Saturday, February 28, 2009

Some more local food: the zakuski.

Time to revisit one of my favorite topics: the local food. This time, I will talk about what I should have talked in the first place: the zakuski, which mean "starters", or "hors d'oeuvre" for the posh and the French.
My entire blog could be about zakuskis, because Russians have a lot of them. Almost as many as soups. Here are my favorites so far. And I will probably stick to these ones, because I am tired with experimenting with new food by trial and error.

The "blini c ikroy" (that's pancakes with red caviar): a reliable starter. It goes well with vodka, although the pancake is not required.


The raw salmon plate: this is very common around here. They actually have several types of salmon, but don't ask me differentiating them... (Once again, if you want more exhaustive accounts about Russia, I recommend you to expand your reading material beyond this blog). This salmon goes well with a good white wine. No need to recommend a specific wine, you'll have to go with whichever wine is available (very possibly the one that is slightly more expensive than the one you meant to order).


The fish plate: again, you'll have to appreciate my minimalist approach when it comes to describe what's actually in the plate. There is salmon (or trout? here they have the same color) and two other fish. I can spot pretty precisely the lettuce and the lemon though. Well, anyway, it is tasty.


The assortment of meat: I can't say that one is my favorite. They always have beef tongue in this assotment plates. Tongue is actually very popular here, and the amount of tongue served in restaurants far exceeds the amount of all other pieces of beef combined. I haven't spotted cattle around Novosibirsk, but I suspect that they are genetically modified to have huge tongues and just a little of everything else. Still, the tongue is good with the horseraddish mustard.

Enjoy... Thanks for reading.
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1 comment:

Ian said...

These might be the first appetising pictures of Russian food that you've posted.