I went to Toronto (Ontario, Canada) on the weekend with my boyfriend and his sister, who are both Russian. We planned on going to a Russian restaurant called "Бармалеи Самовар" (Spelling?, and I'm curious as to how that name makes sense...) for dinner.
We were really excited to have some good food..and were SO dissapointed!! The owners were from Georgia and their food was really disappointing. (According to Yuri, my boyfriend, the food was really average and just tasted like a meal you could cook at home.)
The owner was very rude and refused to speak Russian, and the limited menu wasn't good at all...their 'Chicken Tabak' was chicken with BBQ sauce, and the Borsh tasted like Chinese won ton soup
After this, we went to "Pravda", a Russian bar downtown. This place looked really nice, but we were disappointed here too. The owners were Bulgarian and said they didn't speak Russian. Yuri asked the DJ for Russian music, and he said 'we don't play Russian music on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday'.
The decorations looked nice until we noticed that there was a statue of Lenin's head mixed in amongst the HUGE collection of Vodka bottles - which Yuri and Nadia found really disrespectful - and on one wall was a huge portrait of Lenin, across from it a collection of Orthodox depictions of Christ. Is that not contradictory?
I'm wondering, for those of you living outside of Russia, are "Russian" establishments in your area like this? It seemed like they were just using Russian/Soviet culture as a gimmick for money making. How disapointing
And, do you find any of these things offensive as we did? Or were we overreacting