Russia
Prepared Food
Russian Food
Russia
Meat
Meat
Russia
Meat
Russia
Recent visits to Yugo restaurants like Kafana left me craving more grilled meat. Something slightly different from my usual Caucasian and Central Asian kebab experiments, yet not completely unrelated — after all, the region was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. So this summer I decided to skip the trip to Buffalo and just make […]
Now that we’ve explored Dushanbe’s cultural attractions, we’ll head to the central market. Shah Mansur Bazaar, also called the Green Bazaar, is easy to find: it’s a bona fide landmark, alongside club Port Saïd and the beer factory. “The heartbeat of Dushanbe trade,” says Lonely Planet. In a city literally named after a market, expectations are high. […]
A note about my restaurant reviews: New York City counts many Eastern European restaurants scattered across the five boroughs, most of them ignored by restaurant critics and diners alike. I intend to visit as many as I can and report! Culinary gransploitation is trendy, this we know. With Babushka Café in Greenwich Village, the phenomenon is brought […]
Now back from a series of business and vacation trips, I’ve decided to do some belated spring cleaning in my social media accounts: I’ve officially stopped linking my posts on Pinterest. This probably shouldn’t affect you too much: chances are you didn’t even know I had a Pinterest account, and it’s never featured anything that you can’t already find […]
Bryndzové halušky can be called Slovakia’s national dish without too much debate. This dish of potato spaetzle/gnocchi topped with a sheep’s milk cheese sauce and fried bacon is available in every other Slovak restaurant, if not more. Halušky have their own songs (I’ll let you google them) and their very own festival, Halušky Fest in Turecká. The latter starts in […]
A note about my restaurant reviews: New York City counts many Eastern European restaurants scattered across the five boroughs, most of them ignored by restaurant critics and diners alike. I intend to visit as many as I can and report! “That’s it,” you must think. “He’s lost it. He’s reviewing some grubby pizza joint in the […]
I’ve said in the past that if you want to avoid crowds, the Monday after Thanksgiving is a good day to fish on the Salmon River. Well, here’s another quiet day to go fishing in the area: Mother’s Day. Real sentimental, those fishermen! Come the second Sunday of May, they leave their fishing rods in the […]
Dushanbe, population 778,500, capital city of Tajikistan. Our final stop on a journey that didn’t quite go as planned, before we cross the border back to Uzbekistan. “Dushanbe” means Monday in Tajik, allegedly because it started as a small village hosting a popular market on Mondays. When the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic was created in 1929, the metonymy was replaced […]
Spring has now sprung in earnest, but tell me, what foods can possibly mark the beginning of spring in a world where you can buy bad strawberries all year round, and even the wild mushroom trade has turned into a global business in which countries from both hemispheres take turns replenishing that supply of morels and chanterelles at […]
I’ve been hunting waterfowl on Lake Ontario about once a year for three years now, and of all my formative hunting trips, these are probably my favorite. These outings have also resulted in a couple of posts on these pages. First the Wild Duck and Goose Rillettes over two years ago, where I briefly narrated my first business encounter […]