How to stick to a vegetarian diet

Stay alert. Cutting animal-derived products out of your own diet (colloquially, "meat," or meat plus fish plus eggs plus dairy) doesn't mean you can no longer go into a supermarket or order a tasty dish at the nearest café. Some people, on top of restricting where their food comes from, eat only "cold" food (heated no higher than 40-60 degrees), and still look lively and cheerful. The main thing is strategy.

Simple rules for surviving in the city

Always check what's in a dish. A visual once-over may not be enough. For example, pumpkin purée soup made with chicken stock is not a vegetarian dish, even though no pieces of meat float in it.

Vegetarian cafés

A safe bet here is to visit vegetarian cafés or cafés with a dedicated vegan menu (though some die-hard adherents believe that eating food cooked in the same kitchen/pan/blender as animal products is already karmically wrong). Obviously, in practically every establishment you can find fresh juices, a Greek salad or a fruit salad as a 100% vegetarian option, and sometimes a whole page of vegetarian dishes. If you'd rather act with a plan than trust to luck, here's where to go:

Miraya

"Miraya" at 26 Alekseevskaya Street (Dzerzhinskogo), eco-center site, café's own site. Part of a large conglomerate of Eastern practices (a school, a shop, a spa, a café, psychology courses, art, ethno-tourism). It grew out of the city's oldest yoga school ("Andrei Lobanov's School").

  • Inexpensive, filling lunches. Fast.
  • Fresh homemade sweets
  • A great selection of Chinese tea and tasty herbal blends
  • A nice interior, with a room for tea ceremonies

Noot.Toot

Noot.Toot at 15 Bolshaya Pokrovskaya Street, café site. "Falafel, hummus and all that." It started as a pop-up restaurant at every "Restaurant Day," then ran as a delivery service, and since May 2015 has been an independent café run by a nice bunch of young people. Elsewhere in the city you can get hummus at Franky bar, and falafel and sometimes vegetable soups at the meatball hipster spot Freakadely.

  • A rare-for-the-city lineup of Eastern-cuisine dishes based on chickpeas, eggplant and sesame
  • Reliably tasty presentation and proven quality

Del Para

"Del Para" — new address after its last move: Pochainska Street, 20 (café site).

  • A fairly large vegetarian menu in Indian style.
  • The rest of the ("meat") menu is light — mostly chicken or cheese.

Latino House Café

Latino House Café Zvezdinka Street, 24.

  • A varied and unexpectedly tasty vegetarian menu (spinach patties, for instance) A new place that opened where the bar Fidel used to be; it could easily close for lack of customers

Botanika

"Botanika" lunch bar at Minina Street, 5B (bar site). A mid-to-high-priced establishment with a certain, if modest, leaning toward green food that doesn't harm anything living.

Mate Club

"Mate Club" Rozhdestvenskaya, 40 (club site). Focused on drinking mate and on ethno-practices of every stripe. It does, however, serve some food. Note that at the entrance you're required to hand in your phone and any other devices into special storage lockers, so that nothing distracts from an unhurried stay on the club's premises.

  • Mostly sweet Amerindian-style dishes ("porridges") made with coconut milk, spices and dried fruit

Know-how

Get to grips with how "simple" products are made. For example, marmalade made with gelatin (an animal glue) is not the same thing as marmalade made with agar-agar (seaweed), and cheese or cottage cheese made using rennet is downright karmically terrible (how to read the ingredient labels on dairy products, and what dead young calves have to do with it). By the way, plenty of places advertise soy-milk coffee, but few actually offer it. You'll most often find it at Traveler's Coffee on Bolshaya Pokrovskaya Street.

To buy non-standard ingredients and make sweets, lemonades, smoothies and sprouts at home, you need to know not only the special vocabulary but also your own "in-crowd" suppliers.

Eco-product shops

Find the nearest eco-product shops and compare their prices on staples and the typical products of a vegetarian diet. It's not just greens. You'll find plenty of unusual porridges made from unheated grain; sweets made with carob, plus carob itself for cooking experiments; ingredients like chia seeds or poppy-seed urbech; nutrition bars, soy sausages, mushroom "cheese," spelt pasta and sourdough bread.

Miraya

See above

  • A wide selection of imported products such as muesli bars
  • Exclusive raw-food dry porridges made in Russia
  • A full range of accessories for a healthy lifestyle: from amulets to yoga-mat covers

Zhivoy Eco-Shop

"Zhivoy Eco-Shop" ("Living") at Piskunova Street, 24 shop site.

  • An exceptional range of household chemicals and cosmetics with a 100% natural composition.
  • A steady supply and wide variety of Altai herbs, medicinal blends and oils.
  • Great bags and items made of hemp fiber

Ayurveda

"Ayurveda" shop site. The city's largest chain of Vedic shops. The oldest branch is at Varvarskaya Street, 4. But there are also two on Bolshaya Pokrovskaya Street and several more around the city — one in every district.

  • A good selection of imported Indian spices and powders for cooking and medicinal use (for the stomach, kidneys, liver, etc.). If you've read about something online and don't know where to buy it, and the internet suggests "a pharmacy," then "Ayurveda" is the place.
  • Odd Indian cosmetics. Henna. Vedic accessories and books of unclear purpose.

Health Club

"Health Club" 8 Trudovaya Street. An almost underground spot behind the same door as a certain "Coral Club" (an international distributor network for healthy nutrition), in a new residential building. The shop is upstairs, Coral Club is downstairs.

  • The ancestral settlements bring them homemade grain bread, even made from "bio-grain."
  • There are raw-food lunches and a few tables, plus certain ready-made items on their own (cold soups, vegetable purées, etc. can be bought to take home).
  • Other products are pricier than at similar shops elsewhere.
  • Active participants in festivals and eco-markets, they often hold their own meetups and gatherings.

Coral Club products have to be ordered, but there's no denying they're beneficial. For example, you can easily buy acai juice.

BIO Products

"BIO Products" at Belinsky Street, 122. A fairly plain, repetitive range overlapping with the shops listed above. Only packaged goods, no fresh deliveries. Might be handy simply because of its location.

Bikram Yoga School

Bikram Yoga School at [Universitetsky Lane], 5A — specifically the "hot" branch of the wellness practice, school site — sells sports drinks made with coconut milk and similar products. You'll have to test their benefits on yourself, but they haven't turned up anywhere else.

Best of India

"Best of India" at / at Bolshaya Pokrovskaya Street, 29 opposite the The State Bank Building offers a range of edible and non-edible goods fully living up to its name (shop site).

  • Indian chips, spicy and extra-spicy
  • Indian sweets, for example authentic halva
  • Indian spices and cosmetics — an acquired taste

Don't forget

  • go to "healthy" festivals or take "green" weekends with three healthy meals a day (for example, to a surf camp on the Gorky Sea,
  • collect the contacts and business cards of every "good" producer of honey, bread, cheese or potatoes in the area (usually the ancestral settlements mentioned above, full list (archive) ),
  • grow your own food and cook it at home as often as possible.