It seems that Petersburg is losing its reputation as a serial remover – it is replaced by the reputation of a serial poisoner. Ninth grade students from at least six schools poisoned in a restaurant in the city center with the beautiful name Grand Bianco. Canals, bridges, tourists swim in boats. The children were also supposed to sail the next day after the feast, but they had no luck: they fell ill, the ships turned up empty.
restaurant four years ago already poisoned peoples. There was a high profile story, Rospotrebnadzor intervened and then 65 kilos of expired product was confiscated. But the restaurant did not go anywhere: it changed its signage. It was Dizzi, it became Grand Bianco. The manager remains the same. The restaurant continued to increase its turnover: after the current poisoning of schoolchildren, already 220 kilograms of expired products were seized. Including ready meals that were not sold on time.
Our city is amazing. Once upon a time Petersburg was considered the capital of cheap good canteens. The image of the eatery, where you can eat quickly and cheaply in a pleasant interior, seems to have come from here. Networks of such organizations first appeared here. Later, the price of the city rose and it began to regularly take the first place in the ranking of the most expensive cities. Canteens began to deteriorate before our eyes, menu prices increased. Today, the modern and affordable place format where you can eat with peace of mind has disappeared. Petersburg canteens are as expensive as the average cafe, even by Moscow standards. The city has become so expensive, it has become dangerous to raise prices in restaurants: people will stop going. And already at the height of white nights, there are many half-empty establishments on weekday evenings on restaurant street Rubinshteina. My daughter and I wandered around the center on the eve of City Day: in restaurants to avoid crowds of tourists and overcrowding. Where do tourists eat? They’re probably buying something from the store and snacking on the bench. For example, on the benches on the way from the subway to the Russian Museum, neat-looking people with kefir, donuts are more and more often found: they sit, they eat. Since eating in canteens is now very expensive, the format of good affordable canteens has now remained in regional centres. There are many of them in Pskov, in Veliky Novgorod. They disappeared in Petersburg.
This is a local feature. And all of Russia has another problem: any public food service is trying to reduce the cost of meals. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that this is a universal human disease. The harmful spirit of capitalism. Capital wants to buy low and sell high – we all remember that.
But in Russia it looks like this in practice: one evening a hundred people were poisoned. Sent to the freezer until better times, patties, salmon steaks, green bean mashed soups: they’re not sold – maybe in a week someone else will order it.
It has always been like this. I lived near the Hermitage ten years ago and regularly passed by the most expensive restaurants and hotels. He was working late, so sometimes it was almost night time. As the city fell asleep and tourists crammed into hotel beds, restaurateurs brought food into the kitchens. What I’ve never seen in my two years in the city center: The Italian chain of pizza restaurants was given milk and instant dough with the Dixie logo! In a large restaurant on Nevsky – cheap tomato paste and Makfa pasta. And in the summer, frozen fruit is delivered to a nearby vegetarian restaurant, from where desserts are prepared and sold seasonally.
I also saw something very bad: The hotel where Obama stayed at the G20 summit in 2013 was loaded with frozen meat that looked suspicious at night. This information then cost me dearly: I was running after midnight, and on the way back, exactly a hundred meters from the police cordon, an evil-looking citizen attacked me with a knife near the house. I ran away from it. But now I know a little more about the domestic cuisine of expensive enterprises.
By the way, this is not a Russian problem. When I was young I lived in London and worked as a waitress. At an expensive central Indian restaurant, I saw how they fry rice with used cooking oil that was taken through the back door to a nearby McDonald’s. A Moroccan restaurant bought candies from the market. At night, the restaurants had packages of tenpence beans with tomatoes bought from TESCO supermarkets: in the morning they had to imitate real English breakfasts for tourists. In London, things are probably worse: the system did not provide any invoice from the restaurateur of where and what he bought, no one was interested, so they themselves went to the market and cheap Lidl. The Sanepidnazor wasn’t supposed to be like that either.
A health inspector came to the restaurant where I worked once. He said there will be a check up soon and we left surveys for employees. Control, “What would you do if you woke up in the morning with SARS symptoms?” It consisted of answering such questions at home. or “What would you do if you saw a mouse in the kitchen?” Then the answer options were presented: “I will call the chief”, “I will catch and kill myself”, “I will call the sanitary inspectorate”. How to say, none of us knew. Many of my classmates also worked part-time in food service and told terrible things. One, for example, worked in a deli format: it’s often like a small shop selling rare items in a restaurant – truffles, handmade pasta, good olives by weight, cold cuts. He sold Parma ham and other delicacies. I cut it on a large miter saw and stuffed it into bags. Everything was sold by weight through the cash register. At the end of the shift, the manager weighed the leftovers and took them to the kitchen, where they were used to make soup and scones. At the same time, my friend had to argue with the Brit: she explained to him that during the day moisture evaporates from the thin parts, and therefore they are lighter. But the citizen, who had just graduated from school, was sure that his vendors were eating ham themselves.
I also worked in such an institution, in an Italian restaurant chain, its name was Carliccio’s as far as I remember now. Everything was fine in our deli department, no one collected scraps: I sold a few dozen sodas, Parma ham, mortadella, cut them all with a special machine. I can’t say anything about quality and taste because I didn’t eat meat back then. Our chief was a Pole who fed Polish troops during the NATO war in Iraq. My duties included making coffee as well as cutting ham and selling prepared salads. In less than three months, I made coffee for Amy Whitehouse, Queen guitarist Brian May, and George Michael, who for some reason came to knit while waiting for their orders. Neither at this Italian chain, nor at other restaurants, or even at the catering company where I worked at aristocratic banquets attended by the queen, they didn’t just ask me for a medical book – they didn’t ask for a medical certificate or visa: only social security number and bank account information.
There were good times. However, after working for a London catering company, I did not eat in cafes and restaurants for a long time. I have developed an existential aversion to many over-the-top foods. And the real fear of poisoning: poisoning has already become part of their folklore, all over England.
By the way, in Russia it is still tolerable: they wear gloves, there is Rospotrebnadzor, and according to my observations, it is difficult to get poisoned in a cafe, especially in a restaurant. Yes, and a kind of protection against cunning was invented: unused tomato paste or cucumber, bought from the grandmother around the corner, can only be bought in a restaurant, bypassing many rules that not everyone will agree with. Yet we easily survived a pandemic. The Soviet Union was guilty of many things before us, but the system of sanitary and epidemiological surveillance left us a good legacy. And in the catering area – incl.
True, as they say, you need an eye and an eye. A little slack – everything falls apart. During the pandemic, a moratorium was introduced on unscheduled inspections of small and medium businesses. At first this did not affect: people tried to stay at home, they did not go to restaurants much. But in 2023, everything changed dramatically. The population is practically locked in the country, there are few tourist attractions for 150 million people, because many tourists visit St. Tens of millions of tourists travel to various cities of the country, a frenzied concentration of people – and there is still a moratorium on labor inspections. Why? Is this a sign that profit from the government is more important than quality? And how much did he save by admitting ninth graders from the six parallels to hospitals?
If the Grand Bianco restaurant knew it could receive notice of an impending inspection at any time, it wouldn’t be too concerned with the two-cent pileup of expired food, not counting the ninth graders—it wouldn’t pay to collect and store all that, especially considering its experience with food withdrawals in 2019. by keeping.
And maybe “Mr. Cider” was made with legal ethanol and given by all the rules, and again, if the owner were afraid of checks, he wouldn’t have bought stolen alcohol from somewhere in the warehouses.
I honestly don’t believe in a self-employed business. Especially the restaurant one.
Especially in a touristic city and during peak season, when restaurant operators know that poisoned people will not complain until they are seriously hospitalized: they have vacations, trips, the hotel is paid, they do not have time to go to the police . There is no honest business – only tight control. The words “don’t make it a nightmare” didn’t play a very good joke with Russia, because in keeping with the so-called overcrowded prisons by businessmen, they actually managed to reduce basic quality control. And here’s the result: dozens died from cider, six school graduates were poisoned in a restaurant. And who is bothering whom here?
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.