Best Vegetarian Restaurants in St. Petersburg and Moscow

Natural food stores all smell the same – vaguely of herbs and essential oils, a bit of Indian spice. If you walk into one, you’ll readily identify the scent. I always had this thing when I was traveling for work: seek out the natural foods store when I felt like I needed a touch of home. Or, at least, a touch of something familiar, something that was decidedly not fried or an unidentifiable meat. Something that united me with people far from my little Northern California nest.

Here, in St. Petersburg and Moscow, the vegetarian restaurants (all two that I’ve found, though I hear there is one other in Moscow) have that same smell. I keep going back to them. After all, it’s hard to find yummy salads and dhals in the meat-and-starch-centric cuisine of Russia. I mean, even the veggies in my airplane dinner came with a hefty slab of turkey lunch meat (what I think was turkey, anyway) folded across the top.

I expect it will become harder still to find good fresh green food as I travel eastward to Baikal, and then into Mongolia, where, I hear, the diet is primarily milk, mutton, and vodka. I will take what I can get now.

Before I discovered these restaurants, I was mainly eating at Tyremok, the Russian fast food restaurant that makes a nice cheap blini on just about every corner, and a bread, cheese, apple combo at the hostel.

As if we didn’t already know, all starch and no green makes Coco an unpleasant person. Also, it makes her a sick person – I have an annoying head cold, which was perhaps brought on by the sudden lack of green smoothies for breakfast, or otherwise the super smoky bar where the St. Petersburg CouchSurfing meet-up was held. (All bars and restaurants here are smoky, ps, which means I do a lot of eating at the hostel and the park.) Pleasantly, the vegetarian restaurants are smoke-free.

The Best Vegetarian Restaurant in St. Petersburg, Russia

Adi Vegetarian Restaurant, at 36 Gorkhova Ulitsa in St. Petersburg, is also probably the only veg restaurant in St. Petersburg, but whatever, it’s still really good. It’s a cafeteria style service, pay-by-the-portion ground floor vegetarian restaurant. I’d heard about the place from the Syrian guy at the hostel – when he’s living in Russia, he says, he doesn’t eat meat.

It took me three tries to get there – I was sidelined once by rain and once by the distance – but when I did, I wished desperately that I’d known about this since the beginning. Tyremok, that Russian fast food place, makes a fine cheap blini with sour cream, but like I said, nothing compares to the smell of turmeric and coriander stewing.

I had the lentil (or maybe mung bean) dhal, kasha (cooked buckwheat), and a sautee of cauliflower, potatoes and carrots. They also offer vegan smoothies with carob and banana, though they were out the day I went.

The restaurant seems to have taken the place, so to speak, of the now-closed Hare Krishna restaurant. While it doesn’t say it’s such, the cook staff is half young guys with circular patches shaved into their heads. George Harrison and Gandhi watch diners from their framed perches on the walls, and Snatam Kaur was playing on the stereo. I admit it, I loved it.

So maybe the big secret to finding the best vegetarian food is figure out where the Hare Krishnas are cooking or eating.

The Best Vegetarian Restaurant in Moscow, Russia

Right around the corner from the Hare Krishna space in Moscow is Jagannath, at 11 Kuznetsky Most Ulitsa, a store, café and cafeteria-style restaurant decked out in Indian décor and flavors. It doesn’t seem to have any connection to the Hare Krishnas, but if I were them, I’d walk down the street for this food. It comes well-reviewed just about everywhere, and it didn’t disappoint me.

The yellow lentil dhal soothed my aching head. (Funny that I hated Indian spices a year ago and now it has become my comfort food.) The spinach and paneer was creamy and satisfying, and best of all, green! My friend and I shared a pot of ginger tea, made with freshly shaved ginger, and I munched on a dried fruit and nut sweet for dessert.

The store at the front had eucalyptus essential oil, which is helping this cold go away fast. I have a train to catch, after all.

Both restaurants are cheap too, relatively speaking. I ate a hearty meal for under ten dollars at both places.