Work through the list in order. Hide the notes when you know what to do.
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Try smelt in season
A small fish that runs in May and smells of fresh cucumber — not a metaphor, the smell really is cucumber. It is floured, fried whole and eaten with your hands, bones and all.
The season is short, roughly late April to early June, and during it the fish is fried everywhere including street stalls. Outside the season there is no fresh smelt, only frozen.
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Eat pyshki
Rings of fried dough dusted with icing sugar, eaten with milky coffee poured from an urn. They differ from Moscow doughnuts: the dough is less sweet, and the setting is a Soviet-era shop with aluminium trays.
You buy four to six at once; nobody buys one. The coffee in a classic pyshechnaya is brewed with milk in a large urn, and that is the genre rather than a mistake.
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Try shaverma
Meat from a vertical grill wrapped in flatbread with vegetables and sauce. The local spelling and the local school differ from Moscow's: the filling is drier and the wrap is always pressed and toasted.
The best stands are by outlying metro stations, where the queue is local. Ask for the wrap to be pressed on the grill if they have not done it automatically.
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Try Baltic fish
Baltic sprat, herring and pike-perch: the fish the city smokes, salts and fries all year. Hot-smoked sprat is sold at markets while it is still warm.
Look at the Kuznechny and Sytny markets, where fish is smoked next to the counter. Pike-perch usually comes fried with potatoes, herring with onion and sunflower oil.
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Try ukha fish soup
A clear fish soup made from several kinds of fish, with nothing fried and nothing thickened — that is what separates it from a European fish soup. Served with vodka and dark bread.
A good ukha is clear rather than cloudy, with a whole piece of fish in it rather than shreds. The classic combination is pike-perch, whitefish and salmon in one pot.
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Try Pozharsky cutlets
Chopped chicken cutlets in a crust of bread cubes, crisp outside and very juicy inside. Invented at a coaching inn on the road between the two capitals and adopted into the imperial kitchen.
The crust should be made of bread cubes rather than crumbs, and that is how you tell the real thing. Served with mashed potato or lightly cooked vegetables.
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Eat pelmeni in a pelmennaya
Small dumplings with sour cream and vinegar in a place that serves almost nothing else. The Soviet pelmennaya format survives better here than anywhere else.
Vinegar and black pepper sit on the table and you add them yourself. Portions are counted in pieces or grams rather than plates.
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Try blini
Thin pancakes with caviar, cured salmon, sour cream or jam. In a blinnaya they are cooked in front of you on a large griddle, a canteen genre of its own.
Thin blini are not pancakes in the fluffy sense: the batter is liquid, with no yeast or soda. Maslenitsa at the end of winter is the week they are eaten daily and everywhere.
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Try stroganina or lightly cured fish
Frozen northern fish shaved into ribbons and eaten still frozen with salt and pepper, or lightly cured muksun and halibut in slices. The northern catch arrives here all year.
Stroganina is served on a chilled board and must be eaten fast; once it thaws the texture is gone. It goes with spirits rather than wine.
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Have a sprat sandwich
Spiced Baltic sprat on a slice of dark bread with butter and boiled egg — the classic ryumochnaya snack. As simple as it gets and entirely local.
It is served in stand-up bars alongside an infusion and rarely ordered on its own. The bread must be rye; on white it becomes a different thing.
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Try a Sever pastry Desserts and pastries
Soviet pastries — the crumb-and-cocoa kartoshka, a tartlet with meringue cream, an éclair — from confectioners that have run since the middle of the last century. The taste is exactly as remembered.
Look for the old confectioners on Nevsky and the side streets around it, where the display case has not changed in decades. You buy one with coffee rather than a box.
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Try medovik or smetannik Desserts and pastries
Layered cakes bound with sour cream, sold by the slice in any café. Medovik uses honey layers, smetannik sour cream ones, and both should be moist rather than dry.
A good cake rests overnight so the layers soften. Third-wave cafés often rebuild them in a less sweet version.
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Drink locally roasted coffee Non-alcoholic drinks
The city has dozens of its own roasteries and three-table cafés that change beans by season. Ask what is on filter today; it is usually the best thing on the menu.
Fifteen-square-metre cafés in courtyard passages are a local format and open from eight. Many sell their own roasted beans to take away.
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Drink mors or ivan-chai Non-alcoholic drinks
Cranberry mors and ivan-chai, a fermented drink made from fireweed that brews like tea but carries no caffeine. Both appear in almost any Russian-food restaurant.
Ivan-chai smells of hay and honey and does not turn bitter if over-brewed, which is what separates it from black tea. Mors should be sour rather than syrupy.
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Visit a ryumochnaya Local alcohol
A stand-up bar serving berry, horseradish and herb infusions, sprat sandwiches and prices from another century. You stop in for one glass on your way somewhere, not for the evening.
An infusion comes with a snack, which is how it is drunk rather than a formality. The classic trio is cranberry, horseradish and whatever herbal one the bar makes.
