Eastern European Food

Last month, during a short business trip to Sweden, I visited Stockholm’s venerable Östermalms Saluhall, a food market operating since 1888. While the historic hall is currently closed for renovation, the market…

After all my years of trying them at restaurants and reporting on them in these pages, I sure hope you know what pelmeni are. One of Russian cuisine’s most famous dishes, eaten…

Everybody knows what a bagel is, but what about a bialy? “It’s like a bagel without a hole,” will say people who’ve had one. And these people have a point: bialys are generally…

This is one of my recurring ramblings: why do we see so little shellfish in Russian restaurants outside of Russia? Oh sure, you can have seafood fettuccine, lobster bisque, snails in garlic sauce,…

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…

Steelhead season on the Salmon River was rather slow this year. A little bit like deer season, come to think of it, a consequence of two consecutive cold winters. Considering that I…

It all begins about 20 years ago in Moscow. There aren’t that many noteworthy restaurants in the Russian capital yet. I don’t know if Pizzeria San Marco, on the Arbat, really counts as…

Over the past decade or so, kefir, a kind of cultured milk sometimes described as a “tangy milk smoothie,” has gained popularity and conquered the shelves of American supermarkets. “Probiotic,” the labels…

It all started with Irina Chadeyeva’s Vypechka po GOSTu, a compilation of Soviet era baking hits, from the Kiev cake to the kartoshka (each of which I’ve encountered here and here, respectively).…

I thought I’d written everything one needs to know about varenyky. I’ve prepared the Ukrainian dumplings with potatoes, cabbage, butternut squash, and artichoke. I’ve eaten them at countless restaurants reviewed on these pages, I’ve…