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The peculiarity of Russian ñuisine - a tasty lection in a restaurant
The history of Russian tsars cuisine
Gastronomie
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Russia's culinary traditions run from the daylong, table-crushing feasts of the 19th-century aristocracy to the cabbage soup and potatoes
on which generations of ordinary Russians were raised.
Your guide provides you information about restaurants of Moscow. You can try restaurants of various cuisines - from traditional Russian to Caucasian and Exotic. The restaurants are located in different parts of Moscow - you may choose any depending on the food you prefer and the most convenient place for you.
Russian tsars were gluttons, Russian emperors - gourmets.
The most ascetic among Russian monarchs was Alexei Mikhailovich the Quietest, the second tsar in Romanov dynasty. Foreigners coming to viist his court witnessed that the dinner table was always served up with simplest dishes accompanied by rye bread, a little bit of vine, oat based home-brewed beer, and sometimes simply by drinking water with a touch of cinnamon. During the fast Alexei Mikhailovich dined only three times a week - on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. The rest of the week his meal consisited of a slice of rye bread with salt, a pickled mushroom or a cucumber washed down with a glass of light beer. In short, few monks could match his fasting habits. His son, Peter I, had a more liberal approach towards food. He ate copiously and enjoyed it, although he still preffered simple dishes, for example - barely porrige with almond milk perfectly made for him by Catherine I. Among delicacies, Peter had weakness only for imported Limburg cheese. His court cook Felten often prepared boiled beef with cucumbers, jellied meats and sauerkraut soup, followed by turnip based dishes, pies, panckes, and curd tarts. Peter’s successors, both male and female, were not gourmets either, according to modern sense of this word. Elisabeth II liked «kulebyakas» (pies) with various stuffing, Anna Ioannovna - cold boiled pork, Catherine the Great preffered cold boiled veal with pickles, schi, and boiled buckwheat. Pavel I, the son of Cathereine the Great, stands a little bit apart from others in that respect. According to some witness accounts, his favourite dish was trout baked with mushrooms.
The story of royal culinary habits goes on pretty much on the same note - Alexander I liked beet-tops soup. Alexander III simply had a weakness for «common people» food (even his coronation dinner opened with barely soup). Even the last Russian monarch Nikolai II had rather moderate eating habits, except he had a passion for turtledove soup with noodles and his all-time favourite dish was sucking pig spiced with horseradish. In all other respects, his daily dinner menu was rather plain. The monarchs could afford modesty in their daily routine. First, they had an absolute freedom of choice - beet-tops soup or cold veal could have been substituted with the most exotic delicacies at any time. Secindly, they had to deal with delicacies on a regular basis anyway, as a part of their, so to speak , «royal duty» - during dinner parties, ceremonial receptions, and festive banquets. The feats given by Russian sovereigns were the ones that fit the definition «royal» in reference to meals - their scale simply had no match. In 16th century, a «standard» royal banquet consisted of 150-200 entries, and it wasn’t uncommon. During the reception in honour of the British Ambassador Carmel, Boris Godunov hosted a dinner with as many as 550 entries. The feasts thrown by Ivan the Terrible lasted six-eight hours. Each one was attended by 600-700 people. The record established during his rule was 2,000 Nogai nobles feasting at one time in the Kremlin palace. To list all the dishes served during royal banquets would have taken too much space. It is not a journalistic stock phrase - it took two and a half pages for a historian I.Zabelin to describe the menu of the Moscow Patriarch’s dinner party. Now, imagine the royal banquets - they were certainly more exuberant than the Patriarch’s...
A.K.Tolstoy left, probably, the best account of a royal feast in the novel «Prince Serebryany» (1874). Certainly, he couldn’t have attended Ivan the Terrible’s dinner personally, but his description is genuinely «delicious», and his atttention to historical details is unquestionalble. «A host fo servants, all dressed in velvet caftans of violet colour, embroidered with gold, stood before the tsar, bowed low and left in pairs to fetch the food. Soon they returned, carying gold trays with roasted swans, around two hundred in number... .... Servants, who previously wore velevet garments, now all appeared in brocaded dolman coats, stood before the tsar, bowed low left in pairs to fetch the food. Soon they returned, carrying gold trays with roasted swans, around two hundred in number... ....Servants , who previously wore velvet garments, now all appeared in brocaded dolman coats. This change of dress was one of the major features of royal dinners. First came the plates with galantines of wvarious kinds: then followed the cranes spiced with herbs, roosters tempered with pickled ginger, boneless chicken and ducks with cucumbers... After «uha», servants brought hazel grouse with prunes, geese with millet and grey hens with saffron... ....Giant fish caught in Sudyonoe Sea and sent to royal court from Solovetski monastery stirred the most curiousity. They were brought alive in huge wooden barrels: the journey took several weeks. The fish were so enormous they could hardly fit silver and gold trays carried into the dining hall by several men apiece....» His description is obviously close to reality. Indeed, swans were considered the best delicasy. They were served only at dinner tables of monarchs and nobles. Swans were prepared in a variety of ways - roasted or baked whole, with honey, saffron, and special sauce, accompanied with thick slices of kalatch (padlock-shaped white loaf). Russian monarchs were well known for their devotion to various fish dishes, especially taking into account the number of fasting days in the Russian ecclesiastical calendar. In the middle of XVII century, the royal court regularly spent an incredible amount of money - 100,000 roubles yearly - to buy fish for monarch’s kitchen. It’s worth mentioning, though, that the quality and exotic nature of the ‘ingredients» used in royal cooking in pre-Peter times didn’t necessarily guarantee the exclusive quality of the taste. Many noble foreigners complained about «aged» herons and «dry swans». In reality, «aged» herons were never served at royal banquets. Although, «dry» they might have been due to the peculiarities of the old-style Russian cooking. The lion’s share of hot dishes was prepared in traditional Russian ovens. The major methods of cooking were stewing , simmering, boiling and baking. Good for porrrige and soups, those methods were barely suitable for cooking meat or fish... 
Peter I revolutionized Russian cuisine. Tsar the didn’t leave even his kitchen unchanged. Despite the fact that during his rule the quests at his «assemblies» didn’t care much about the quality of food (his parties were notorious mostly for the variety and quantity of drinks consumed), the meperor still managed to cut ‘the window to Europe» for Russian cuisine, as well. And it is not surprising - as a saying goes, «you live and learn - from those you live with...» Peter’s closest entourage consisted mostly of foreigners. While the court stayed in Moscow, th etsar spent hardly less time in the German Quarter than in the Kremlin itself. There, Peter had all chances to get acquainted with dishes prepared «a la German style» - salads, pates, meat rissoles, meat loaf, potages - simply with everything that never existed in the traditional Russian cuisine. The only bad consequence of European influence on Russian eating habits was the transformation of the way the dishes were served. Instead of numerous changes, th «all-at-once» service was introduced - almost all dishes on the menu would crowd the table from the very start of a banquet. Consequently, the number of entries even during ceremonial imperial dinners had been significally reduced - there was simply no space left to put them! Lesser quantity, though, was compensated by better quality - the royal menu became more varied; garnish, salads, and complex sauces would normally accompany the main dishes. Besides, after a comparatively short period, everything came back to where it had started. And, as strange as it sounds, all thanks to a Frenchman - a famous cook Marie-Antoine Careme. He came to Russia in the beginning of the 19th century by the invitation of Prince Bagration. Soon he was hired by the imperial court. After getting a first look at Russian cuisine, Careme decided that its traditional way of serving dishes was much more logical and promising than the European way. He started actively promoting it - first in Russia, and then in his native France. Careme’s ingenuity was in reducing drastically the number of changes and switching between «heavy « dishes and «light» dishes in the course of a banguet. After gaining ground in France, «the Russian-style serving etiquette» quickly conquered the whole Europe and practically became the only way of serving food at ceremonial events, In this sense, Russian cuisine obviously influenced European gastronomic tradition.
Das Restaurantangebot der Stadt ist kaum überschaubar, ständig sind neue Lokalitäten angesagt, andere werden wieder geschlossen. Die Preise sind sehr unterschiedlich. Es gibt Gaststätten die der Unterhaltung dienen, Bars, Cafés, Nobelrestaurants, aber auch Fastfood-Ketten, Selbstbedienungsrestaurants und Kantinen.