VEGETABLE SOUPS
Once the non-meat option, now rich and savoury.

BREAD & PANCAKES
Revolutions have been fought and won about less.

MEAT & POULTRY
The finest dishes of world cuisine bear Russian names.

BEER & TEA
The beer is getting better, the tea has always been good.

food, drink

Like almost every major city in modern Europe, St Petersburg offers a great range of culinary services from fine dining to fast food. The shortages of Communist times are a thing of the past.

Some of the cuisine - Italian, French, Chinese, Indian, etc. - is safely familiar but it would be a shame to leave without tasting local specialties. Russians like their food strong in flavour and rich in ingredients. If it's salty it's very salty. If it's sweet, it's often cloying. For those with waistband issues, the answer is small portions.

When the centre of Russian power moved to St Petersburg in the 18th century, Moscow became the focus of Russia's dolce vita. The old capital was where nobles devoted all their time to the pleasures of dining and chattering. Meals were an important part of aristocratic life in the provinces, too, where there was little else to do that suited the dignity of the wealthy.

But Moscow celebrated its food with quantity rather than sophistication. The restaurants of St Petersburg had to meet the demands of government officials, intellectuals, officers and foreigners on relatively modest incomes. Their cuisine was more democratic and international than elsewhere in the Russian Empire.

VEGETABLE SOUPS
The oldest specialties are foods eaten before Easter in the period of Lent. A complete fast during these 40 days was not feasible for those who had to work, but religion could be combined with economy in the form of non-meat dishes.

This was the origin of Russia's renowned vegetable soups. Borscht is the most familiar. It is eaten throughout Europe and contains beans, cabbage, carrots, cucumber, potatoes, onions, tomatoes and mushrooms, but the key ingredient in the Russian soup is beetroot, which imparts its rich red colour. Outside Lent, meat or at least stock was often added. Today it almost always is.

Less familiar but perhaps more typically Russian is shchi soup, made of cabbage and other winter vegetables. Meat can be added to this, too, but it is less common to do so. Both beetroot borscht and cabbage shchi are usually served with soured cream or smetana.

BREAD AND PANCAKES
Soups were eaten with bread. Baked in various shapes, bread has had great religious significance in Russian peasant rituals.

Other Lenten foods were pies, porridges and pancakes, as well as fish and mushroom dishes. For thin pancakes, served with a variety of toppings, English uses the Russian word bliny.

A popular kind of non-Lenten soup is solyanka. This is thick and sour, made of fish or meat but also containing pickled cucumber and often cabbage and salted mushrooms. It too is usually eaten with smetana.

MEAT AND POULTRY
If you see "cutlet" on a Russian menu, it's probably a mistranslation of the word kotlety and what you'll get is meatballs. The main ingredients are pork and beef but sometimes they are made of chicken or fish. Freshly prepared they are delicious, if not perhaps what you were expecting.

Pelmeni is the Russian variant of Italy's ravioli, except that the ground meat contents are wrapped in a thin dough, not sandwiched between squares of pasta. The filling is usually pork, lamb, beef or a mixture. They weren't copied from Italy but from the peoples of the Urals and Siberia.

Veal Orloff, Beef Stroganoff and Chicken Kiev, the other great dishes of Russian cuisine, are not Russian traditions but were devised in the 18th and 19th centuries, the first at least by a French chef. However, Orloff was a Russian prince and Stroganoff was a distinguished Russian family so their pedigrees are assuredly Russian.

Kiev is of course now the capital of Ukraine but the dish, of boned chicken breast, is said to have been invented in St Petersburg.

BEER AND TEA
The traditional Russian beer is kvass, although it would be better translated into English as small beer because the alcohol content is so low. It is made by the natural fermentation of wheat, rye or barley bread, and is a muddy brown colour. Russians have been brewing it for over a thousand years.

Unlike the low-alcohol beers of the west, kvass is still popular and actually enjoying something of a revival. It is often flavoured with fruit and herbs. Children like it.

In the 20th century, the alcoholic beer was horrible, and beer imports into Russia soared after the fall of communism. The world's leading brewers then followed their products east, taking over and modernizing local breweries. Beer made in Russia is now of a high standard and is successfully and widely exported.

But the top drink is black tea, introduced to Russia from China in 17th century. Russia is still one of the biggest tea consumers and importers in the world. St Petersburg's great founder, Peter the Great, tried to introduce coffee but that was one idea that didn't really catch on.