, and/or all priced their menus in dollars. A visit to a restaurant was a way to demonstrate your prosperity, to impress a provincial partner, to spend money. And nobody wanted to spend money on the same food they could get at home.

The landscape of Moscow restaurants in the 1990s included Georgian (because Georgian cuisine and hospitality were legendary among ex-Soviets), Italian (Russians have always been in love with Italy), Mexican (a bit of a mystery, this one) and American (to provide expats with a taste of home). The only major attempt at popularization of Russian cuisine was the late 1990s launch of Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s Russian Bistro franchise, which sold pirozhki, kulebyaki and watery borsch as fast food.

Then came the new century, and new ethnic waves. Moscow was invaded by sushi restaurants and chaikhanas/tea houses that peddled Central Asian cuisine and aesthetics. For guests, the “foreignness” of food and the “authentic” interiors of the restaurants were no less important (and perhaps more) than the food itself.

But then something interesting happened. With the trickle-down effects of high oil prices, economic prosperity touched the growing middle class – people who did not want to go to restaurants to show off, but to taste good food. Suddenly it wasn’t important whether you served French, Japanese or Italian, as long as you served delicious.

The new restaurants still often had guest chefs from Europe, but their food was no longer advertised as a national cuisine, it was always a fusion of this and that. And when you mix things together, it suddenly seems okay to look at the local traditions and to discover that the famous Italian farro is the same as Russian polba, and that pearl barley is the previously despised perlovka – a staple of Soviet cafeterias in the form of a watery gruel. What is more, you can take local products and use them to make something untraditional, or take traditional recipes and make them with new ingredients.

The Russian company LavkaLavka has been promoting a locavore manifesto since 2009, but it wasn’t until 2014 that international sanctions and Russian counter-sanctions finally forced the broader Russian restaurant scene to embrace their agenda. Now many top restaurants boast their own farms and build their menus around seasonal produce. The word “Russian” in the term “New Russian cuisine” most often denotes the provenance of products, not the recipes themselves, but that doesn’t really matter, because the result is delicious food.

Perlotto Fusion

This is an excellent example of combining a traditional Russian ingredient (barley) with a traditional Italian recipe to make a new dish.

You will need:

1 leek, diced
1 cup of pearl barley
3-4 cups of hot stock (vegetable, chicken, beef – whatever you like)
3/4 cup fresh (or frozen) green peas (it’s spring after all)
4-5 oz salo/back pig fat (to give it some Ukrainian/Gogolesque flavor)
2 tbsp olive oil

First, if using salo, fry it for 10-20 minutes to make cracklings, until the fat is mostly gone. Or, feel free to use bacon if tracking down salo is too difficult.

When the cracklings are almost done, add the peas for a quick stir-fry. Remove from heat and set aside. Sauté the leek in the olive oil, in a heavy-bottomed pan. Add the pearl barley, mix it with the leeks, and sauté for a minute or two longer.

Start adding the stock one cup at a time, mixing well and letting it cook down before adding the next cup. Taste as you go. The perlotto should be ready in 25-30 minutes.

Turn off the heat, mix the cracklings and peas in with the barley mixture, cover and let the stand for 10 minutes.

Top with butter and grated parmesan when serving for the complete treat.

Serves 4.