I remember when Russian haute cuisine was a 10 letter word: mayonnaise.
When the first “Western” pizzeria opened in my home town of Murmansk around 1994, its house specialty certainly looked like pizza: a slick flatbread baked in a giant rectangular pan and sliced into plate sized squares. I queued for ages to get my hands on the exotic, golden topped pie. But when I bit into it, instead of a the expected stringy wisp of cheese pulling away from my lips, the baked filmy top layer broke and sour milky smegma crammed into my mouth. The topping was not cheese. It was BAKED MAYONNAISE!
Every post-Communist Russian household used to be crammed full of empty mayo buckets. Yes, buckets. But no one knows how it came to be that way. It’s not like mayo used to be banned or anything. Or that it was the symbol of freedom.
Anyway, all that will soon be a thing of the past, according to the Guardian.
In an article headlined “From Russia With Lovage” (well, I liked it!) the paper reports that a recent Moscow organic food fair attracted a massive 12000 people over one month!
Er, wait a second…
That’s a whopping 0.75% percent of Russia’s richest city, home to at least 30,000 dollar millionaires.
Judging by some of the maximally obnoxious characters interviewed in the piece as arbiters of the new gastroboom, I’m kind of glad that it’s going nowhere fast. Better to die with dignity than subject yourself to this kind of nonsense.
One restauranteur actually said the following:
“I don’t do cafeteria food. After all, Tchaikovsky didn’t promote folk dancing, he wrote opera and ballet.”
I feel like I’ve just swallowed a tub of baked mayo!
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