St. Petersburg In Your Pocket

Interview with Marina Albi - owner of the vegetarian restaurant Cafe Botanika

 
 Italian-American Marina Albi first got hooked on Russia in the heady days of perestroika when she started working with satellites and Soviet TV. A fan of yoga and a passionate vegetarian, two years ago she decided to open the city’s most popular vegetarian restaurant, Cafe Botanika.

How long have you been a vegetarian?

I spent most of my youth living on a farm with my family. We had every animal you could think of and I was raised as a real country girl, looking after all the various animals, making the hay bales and so on. One day when I was 12 the slaughterhouse man came to collect a calf. Getting the calf to leave was such a traumatic situation that they had to kill the mother - finally I truly understood the whole system of where meat really comes from. Living on the farm and being close to the animals and seeing them in such distress - I just couldn’t eat meat any more.

What do you think of the Russian diet?

Well if you compare it to what people eat in America for example then it’s much healthier. Russians eat a lot of seasonal foods and you’ll find that most Russian grandmothers know what foods to eat in what times of the year to get all the essential nutrients, there’s the berry season and the beetroot season etc. In the west people just go to the supermarket without even thinking about where the food they are buying has come from.

How do you choose the menu for the restaurant?

I like cooking a lot and of course I had my favourite dishes that I wanted to include. We really experimented with the food, the chef would make up dishes according to a load of different recipes and we’d have a lot of tasting evenings. I wanted the menu to include typical Russian dishes as well as vegetarian classics like hummus or curry. We make some really fantastic versions of things like borsch that are so good people usually don’t even notice there’s no meat. It’s not written anywhere here that this is a vegetarian restaurant, we are just serving really good healthy food.

What did you do here before you opened a restaurant?

Well it’s rather a long story and quite complicated! I can try and give you the abbreviated version…

Ok then, start at the beginning

I first came as a student in 1985. I was crazy about visiting the Soviet Union so I managed to get myself on a tour group, I had no money but the agency said if I could convince ten people to go with me, then I could have a free ticket. After that I was hooked and went back again. It was pretty funny being a vegetarian here then - always ordering a dvoinoi garnir (double garnish) so I could try and be full, or bread with mustard. And of course I’d be given sausages everyday for breakfast – for them that was the best food they could possibly give a foreigner! Then I and a friend hatched a plan to get Soviet TV in the US…

Soviet television? Why?!

Well, it was perestroika, the cold war was ending, a very exciting time. I was a graduate student at Columbia in New York where they could get Soviet TV though a satellite dish. I thought, what a great idea - why not start a small business setting up antennas for other students so they could watch it? For legal reasons we had to get permission from the Soviets to transmit their TV shows in America - I went over there and talked to them and they just mailed us a licence after three months, even though we were just students! Then with the rights we could do exciting things in media like making live link-ups and documentaries etc. In the 1990s when Russia opened up people started to ask us to help them use the satellites to get good phone connections, so it was some kind of natural progression.

Sounds like you became real entrepeneurs…

(Laughing) You know so much of what we did just came about because we didn’t know that we couldn’t do these things – we just tried things regardless. Our company really started to kick off when foreign businesses started investing in Russia and the internet began to get popular. How can an oil company function if to call their head office they have to wait for the operator for two hours? We came up with the idea of a kind of satellite phone – it looked like a small suitcase with a dish that folded out of it. Think of it as though a factory in Siberia were a ship at sea and you can start to imagine how it worked.

Why did you decide to give it all up?

I’d never imagined that I would be at the head of a big corporation, it wasn’t my intention at all. After some point I knew that this corporate life was not the direction that I wanted. In 1991 I met my husband here and in 1992 we had a child. I didn’t want to spend my life travelling back and forth dragging my baby along with me. I needed to settle into something else, and having this restaurant and teaching at the university was my dream.

How has Russia changed over the years?

Russia changes all the time – it’s so dynamic here, it will always be like that, although there are some ‘Soviet hangovers’ that haven’t gone, like the fact that nobody ever wants to be the manager because everyone hates the manager! They always tend to want to take responsibility only within their own small job roles. The image of Russians abroad has changed dramatically. Before the female image was big burly shot-putting Olgas, now the stereotype is ‘watch out, they’re all glamorous, intelligent femme-fatales who’ll steal your husband!’ And the men are rich and will spend their last Rouble on filling a swimming pool with champagne for their lover’s birthday. What a massive turn around that is!

How do you see your future in Russia?

I know this is where I want to be now – I have this saying ‘the only thing worse than living in Russia is getting kicked out of Russia!’ I love my life here - cycling down to the restaurant and meeting with friends, teaching my course at the university and I lead a yoga class too. I’m working on some other projects as well – I want to make a vegetarian cookbook, I’m learning Arabic and my husband and I are opening a small hotel in Egypt. I said to him, ok I’m happy to live in Russia, but I need a bit of sunshine too!

Albi back…