What a week of eating looks like

Most food shopping happens in chain supermarkets within walking distance — Pyaterochka and Magnit at the cheap end, Vkusvill for a narrower, fresher range. Delivery is the part that surprises visitors: several services bring a supermarket order in fifteen to thirty minutes, in most large cities, for a small fee or none.

Eating out splits in two. Restaurants in Moscow and St Petersburg are expensive by local salary and often cheap by European standards. Alongside them the stolovaya survives — a canteen where you take a tray, point at what you want and pay by weight or by item. Office districts run on the business lunch: a set course at a fixed midday price.

After 2022 many foreign chains left and were rebought and renamed by Russian operators; the buildings and often the menus stayed. Imported products did not disappear so much as get more expensive and less predictable.