Russian restaurants found supplies from Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. meat, and this year it banned meat from Australia. Moscow has banned imports of various products in the past, usually at times of diplomatic tension. One Moscow chef said lamb from Russia’s southern Tatarstan region was of good quality but is sold only as whole animal carcasses, which meant his restaurant had to figure out what to do with cuts it normally didn’t use. Restaurateurs are looking at new suppliers from Asia and South America, and also locally.
Smuggling products through routes like Belarus is only one answer.
Leonid Pleshko, director of Belarus’s state inspectorate for seeds, quarantine and plant protection, said food imports from the EU would be barred entry into Belarus if their documents showed they were intended for onward shipment to Russia. “But for large-scale, organized efforts, that will not be tolerated.” “At the level of gastronomic tourism, when cheese is brought in a suitcase, then maybe it can get through,” said a Belarus government source. In Minsk, officials said that despite the customs union removing checks at the Russia-Belarus border, Moscow would still pick up on large imports of “Belarussian parmesan” by inspecting it at the final destination. Belarus has become a source not only of Italian cheese but of fruit and vegetables, all bearing phoney Belarus labels.Īn official at Russia’s customs agency said it had no official figures on imports from Belarus and declined to comment on whether officials were seeing oddly packaged Parmesan cheese. Two chefs said this was an increasingly common practice. Minsk has imposed no ban on imports from the EU and has a customs union agreement with Moscow, which means products can be brought into Belarus legally and shipped to Russia with no border checks. Most spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity to avoid revealing their secrets for obtaining gourmet goods.īelarus provides an obvious loophole. Several chefs at high-end restaurants in Moscow, most of which source 85-90 percent of their produce from abroad, were convinced there’s always a way to find what they need. The ban on most Western food imports has been hard to swallow for those who run the pizza joints, sushi bars and French-style brasseries that have opened up across Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, especially in the capital Moscow.Ĭhefs are searching for new suppliers, buying delicacies from smugglers, rewriting recipes and overhauling menus.
Igor Bukharov, president of the federation of restaurateurs and hoteliers, said he was surprised to see a sign outside a restaurant which said simply “Parmesan” and gave a phone number.
It came in original Italian packaging, stuck with crude stickers saying “made in Belarus”. Two chefs at Moscow restaurants described buying genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano, produced only in a few northern Italian provinces. Once upon a time, the black marketeers of the former Soviet Union were known for using fake labels to pass off dodgy local products as expensive imports. No sooner had Moscow banned dairy, meat, vegetables and fruit from most Western countries in response to sanctions over Ukraine, than Belarus, a former Soviet republic better known for black bread and potato pancakes, became a “producer” of top-quality cheese. A waitress serves pizza at a restaurant in Moscow, September 10, 2014.
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