During the World Cup in the participating cities, the gastronomic festival "Welcome FoodBall Cup" will be held. On it tourists will get acquainted with the original cuisine of Russia with the help of the best chefs of the country.
"Caesar" against the "kalitok"
Russia is still looking for its own kitchen. It is given is not easy: she was too eager to copy the West, her agriculture is too shaky, the conditions for small business are too complicated. It is too oriented on the capital, which, trying to imitate other world cities, readily absorbed Chinese cuisine and pizzerias, and at the same time remained completely indifferent to the authentic cuisine of its own country. Who from living in Moscow knows what perepechi? What pancakes are called "pachat"? What «kalitka» is not only the door in the fence? What is a rapana, is it possible to find them in Russia and where to look? What do they eat in the «poznoy»,, in the end?
The answers to these questions are scattered over the cafes and kitchens of Russian cities. All these dishes - not some kind of expensive curiosity, the usual food, which the housewives prepare at home every week. And the cooks are not like in rare restaurants - in numerous canteens for hard workers.
But how to find them for tourists, because he does not even know what to look for? Not everyone dares to poke a finger at an unfamiliar graph on the menu or will want to ask the waiters about the old recipes.
Owners of cafes and restaurants do not hurry to promote such a product. Most often they prefer not to get involved. It is much easier to prepare a Caesar salad than to hope that a visitor chosen by a local person from the fruit rowan will choose it. Need soup? We will put borscht, and lagman the tenth item we will write. Dessert will go cheesecake, and for a snack for beer garlic toasts. Everything is like everyone else, but it is reliable and economically profitable.
"In regional restaurants, they are afraid to introduce new positions in the menu," confirmed Ekaterina Shapovalova, author of the project "Gastronomic Map of Russia." - Salad "Caesar" - the leads . When we come and invite them to create new interesting dishes for some event within the framework of local traditions, they seem to be ready, but then refuse. Exceptions can be found in Moscow, St. Petersburg and among rare singles such as the Krasnodar chef Andrew Matyukha, who won the Russian stage of the prestigious world culinary competition Bocuse d'Or last year. "
Another thing is great events and festivals under the control of the state. Here you can take a chance. The FIFA World Cup, which starts in a month in eleven cities across the country, is a good way to introduce local and foreign tourists to all the diversity of Russian cuisine.
The oppression of the kulebyaki
Telling the cheerleader about gastronomy is not an easy task. Not everyone will go to an expensive restaurant, and the one who rented an apartment, maybe, in a cafe will not look into one either. Food on the street is another matter. The organizers of the festival "Welcome FoodBall Cup" prefer the term "street food", and not "fast food", because "street" (translated from English "street") does not speak about the quality of food, but only about its location. Yes, it can be bought on the street. But unlike fast food, which implies fast and cheap food, which is often necessary to eat with your hands, street food can be anything - even a restaurant dish in a lunch box.
The easiest way would be to introduce the fans to the cuisine of the regions directly at the stadiums. Sell from trays echpochmaki and kalachi, provide spectators with buckwheat popcorn. But this is impossible. More precisely, it is very difficult. All stadiums at the time of the World Cup are like a "state in the state" and follow the rules of the International Football Federation. She announced a competition for catering to spectators at the stadiums. It was held in two stages. Even at the first company, it was necessary not only to develop a special menu for Russian and foreign fans, but also to present financial reports for three years, to confirm the experience of working with multi-day events on several sites simultaneously, to show that the company is capable of training more than five hundred temporary employees and so Further. The second stage of the tender is completely confidential.
As a result, only 15 catering companies participated in the right to feed the fans, and one subsidiary company , the "Chocolate Girl", won. It should provide about 400 power points in 12 stadiums in 11 cities participating in the World Cup. And only with VIP-guests it will help other companies. In the menu according to the rules should include Russian cuisine - the future organizers themselves call as an example kulebyaka. But it will remain "on the outskirts" of the menu, the basic food should be standard, so that the fan receives the familiar spectacle of the usual food.
Those local restaurants that want to experiment and surprise visitors with new facets of regional cuisine, are forced to stay outside the walls of the stadiums. And implement their projects there.
Let's get to the pen
That's why the idea of a gastronomic festival was born. How else to show the fans the diversity of Russian cuisine, if all the stadium food is entirely given to the power of one company?
And to show is that. Together with the chefs of various restaurants, specialists from the "Gastronomic Map of Russia" project created "new-old" dishes: such traditional forms with fresh content.
For example, bun. The hero of Russian tales of the cook Suzdal from the restaurant "Beehive" is baked from potatoes, stuffing with stewed Vladimir goose. Chefs from the Saransk "Mordovian farmstead" offer pacha burgers from traditional thick Mordovian pancakes. By the way, they were invented by Ekaterina Shapovalova during the work of the project "The Gastronomic Map of Russia", asking the cooks to replace in ordinary burgers rolls with sesame seeds for pancakes. And after a couple of days, the FIFA commission in Saransk has already tried "modern Mordovian streetfood ".
In the new form will appear classical Moscow and Murom kalachi. Now they are almost forgotten, but in Russia they have been known since the XVI century and have firmly entered the popular speech. "Kalach was prepared from a good wheat flour, which was rubbed for a long time - hence the expression" grated kalach ", says Kirill Kryzhin, the founder of the bakery Kalachi Muscovites. - Our kalach is also "grated", we recreated the original recipe, but with a modern interpretation: we have a filling, and in the kalach we add a special starter to make the dough more airy. So kalach is better than this filling soaks and becomes tastier. "
Traditional kalachi shape similar to weights. They stood decent, so that not all were available. The rich buyer kept the weight for the handle, which he then threw away. Beggars were thrown at her, "those who reached the pens."
Many such stories can be found at the festival. And besides, try the "koryushku" , Samarskie crawfish, cakes of the oldest St. Petersburg production "North",with Black Sea - barbulyu, a "kurnik" in the form of a soccer ball and much more.
"As the world and Russian experience shows, gastronomic festivals attract the benevolent attention of the public to the territories of the holding," said Oleg Safonov, head of the Federal Agency for Tourism. "This festival will help overcome false stereotypes about Russia as a country whose gastronomic delights are limited to pancakes, caviar and borshch, and show the true wealth and diversity of cuisine in the Russian regions."
Conducting in each city a large multi-day festivals would be difficult and expensive. Therefore, they were made mobile.For a whole month 11 specially created auto plant GAZ -autotrailers will travel to the cities that host the World Cup matches. In each city, they will linger for exactly one day, plowing their auto-counters as a modern embodiment of traditional bazaars. The route will start in Sochi on June 15, and will end in St. Petersburg on July 14. Organizers hope that after the end of the tournament their ideas will not be lost, but will become recognizable gastrobrands of their cities.
Calendar of festivals «Welcome FoodBall Cup»:
June 15 - Sochi
June 17 - Rostov-on-Don
June 21 - Nizhny Novgorod
June 28 - Kaliningrad
July 6 - Kazan
July 8 - Saransk
July 10 - Samara
July 14 - St. Petersburg
