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| Lavka Lavka restaurant. Image |
Thinking back to our recent trip, were the sanctions clearly evident? .....
In Moscow, I didn't notice any particular differences. As for the trendy, hipster fad for locavore cooking; they might be getting good reviews but I didn't notice any such places. In fairness, though, this trend does appear to be limited to a handful of restaurants or bars named in articles [1, 2]. Not that my wife and I were ever likely to raise our standards above slumming it. That meant our usual, cheaper fast food of choice: Kroshka Kartoshka (baked potatoes with your choice of topping... i.e. with meat and/ or something drowned in mayo) or Teremok (mainly pancakes). Wherever the contents were sourced, foreign chains (e.g. McD****** or Kentucky Fried Crap) and international cuisine (the widespread Italian and Japanese restaurants) also seemed as popular as ever.
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| Russian, fast, inexpensive food and English, good grammar. |
As for the shops, we didn't notice anything really different there either but, then again, we weren't specifically searching for produce from the US or EU. I guess that's typical of most people's shopping process... 'those pears look nice, I'll get some' rather than 'let me look for items from a certain place'. Moreover, on getting to Siberia in wintertime, it's more a case of whatever gets through undamaged. If anything, the opening of a branch of a large chain of supermarkets had, by virtue of one shop, single-handedly increased the range of fruit and veg in the city. Friends, though, lamented the closure of the local branch of Azbuka Vkusa (The ABC of Taste, the Waitrose of Russian supermarket chains, basing its appeal on a wide range of exotic produce... either price or the diminished range of available items leading to its demise in the town). Siberian supermarkets in winter were pretty much the same as they ever were: the 'Dutch cheese', which we realistically knew had never set foot in the Netherlands (not that cheese can set foot anywhere), was just as rubbery; the sausage still came from the city's factory (and was still probably the main solution to the city's stray cat and dog problem); and the western-named products were still presumably made under licence explaining why Guinness was still like piss in Siberia and brands such as France's Bonduelle were on the shelves.
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| Sanctions? What sanctions? Source |
If anything, relatives in Moscow seemed to take pride in the Russian-made alternatives such as a blue cheese as unpalatable any anything in the UK. They took even greater pride in sticking two fingers up to the West: Russia had new trade agreements, such as satsumas from Morocco, which would surely continue after sanctions had finished and to the West's detriment; Russian ingenuity had defied 'the West's sanctions' (actually Russia's ban but who cares, it was still a 'f*** you' to America and the EU) by simply relabelling boxes of fruit from the EU or bringing it in via Belarus.
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| Who knows where the kiosk's fruit & veg comes from... |
It's hard to know what next. There doesn't to be a particular impact of Russian sanctions for the Russian people. Perhaps for the EU, the tit-for-tat sanctions may turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory given the loss in trade (€100bn cost of the EU's own sanctions on Russia alone; $½bn worth of trade lost because of Russian sanctions on the West). It may also force Russia to work harder to achieve its long-held aim of being self-sufficient in terms of feeding the country by 2020.
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| Missing out? |
Being cynical, though, it's worth noting that the sanctions only ever applies to certain foods: it never included western drinks. I suspect that banning alcohol imports might've been a step too far... no Czech beer, Spanish wine, French cognac or Scottish whiskey? I think not.
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| Not off the menu. |
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