“Instead of tuna, sprats”: Moscow restaurants began to cheat with cheap ingredients

In cafes and restaurants, the “time of fakes” began: out of economy, expensive products in dishes began to be secretly replaced with cheap ones. Poshekhonsky cheese instead of Roquefort in “cheese plateau” and sprats instead of tuna in Italian sauce – this is just the beginning. Readers have shared some of the most outrageous ingredient substitutions they’ve come across in recent times.

– Recently, in an Italian restaurant, I ordered vitello tonato – roast beef with tuna sauce, I love this dish very much. They brought it, I tried it – I feel a clear taste and smell of sprats. And I categorically cannot stand sprats since childhood, from Soviet New Year’s feasts, even the smell is bad … I ask the waiter: what is it? He says: the chef has changed the recipe because the price of tuna has risen a lot, now we make the sauce from sprats. Shouldn’t you be warned about this? – says indignantly one of the regular readers of “MK”, ​​33-year-old Ksenia.

Another interlocutor of MK agrees with her, but adds that sometimes chefs simply try to “cover themselves” with a difficult economic situation in order to mask their own flaws.

– My girlfriend and I came to a restaurant, asked for the Pavlova dessert. The waitress warns: our Pavlova recipe has changed. We ask: how? It turns out that there is now a meringue with a scoop of fruit and berry ice cream – the one, remember, brown from childhood? Instead of cream and berries. Allegedly with berries it turns out very expensive. In summer, at the height of the season, is it expensive to add three strawberries and a handful of currants to dessert?! Are they bullying?! – a Muscovite named Sergey shares his impressions.

We ordered a cheese plate. The description on the menu listed expensive cheeses. They brought a plate with a cheap set. The waiter answered my question: “Don’t worry. Overall weight saved.” To which I replied: “So you want to sell me a kilogram of bread for the price of a kilogram of black caviar?” He never understood me. I had to invite the manager and complain to him, – says 40-year-old Alina.

The situation is the same: it goes without saying that the Russians have already come to terms with the shortage of gorgonzola, roquefort and brie – or at least get used to analogues of domestic production – but still it is unacceptable to replace the conditional gruyère with Poshekhonsky cheese, arguing this by maintaining the “total weight”. .

Back in the early spring of 2022, gastronomy and restaurant industry experts warned that many restaurateurs would have to seriously revise their menu and exclude from it dishes whose components had become difficult to obtain or too expensive. However, all changes must be recorded in the menu: the client must clearly understand what exactly he orders, eats and pays for. Attempts to make changes “quietly”, without advertising them, are only permissible if the product is replaced with its complete analogue.

– There are replacements that only the most sophisticated client is able to catch, and even that is unlikely. For example, we recently completely abandoned Italian mozzarella, which we brought from San Marino, and started using Russian. For pizza, this is not important, – said Nikolai P., a chef at an Italian restaurant in the south of Moscow. – The same thing happened when we changed the supplier of arugula. Now we are planning to switch to Turkish olive oil, and this should not be noticeable either. However, sprat vitello tonnato sauce is no longer a substitute, it is the author’s rethinking of the recipe by the chef. And you need to be warned about it. Especially if the replacement should affect the price.

Slipping a cheaper product over an expensive one is one of the most common complaints. However, many restaurant customers also pay attention to the opposite problem – the dishes contain ingredients that are not provided for in the classic recipe: so to speak, an unplanned gift from the chef, which customers did not count on at all (and are not obliged to be happy about it).

“In a cafe in the center of Moscow, where I often go, I ordered chicken broth, just chicken broth. That’s what it was called on the menu: “Chicken broth.” Upon close acquaintance, it turned out to be chicken broth with meatballs and spinach. It did not cause any bad emotions for me – I love meatballs and I love spinach, I ate it with pleasure. However, I understand that it would be worth warning about such things – this is not a decoration like a sprig of greens, these are two full-fledged and rather expressive ingredients in taste! – a Muscovite shared her experience on a social network.

The interlocutors in the comments immediately spoke: yes, they say, this happens more often than we would like!

“The waiter brings lasagna, I start picking it and suddenly I see mushrooms. “Mushrooms in lasagna? I thought. – Not typical”. You see, I don’t really like mushrooms. I don’t turn my nose up, if necessary, I’ll eat it, but without any pleasure. Then I decided not to make a fuss – there was no time to change the order. Then he asked the waiter: why didn’t you warn that there were mushrooms in the lasagne? This is a deviation from the classic recipe, so it would be nice to indicate on the menu or at least verbally warn? The waiter was very upset, he even excluded lasagna from the bill. But someone after all and an allergy can be!” says another social media user.

– In the menu that is served to guests, it is permissible not to indicate the entire composition of the dish, down to spices. However, the waiter must be ready on demand to provide a more detailed menu, where it is written – and components, and calories, and allergens. So we are required not only to know not only the composition of the dishes, but also to be ready to answer the question of the possibility of excluding a certain product from the recipe at the request of the guest: for example, it is possible not to put tomatoes in a salad, but to prepare dough for khinkali without flour, alas, it’s impossible,” said Ruslan Andreev, a waiter at one of the chain restaurants of Georgian cuisine, in an interview with an MK correspondent. According to him, most of the complaints and claims of customers relate to walnuts: many do not know that Georgian cuisine often includes this component (for example, chicken satsivi sauce), and then they face allergies.