11 July 2012 - Foraging for Food

My local grocery store

["Hungry like the wolf" by Duran Duran, of course]

Once I moved into my apartment here, and particularly since there were not many of the basics like spices or cooking oil, it was quite urgent to go out and find food.  How difficult could it be, right?

Well, quite difficult, as a matter of fact.  I live on Tverskaya Street, which has a lot of good, high-end shopping, but that doesn't tend to make storefronts reasonably priced for something like a grocery store that requires a lot of space.  I had seen one place about a block away that had plastic sheets in the window with pictures of fresh fruits and vegetables, so I thought that might be a good place to start.

Well, not really.  It was more like a mini-mart.  There were a few limited things and I did find some cooking oil, but I gave up on finding the things I would need for a real meal and bought a frozen pizza that, thank goodness, was German (Dr. Oetker's) and had preparation instructions in German as well as in Russian, thank goodness.  (The fact that my oven didn't really work as one would expect it to is beyond the scope of this story, but suffice it to say it was not a good pizza experience.)

I had heard that there was a gourmet market in a kind of department store called TSUM (I may be spelling it incorrectly, but you get the idea).  There was, but it was very tiny and ridiculously overpriced.  An expat colleague at the office mentioned that he had paid about $8 for three strips of bacon.  Good bacon, to be sure, but not quite that good.  Not being a bacon eater, I'm not sure how overpriced that is, but it seemed crazy.  That said, if I haven't mentioned it before, everything's crazy expensive here, so why should food be any different?

I finally asked my administrative assistant if she could do a search on the internet or something to see if there was a grocery store somewhere in my neighborhood.  She found one that was apparently in the basement of an underground (so I guess the lowest of all basement floors?) mall next to Red Square.  Okay....  It took me two visits of wandering around the malls to find the place, primarily as there were no directory signs that I could find that would help me figure this out.  The place ended up being nearly outside of the building and in a kind of dark and shady area, but in I went.  It approximated a more normal kind of grocery shopping experience, but again, on a very small scale.  I was able to buy some milk, pasta, spices, etc.

This was where I encountered the fruit and vegetable stand procedures.  Unlike in the US where you just put whatever you want into a bag and may need to somehow weigh and tag things, in Russia there is someone in the produce area assigned to do this for you.  I didn't realize this.  There was some immediate, um, "feedback," when I started picking up fruit.  Finally figured it out.  There are some things that are already pre-packaged into saran-wrapped styrofoam trays if you're in a hurry, but hard to gauge the quality of the items in the packaging.

What was odd at this particular produce area is that I couldn't find any onions.  None.  Hmmm....  This required me attempting to communicate with the produce lady, who already seemed disinclined to help me since I clearly didn't know the applicable produce rules.  But I tried all sorts of things, including acting like I was crying, to try to get through that I needed onions.  Nope.  No deal.  I ended up having to go to TSUM and paying something ridiculous like $5 for two small onions.  Seriously?

About a week after this, the same colleague who had purchased the overpriced bacon mentioned that there was an old school grocery store a few blocks up the street.  Hmmm....  So I checked it out.  That would be the place pictured in the photo above.  It is just gorgeous.  Crazy high ceilings, stained glasswork (like Tiffany rather than like a church) towards the top, gigantic chandeliers, a large oval area in the center for meats and cheeses (like produce, there isn't self-selection here - all custom-cut for your needs) and an odd little nook where they have alcohol and souvenirs, which I guess somehow are supposed to go together?  It's still a bit overpriced compared to the place without onions, but it's better than TSUM, has a pretty good selection, and it's only about a seven minute walk from home.

One side of the vodka aisle

There is, however, one really large supermarket.  American-style, I might say.  It's called Karusel (or something like that) and is connected to a rather nice mall called Metropolis.  It has a lot of personal care products that I recognize (although no Elmex toothpaste, I'm sad to say) as well as home cleaning products that I also recognized.  I was reminded that I was still in Moscow, though, when I came across a long aisle that was nothing but vodka on both sides (well, and one small section for energy drinks).  I guess this is perhaps like the equivalent of the Diet Coke aisle of the same length that we'd have in any US supermarket....