Galina works in a beautiful place - an organic (mostly) vegetarian café in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
The center's aim is to help Russians go vegetarian, to learn about being healthy without meat.
The café is the only organic eatery in Saint Petersburg, the center of Russian culture. They offer a special course for pregnant women teaching them how to have a healthy vegetarian pregnancy and raise healthy vegetarian children.
What is the name of your restaurant and center?
Our restaurant is called "Tebe Mirra." It is dedicated to a French woman named Mirra Rishar, because she shared her knowledge of natural food with the owner of the restaurant and is the source of the main idea and focus. It has been open for three years.
How did it get started?
There was a group of vegetarians in St. Petersburg. They met each other, talked, exchanged their experiences, cooked different food together, and helped each other. After they collected lots of information, recipes, advice and experience, they decided to open a restaurant in order to help other people become vegetarians, to find a new healthy way of life.
What is it like to be a vegetarian in Russia? Is the number of vegetarians growing, or is it still considered unusual?
The number of vegetarians is growing but very, very slowly. In St. Petersburg - the center of Russian culture - there are only three vegetarian restaurants and only one "Tebe Mirra" - a natural organic restaurant. We also don't allow smoking there [unlike the other restaurants], because we think that natural food and smoking are incompatible things. Also, we never use food prepared in advance; we don't warm up food which was prepared some time ago. We cook food specially for each of our customers. This means that when we receive an order from a customer, we peel the vegetables and fruits, cut them up and cook them.
And our customer gets really natural and healthy food full of vitamins and healthy substances.
Do you do any other activities, or is there a veg center or a veg social group with regular meetings in your area?
Our restaurant functions as a club also. We have different meetings and special classes where people can learn how to prepare food, what food would be better for them, which products aren't good for health, and they get a lot of different recipes and so on.
What do you have on your menu? Are there both vegetarian and vegan items?
We have a lot of different dishes - vegetarian and vegan. Also we have fish - for those people who recently decided to become a vegetarian in order to help them to make the transition to a new way of eating. Also, we cook our special homemade bread without yeast according to an ancient Russian recipe.
