The first time in my life I tried pizza in the mid-eighties and not at all in Moscow (this is for those who say that only Muscovites in the USSR ate all sorts of goodies, and the rest of the country was starving). It happened in the summer, in Yalta. The cafe in which this pizza was baked was located near the city beach. I will not name the address, but “nearby” was just nearby - just beyond the fence.
So when I read that the first and only pizzeria in the USSR was in Simferopol, I was even indignant: why lie like that? the first is possible, but about the only one - I doubt it.
I remember concrete slabs, high standing tables and umbrellas above them... Here are the umbrellas - perhaps a left memory, just stuck into the picture ...
And I remember pizza.
Saucer-sized or slightly larger, plump and juicy. It was very tasty, until now this version of pizza seems to me more delicious than thin, with a miserable layer of filling.
It had tomatoes and chicken, mushrooms (a lot, which is surprising), and on top - spicy cheese mixed with dill and parsley, in my opinion. Perhaps, in addition to dill and parsley, there were some other spices in the cheese, because this pizza smelled stupefying - so that it drooled.
It cost... damn it, something like a ruble. Or 55 kopecks. So many years have passed since then that I will not say anything. Yes, and then I was very tender age. There were queues for her, of course - in my opinion, the whole beach trodden a path to that cafe.
Several times I came across a recipe for a certain product called "South pizza" on the Web, and in this pizza “Yuzhnaya” used mashed potatoes for the filling... I don’t remember that, but I didn’t eat pizzas in the USSR so that few.
Not only in Yalta, by the way.
We came across pizza in Jurmala (but this is already closer to the end of the eighties), and did not leave any particularly vivid memories. We came across pizza in Sochi (late eighties, the era of cooperative cafes), pizza along with wonderful cocktails came across to us on a cruise ship (I don't remember the name, but also the eighties, the Black Sea). The cruise liner and its cuisine is generally a separate song, cocktails (non-alcoholic), which were prepared there both to taste and in appearance seemed fabulous - multi-layered, multi-colored, with ice in the form of beads), clouds of mousse fruit foam, straws... Eh, childhood.
Well, to the pizza.
Exactly the same pizza as in Yala, I had a chance to eat in another city - Dnepropetrovsk (I traveled a lot with my parents). The cafe-pizzeria was hiding in the peripheral streets of the city center.
The same - plump, juicy, plate-sized, with chicken and spicy spicy cheese, and (since it was winter) tomato sauce. There were less mushrooms than in the Yalta pizza.
I suspect that the cafe was themed, with a pretense of Italian cuisine, since there, in addition to pizza, I had a chance to taste Italian bean salad.
In Moscow, there was a pizzeria in Komsomolsky Lane, as I found out now, but I was not there. Why dont know. Probably, the parents did not have enough time to look, and in their hometown they preferred to eat at home, more and more delicious ice cream went to the cafe.
So to all those who write that in the USSR people were not familiar with the "cuisine of the peoples of the world" - maybe it is not worth telling fairy tales? Yes, I have never seen Japanese cafes and Japanese dishes (although I was familiar with Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese cuisine). But the dishes that are now considered fast food (pizza and even hamburgers) were available.
By the way, next time we'll talk about hamburgers, ok?