Twenty four hours in St Petersburg is just not enough.
We had plumped for a 72 hour visa to be used over a long weekend. Two days in, I knew it wasn’t going to suffice.
I wish we’d stayed longer. I wish we’d had time to taken the hydrofoil out to Peterhof Palace and the Versailles style gardens. I wish we’d done a World War 2 tour about the siege and the ice road to Lagoda. I wish we’d made it through more than two floors of the Hermitage.
I wish it hadn’t rained in a biblical way for 10 of the hours we were there. I wish I’d known to expect rain. St Petersburg only has about 35 days of sunshine each year.
What I don’t regret are any of the below. It’s not that easy to find great things to eat and drink in St Petersburg. There’s quite a bit of fat tat around.
But sight seeing is hungry work- and these places not only will fuel your adventures, they should help weave some of their own.
So here’s a full day of eating and drinking in St Petersburg sorted . It was researched while The Hungry One and I ticked off one of the last remaining items on our ‘baby bucket list‘ and took wistful photos of The Bronze Horseman.
(For those of you who like things to be visual, I’ve also included a map at the bottom so you can see how it fits together.)
10.30 pm Late drink and dinner- Piterogi
Long flights and queues at immigration mean you might be arriving late at night. Luckily St Petersburg is a 24 hour city- this is even more pertinent when the nights are white and the days stretch onwards towards dawn.
There are four rivers throughout St Petersburg- Piterogi sits snug up against the Fontanka; half way between the River Neva and the central station. It’s just off Nevsky Prospekt and near the four statues of stallions.
Piterogi is a subterranean space, filled locals in their 20s and 30s drinking, smoking, eating and generally having a great time. We arrived at 10.30 pm. While the staff and patrons are primarily speaking Russian very quickly, menus are available in English.
Beer is cheap, so is vodka. The white wine is rough and in large carafes. The menu is large, but populated by lots of Russian comfort food classics. The pies are good here, but you’ll be having the best version in town for brunch tomorrow morning, so hold off. The chicken kiev shot a geyser of hot garlic butter, just like it should, but it was the beef stroganoff (270R) nestled in a fortress of mashed potato and with pickles that I remember most. It was the best we sampled all weekend.
Beyond comfort food, what this place has is atmosphere in spades. The soundtrack is Western 80’s pop and theme songs.
It was twenty minutes into our visit and two vodka shots down when the crowd around us started singing full volume along to the tune of Disney’s ‘Duck Tails‘. It was all we could do not to join in. Woo hoo.
Piterogi
Nab. reky Fontanka 40 (Fontanka embankment, 40)
(+7) 812 275 35 58
http://www.piterogi.ru
1 am- see the bridges of the Neva open
At 1.05 am am every night the 23 bridges of the River Neva open to allow for the passage of ships. They remain open until 5 am. Make sure you’re on the same side as your hotel when you go (otherwise you’ll be stranded). Find a position along the embankment to watch the bridges rise. As long as it’s a fine night, it’s a pretty romantic thing to do.
10 am Brunch- Stolle
Stolle are a chain of very good bakeries across Russia. In St Petersburg there are seven branches. One of the most useful outposts is in the historical part in between the Hermitage Museum/Winter Palace and the gilded Church of Spilled Blood.
Stolle are casual places, where you order at the counter and then try and find yourself a seat in the adjoining dining room. There’s tea, soft drinks and not-so-impressive looking coffee. At lunch, there’s beer (but no wine). What they specialise in are kulebjaka; pies made from yeasted dough cleaved into rectangle slices. They sit somewhere somewhere between a large sausage roll, a panini and a pie.
Both the cabbage and the meat proved cheap, filling, savoury and delicious.
What is also spectacular are Stolle’s seasonal fruit pies. The dough is latticed over the top and softens against the roasted fruit. For us the strawberries bled into the base and threaten to ooze out the side. It’s a dose of sunshine, wrapped in pastry. It’s exactly what you need before tackling the Hermitage. That place makes the Louvre seem slight.
Stolle
Konushenny Lane 1/6, St. Petersburg, Russia
(812) 312-1862
www.stolle.ru/eng/main.htm
Morning: city bus tour or start to tackle The Hermitage Museum
Lunch- Teplo
Teplo has good food, interesting beers, international wines and charming staff. You’ll find it downstairs and across a courtyard stuffed with tables where you can sit if the sun is shining. If it’s not, inside it’s cosy brimming with framed vintage photos, gingham tablecloths, plush couches and tables that totter. In most corners you’ll discover kitschy items- from teddy bears to trucks have been tucked away.
It’s a little like the creche at your grandmother’s house has been taken over by your cooler cousins, who can cook. All the staff are in their twenties who gad about in jeans, tshirts, plimsols and sport good english. The soundtrack is soft but veers from Fiona Apple to light electro.
The menus arrive as fluffy photograph albums, with food and drinks interspersed with postcards and quotes from poetry and film. They’re like that present you gave your best friend when you were 14 for her birthday.
Lunch is served from 1pm- before that they do brunch which also looks good. For lunches and dinner it may prove wise to book- Teplo is popular with both visitors and locals. One dish not to miss are the potato pancakes, crisp and straggled on the edge, topped with buko cheese and roses of smoked salmon and roe.
Teplo also bake pastries on site each day, so be sure to ask what’s warm from the oven before choosing dessert.
Teplo
45 Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, St. Petersburg
00 7 812 570-19-74
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Teplo/207994535892780
Afternoon – see The Bronze Horseman then wander through the Summer Garden and the Field of Mars
Dinner- Mansarda
Mansarda is on the 6th floor of Quatra Corti business centre and overlooks the domed roof of St Isaac’s Cathedral. It’s part terrace, part bar, part restaurant. It’s expensive. It’s shiny. It serves Russian food, sushi, pastas and cocktails. It’s one of the places where local and visiting oligarchs dine and sip vodka out of frosted shot glasses. It’s where you get to go have a splash out meal and people watch.
It’s where we got to pass plenty of time playing the age old game of speculating about portly men and their willowy dates; ‘wife, daughter or professional?’
Sashimi is a big thing among the glamorous set in St Petersburg, yet it became fairly obvious that not all of those constrain themselves to low carb, low fat meals have mastered the use of chopsticks. If you fancy eating something light and showing off your dexterity, keep in mind that the sashimi dishes here will cost you quite a bit.
Good options on the menu are Russian, like the cold version of borscht; trillingly light beetroot juice bulked out with shredded radish, dill and cubes of cucumber. After two days of eating pies and pelmeni, your body will thank you.
Though speaking of pelmeni, the seafood dumplings here were also excellent, filled with prawn and salmon and coated in a sauce made of cream, dill and hard boiled egg.
There’s smoking allowed in the restaurant, but the ventilation is quite good. The hostesses are all dressed up to the nines in cocktail frocks, but if you’re there in jeans (like we were)- you’d also be fine. Beyond that there’s a large wine list and an even longer cocktail list.
What most people are here for is to be seen. But don’t forget, out the window there’s also a cracker of a view.
(Bookings advisable)
Mansarda
Saint-Petersburg, 3 Pochtamtskaya st.
Phone: +7 (812) 946 43 03
12 pm to 1 am
After dinner drink- Stirka 40°
It’s part bar, part laundrette. It’s small and cosy. At night the DJ at the front might well be spinning Elvis tunes on his decks, balanced on top of a piano. Out the back you might find folks doing laundry in one of the three machines, taking advantage of the free wifi. The rest might be dancing rockabilly style by the bar, enjoying cheap beer and vodka shots.
Stirka 40° is also what Berlin-based owner Anke Nowottne presented it as her graduation project at the Zurich School of Art and Design.
It’s one of the only public laundrettes in St Petersburg. The battle with bureaucracy necessary to open a place like this would probably sufficed as performance art in itself. In order to reconcile its dual purposes it’s now officially listed as a ‘laundry with a food-selling department’ .
What it is, is a good fun place to come get a drink, check emails, hang among locals, have a dance- and if you really need to – do some washing.
Drink- Stirka 40°
Kazanskaya 26, Saint Petersburg
314-53-71
11:00 am – 4:00 am
http://www.facebook.com/stirka40
Hints and tips for visiting St Petersburg
Visas
Visas are a big part of any visit to Russia. They’re a bit of a pain to get too. Here’s the best way I found to negotiate it. Book the flight and then book your hotel. Then email the concierge to ask them to issue you documents which serve as invitations to visit Russia- you’ll need one for each of you going. These invitations, along with paperwork, passports and passport photos are what you need to lodge with the Russian visa office.
Hotels
We stayed at the Crowne Plaza Ligovsky. It was very modern, clean, had king size beds and free wifi in the lobby. It was however on the other end of Nevsky Prospekt to the Hermitage and all the rest of the historical sites. It was a 40 minute walk, or 15 minutes on the bus to get into the centre of town each day. I think if we went back I’d stay somewhere on the other side of the Fontanka River.
Transport
That being said, the trolley and bus system up and down Nevsky Prospekt is good. You buy your tickets (around 23 Rubles each trip) from the ticket seller once you’ve got on the bus. Nb, that is different to the driver.
Bus tour
No matter how much it makes you feel like a cheesey tourist, in a city where most of the street signs are in cyrillic the Hop on-Hop Off City Tour (aka big red bus) is a good way to get your bearings on how everything fits together.
Airports
Be sure to double check which terminal your plane leaves Pulkovo airport from. The notion of Pulkovo 2 as the ‘International terminal’ is misleading. It turns out that Rossiya airlines flies to London out of Pulkovo 1. The terminals are a good 10 minutes away from each other by car and the taxi drivers out the front of Pulkovo 2 will try and charge you an exorbitant rate because they know you’re in a pickle and need to get to the other terminal in a hurry. There are also lots of other shady characters around trying to convince you to get in their cars in exchange for cash. (Nb, if you get stuck like we did, the staff at the Crowne Plaza Airport Hotel were very good and let us hitch a ride on their airport shuttle to the right terminal).
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