The MagazineSlow FoodChristopher Caldwell, American abroadApr 18, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 30
• By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
 The squat old lady standing in the entrance to the café in Saint Petersburg was blowing cigarette smoke out of her nose. She had thick glasses and gave off an air of running the place. In fact, she gave off an air of having run it since the Brezhnev era. I had missed lunch and was starving. I asked her if the restaurant was open. She said, “Da.” I asked her if she had solyanka—a Russian soup that I like to order because . . . em . . . well, because it’s about the only thing I know how to order in Russian. When she said, “Da” again, I had to go in; I would have been jerking her around otherwise.  Zach Franzen She shouted two words at the young man behind the bar. One was solyanka. The other must have been the Russian word for lamebrain. He disappeared into the kitchen. She, meanwhile, put a bottle of water on the table where she’d just seated me and stepped behind a door. I heard her mounting a staircase, and I didn’t see her again. Suddenly I was all alone in this overheated, silent café at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, listening to the tap drip. It was an experience I have had dozens of times, but not in many years—that of dashing into a place for a quick bite and realizing that your soup is going to be ready in 45 minutes, not 5. Saint Petersburg has been incompletely globalized. The city is full of matryoshka-doll and lacquer-box shops that serve to separate foreigners from their money, but it doesn’t otherwise exist to accommodate their whims. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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