I was in Pittsburgh for 2 days. And on the first lunch I was invited to a "Russian" lunch. I thought awesome! I have not had borsch, kharcho, blini, or piroshki for a long time.
It was Italian restaurant with gorgeous Russian servers! So that was the Russian lunch. That is one great marketing strategy and it worked. The place was packed with mostly men in business suits. I will guess many of the men were regular customers from the way the devushki were talking with them. Oh, if you are dressed in suits you are bound to get better treatment from the waitresses. We were not in suits so you know the type of service we received: we had to ask for extras and refills.
The waitress, Olga "Olla" gave us the menu and a paper that said they could not accept credit cards that day. So we all dug into our pockets to check for enough funds for lunch. We had enough.
Okay, the food. The bread was deliciously yummy. Thick chewy and very high in gluten. One of the best. Dipped into the olive oil and balsamic vinegar...it was bread lover heaven on earth. We had to ask for 3 extra servings.
I had grilled chicken panini and salad. The food took forever to get to our table of 4. There were definitely more Russian waitresses than cooks there. That long delay was occupied with giant globs of the delicious bread soaked in olive oil and vinegar and capturing in the Russian scenery. Didn't I say this was a great marketing ploy?
When the lunch came, the salad was pale in comparison to the bread. And the panini was weaker yet. How could they get the bread right and the panini wrong?? Maybe the bread was from bakery. We had to hurry up on our lunch to make it back for a conference call.
Would I go back? Definitely for the bread.