There's an eating experience I have been wanting to relate, especially now that I sense that it may not last.
Down on Zagorodny Prospect a few minutes walk off Nevsky Prospect, is one of the few good blini (pancake) cafes left in St Petersburg.
Up and down the street expensive fur shops and others stacked to the ceiling with Japanese televisions and VCRs are encroaching, threatening this bastion of the old order.
Apart from the good, hearty food, the cafe -- known simply as "The Blini Cafe" -- encapsulates so much that is essentially Russian. Hearty food, functionalism with the barest regard for aesthetics and warm hospitality.
The routine is simple. Take a tray and line up at the kitchen hatchway. The handwritten menu is on the wall (in Russian only) beside it.
The view through the hatchway is Dante's Inferno: out-sized steaming pots on blackened grills so vast that the place must once have fed an army battalion. By some quirk of Soviet, or perhaps even tsarist, planning, the kitchen is disproportionately huge in relation to the dining area.
But from its bowels emerge a creditable cold borsch, and other Russian staples such as pelmeni and fried potatoes.
Salads including the ubiquitous Russian beetroot salad, and those featuring cabbage and salted fish. Also on offer are boiled eggs sliced in two and covered with mayonnaise.
Of course the central theme is the blini (pancake). They can be ordered savory with mushrooms, smetana (sour cream), or plain oil. Sweeter tooths can opt for apple sauce or honey.
After two years visiting the Blini Cafe I have recently mastered the art of wrapping the blini around a fork, rather than attacking it with bare hands under the unimpressed gaze of Russian friends.
Utensils are of the cheap aluminum variety -- forks and oversized spoons only. No knives, no teaspoons. They reveal one of the cafe's many glimpses to the old Soviet Union. Moulded into the back of each utensil is its retail price -- in kopecks -- like some monument to the country's former economic stability.
The woman at the cash-register invariably use her enormous, wooden abacus to add up your order's cost. (And why not, it's much simpler to use and more trustworthy than those new-fangled calculators).
One concession to the times is that most of the high, stand-up tables common to many Soviet cafes have disappeared -- which Leninist ideologue came up with the "cafe with no chairs" concept? They have been replaced by cheap but cheery pine tables and benches. Expect to share.
Old Russia-hands will read this review with some suspicion, instantly recognising that the combination of factors described so far is consistent with appalling rude service.
Surprisingly, the staff are magic. Only one of the kitchen-hands is slightly surly, though in the gentlest possible way -- and even she handles with grace my eccentric foreign habit of ordering smetana and apple sauce on the same blini.
Regrettably, prices have gone up. When I visited last week with a friend we paid a total of 18,700 roubles ($3.90) for two courses each with salads and drinks, with cocktails to follow.
"Cocktail" is the Russian word for "milkshake." Those at the Blini Cafe are sublime, but hard to drink by virtue of being so thick. Use a fork. (The huge spoons available won't fit in the glass).
Other drinks on offer include tea, and glasses of suitably rank "compot" (a musky fruit drink) that line the counter.
The price hikes have pushed out some of the more down-market customers who used to enjoy the cafe, including the occasional "bomzh" (bum) who used to dine out on a lucky day's earnings.
But the Blini Cafe's coat-racks are still often filled with an exotic array of garments, ranging from plush fur, to policemen's leather, to dirty worker's greatcoats, with the occasional foreign jacket hanging alongside.
If you do pop in for lunch, round off the experience by wandering a little further down the street towards the "five-corners" intersection, and grab a handful of "pyshki" (Russian round donuts) doused in sugar from the pyshki shop at 13 Lomonosova Ulitsa, just off the intersection to the right.
I take almost every one of my visitors to St Petersburg, whether great or small, to the Blini Cafe. Without exception they look at me oddly as we enter, but seldom does the cafe fail to win their hearts.
Most enjoy the feeling that they have experienced some genuine, if basic, Russian dining experience. They have.
See Dining Guide