A brief history of the Soviet restaurants
Today the trip to the restaurant for the Muscovite is not a holiday, and one of the ways to spend the evening of the restaurants, having lived through the early 2000s with their new Moscow cuisine in the form of Caesar salad and arugula with shrimp, finally found his face — chefs are experimenting with Russian cuisine, and visitors accustomed to a slightly bitter salad with seafood ceased to be the pinnacle of culinary thought. “Газета.Ru” tells the history of the Soviet restaurants.
Restaurant Renaissance began in Soviet Russia in the mid-20’s, with the advent of the NEP period, before this, of course, war communism and the civil war presupposed the existence of bourgeois institutions with tables, menus and a waiter.
But free trade is an opportunity to buy products from the peasants, thus reviving old institutions and opening new ones.
One of the first rose pub at the Kazan station in Petrograd, in 1924 became Leningrad, with its sawdust-strewn floors, salted rye croutons and excellent beer, which indulged in a more Yesenin.
In Moscow opened a restaurant “Astoria” with its rich room, decorated with stucco and gold leaf. The busy evening was held at “Slavianski Bazaar”, which has been to visit the local intelligentsia, long breathy wspominaja about sturgeon with mushrooms, meat soup and sauteed the potatoes in their skins.
Very popular restaurant “Strel’nya” with luxury glass-roofed winter garden inside.
In separate offices stood fountains and decorative grottos, decorated with live plants. The menu showed all the charm of Russian cuisine in the face of the maker of the tongue, pickled cucumbers, caviar and vodka.
Like weeds grow everywhere institutions with fancy names such as “Lame Joe” or “the Cricket on the hearth”.
The Soviet public catering is divided into two camps: the privileged unpretentious restaurants and canteens so eat outside the home could afford one.
Even if not all tasted sturgeon “royally” in the “Slavonic Bazaar”, but canteen bread with mustard and the ubiquitous inscriptions “Fingers and eggs in a saltcellar not” know, probably, everyone. The authorities tried to combine the bourgeois approach to gastronomy and entertainment with the Soviet principle of accessibility and equity, having such a controversial result.
However, the happiness did not last long, and in 1931 the whole catering turned into a closed institution card supplies. The quality of the food in the dining halls depended on the social status of visitors. Cutlery for the party nomenclature and the creative unions was equal to the restaurants continued to feed fine food. In the novel “the Master and Margarita,” describes a closed institution at Massolit. Bulgakov writes about the perch and the thrushes with truffles is, of course, satire, but in that joke was the truth.
But in the mid 30’s rationing system was abolished, and the restaurants and cafes began to open again for all.
Hence originated the legendary institution with a long history. Once Petersburg has captured the sweet smell of pastries and coffee in the cafe “North” with the white porcelain bears a blue-and-green interior. After the war it was renamed the restaurant “North”, but the queue for cakes less than this: even in the 70s, a guest from the capital come here for the eclairs and coffee eclairs though is sometimes not enough.