Café Pushkin

Café Pushkin

Moscow, Russia

A Moscow institution on Tverskoy Boulevard, open since 1999, designed to evoke a 19th-century Russian apothecary and library. The menu covers pre-revolutionary Russian cuisine, but the cold appetizer section includes a zakuski spread with kolbasa platters, and the kitchen draws on the full tradition of Soviet-era comfort food. Doktorskaya appears as part of meat assortments and buterbrod. The three-story building has a pharmacy aesthetic on the ground floor, a library room on the second, and a rooftop café. Foreign visitors call it the most theatrical dining room in Moscow, which is fair. The food holds up.

Click to activate map

Sausages served here

Doktorskaya Kolbasa

Doktorskaya Kolbasa

Moscow, Russia

The sausage of the Soviet Union. Doktorskaya Kolbasa (Doctor's Sausage) was created in 1936 under a government directive to produce a nutritious food for people recovering from illness, specifically those whose health had been ruined by tsarist deprivation. The name was not ironic. The People's Commissariat of Food Industry wrote the original GOST recipe: beef, pork, eggs, milk, salt, sugar, a touch of nutmeg and cardamom. No fillers. No fat scraps. A pale pink log of emulsified protein, smooth as paste, sold by the kilogram from behind glass counters in state gastronoms across eleven time zones. Every Soviet citizen ate it. Most ate it often. It was cheap, always available, and tasted of nothing offensive. Sliced cold on buttered black bread, it fed workers, schoolchildren, and pensioners alike. Decades of nostalgia are baked into every bite for anyone who grew up in the USSR or its successor states.

cookedemulsifiedrussian