Where to eat

We ate cheap, searching for blini joints and grabbing snacks at Coffee Bean and Coffeehouse, Russia's answers to Starbucks and Caribou. If you like sushi, you are in luck: The streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg are lined with sushi restaurants.

In St. Petersburg, for cheap eats, seek out Teremok (Nevsky Prospekt and other locations). The plain lunchrooms serve blinis, which are pancakes with fillings that can be sweet (cream) or savory (fried pork). They are the size of hubcaps and cost $2 to $4. In Moscow we ate at Yolki Palki, a Slavic-themed restaurant in the Kitai-Gorod neighborhood (several locations, 495-628-5525), a bit campy but offering affordable, simple fare. Our meal was about $15 per person.

Georgian food is favored by the Russian smart set. In St. Petersburg we ate at Tbliso (10 Sitninskaya Ulitsa, 812-232-9391), a comfortable, authentic restaurant on the Petrograd side of the river. The food combines elements of Middle Eastern, central Asian, and Slavic cuisines along with some distinctive Georgian food: stews, and kebabs of lamb, fish and eggplant; grains, cheeses, grape leaves, and sour yogurts; exotic flatbreads stuffed with cheese. All of it carries such Georgian flavors as walnut, garlic, pomegranate, eggplant, vinegar, and parsley. We paid about $40 per person, including drinks and dessert.

For more information

U.S. State Department, www.travel.state.gov; U.S. Embassy of the Russian Federation, www.russianembassy.org.

- Craig Stoltz