Why St. Petersburg can’t stop competing with Moscow

Moscow has the money, St.

Petersburg has the pride – Inside a rivalry shaped by history, snobbery, and two very different ideas of home Russia’s most award-winning restaurant is leaving St.

Petersburg for Moscow, and the reaction tells you rather more about the relationship between the country’s two capitals than it does about food.

For eight years, we Petersburgers have taken pride in Birch, a celebrated fine-dining eatery, twice named Russia’s best and renowned for its inventive tasting menus and notoriously hard-to-get tables.

Of course, most of us stopped going there long ago, once it became largely the preserve of visitors from Moscow, because locals are not generally eager to spend $200 per person on dinner, which is roughly what the basic set menu with non-alcoholic drinks would have cost this year.

You also had to pay in advance for a reservation, often months ahead.

A Moscow friend merely laughed when I mentioned the prices.

“That’s reasonable,” she said.

“Average for the market, really.” There, in miniature, you have the difference between the two cities.

Birch was brilliant, but increasingly not for us and then came the news that it was closing and moving to Moscow.

I won’t speculate here about the business reasons, given that’s a conversation for people who take fine dining rather more seriously than I do, but what interested me was the reaction of Petersburgers who had never eaten at Birch and had no intention of doing so.

Read more Callous Kallas: The bitter diplomat dragging the EU down the warpath with Russia They were genuinely upset because, apparently, Birch had become something like the Hermitage Museum or the fountains at the Tsar’s old Peterhof.

We may not visit them every week, but we know they’re there, they belong to us, and we are proud of them.

The restaurant worked in much the same way, while you might consider spending that much on dinner absurd, it was comforting to know that you could.