Location: 14 Malaya Konyushennaya Street, St. Petersburg
Average bill: PPPP
Cuisine: Vegetarian/Pan-Asian/Healthy /Italian
Tel.: +7 (812) 946-30-35
Open: daily 9 am-11 pm
One of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales says: “In China, you know, even the Emperor is Chinese and so are all his subjects.” Well, the founder of the Ukrop (Dill) café is a vegetarian and his wife is a vegetarian and all the food there is vegetarian too. This healthy eatery serves neither meat, nor fish. There are no dishes containing sugar either. Unrefined coconut oil is used instead of refined vegetable oil. The menu also features raw dishes, including three desserts.
Although this is a vegetarian café, half of its regular customers know virtually nothing about vegetarianism. They just like the food and find it tasty and unusual, and so they come back again and again.
The most popular first course is cream soup with roasted vegetables and sun-dried tomatoes. It is fairly light, but very nourishing. For the second course we recommend black dough pizza. It is black because it contains activated carbon. Other establishments use cuttlefish ink, but that would not be vegetarian. The ingredients seem incongruous at first sight: grapefruit, arugula, onion marmalade and honey-mustard sauce. But the combination is irresistible.
For a starter, try the pear salad with Parmesan, arugula, spinach, iceberg and Romaine lettuce and raisins, with a strawberry dressing. It pairs well with wine. By the way, Ukrop serves only dry wines and a few varieties of cider, but no strong alcohol.
Ukrop is in the very heart of St. Petersburg, on Malaya Konyushennaya Street, not far from Konyushennaya Square, which will host the World Cup Fan Fest.