St Petersburg - 56 Nevsky Prospekt

Today we celebrated our 25th Wedding Anniversary J, my wife says I'm nearly half way through her training programme!  It can't be easy being married to a food blogger, frequently trips to out to visit beauty spots or sick relatives have suddenly become detours to interesting deli's or bakeries.  Worst of all for my wife, she frequently has to taste sweets and desserts that I've bought but can't eat!

As a reward for putting up with me for 25 years, I took her to St Petersburg (my holiday pictures are here, we even managed to find a restaurant called The Idiot)).  Friends and family made two predictions, that I wouldn't find anything to blog about in Russia and that my wife, who doesn't especially like beetroot or cabbage would be very hungry!

I enjoyed Borscht, which was nicer than I'd imagined:

and we were both pleasantly surprised with the quality of the food we had in Russia:

We found some very nice cakes:

Prior to going I did a bit of research, and found what looked like a particularly good deli on Nevsky Prospekt, in St Petersburg.

I was going to title this post Yeliseyev's deli, but then I found whilst researching this shop had 11 different spellings!  According to the article in article in Wikipedia on this store, it should be Elisseeff’s or Елисеевский магазин in Russian.

Anyway we found 56 Nevsky Prospekt, a rather fine Art Nouveau building, where the deli should have been:

This business was founded by an ambitious peasant in 1813, the current building was built at the start of the last century.  My (out of date) guidebook told me inside I'd see fantastic Art Nouveau interiors and fantastic food.  This what I was hoping to see:

Thanks to www.nevsky-prospekt.com for providing the two photos above.  This is what we actually saw L:

The place had literally gone to the dogs!  Sadly I subsequently learnt that the shop, having survived a revolution and war, ceased trading on 15th January 2007.  My next post will show you where we did buy great food in this fantastic city.