One of the greatest thing about living in Asia is the wide availability of cooked foods. Whether it is a major city or a rural town, the main streets of any sizable urban community in much of East, Southeast, and South Asia are dominated by endless arrays of both hole-in-the-wall eateries and fancy restaurants serving cuisines of different regions and countries, at a wide spectrum of prices and quality. Getting food is mostly just a matter of going downstairs, walking for a few minutes, and paying an equivalent of a few dollars at most.
For someone used to the culture of getting readily made foods so easily from the streets, not having such easy access to a wide variety of food can be the biggest culture shock in a foreign country. Such persons would certainly feel it hard here in Vladivostok, to say the least. To put simply, the city's dining scene is geared toward very specific segments of its people, but not everyone. Workers on the go can find dozens of cheap stalls dishing out shawarma rolls, hot dogs, and microwaved pizza slices for a couple of dollars.
On the other hand, tourists and Russians looking for a nice night out are channeled toward fancy luxury restaurants easily costing some 20 dollars per person. The ambiance of the high-end restaurants are amazing, some with over-the-top decor, live music, and chandeliers to boot. Interestingly, unlike elsewhere in the world, Chinese food in Vladivostok largely follow the luxury restaurant pattern, dishing out fairly standard but pricey fare in gaudily decorated dining halls with leather sofas in semi-private booths.
Between the cheap street stalls and luxury restaurants, the pickings are quite slim. Some can be considered sit-down versions of street stalls, including generic fast-food joints like Burger King, McDonald's, and local equivalents. Food courts in malls also have similar offerings. An emerging Cafe scene offer cheaper alternative scene to luxury restaurants, but their food offerings can be better called snacks than anything that can satisfy the local Russian appetites that are rather used to big portions. Midrange eateries do not otherwise exist.
The lack of midrange eateries, in some ways, can speak to the different mentality with which locals approach food. Interestingly, for instance, Russian travelers in hostels cook their own lunches if they do not need to go anywhere, e rather than going down to the streets to a street-food stall. Because they are not in a rush to go anywhere and have plenty of time to cook, they rather prepare their own meals. Considering groceries, in a land dominated by agricultural imports from as far as northeastern China, are not cheap, cooking is not for saving money.
Rather, cooking is considered normal way of eating, in direct contrast to some parts of Asia, where dining out has become the norm among especially the youths. Even among some older Asians, cooking has become a skill that is only useful for when important guests are invited to the family home. The fact that eating out has become so convenient, so accessible, and so full of options mean that cooking is in many ways no longer considered the healthy way to eat a greater variety of food. Dining out is no longer special in anyway.
The sense of eating out being special seems to be better retained here in Vladivostok. Because people go out to eat less and are reserving those occasions for special times that allow for more money to be spent, restaurants also evolve to cater to such mentalities. They make the service is tip-top, environment is memorable, and extra services like free live music is thrown in to up the fanciful nature of the nice dining out experience. Those restaurants the the author casually stroll in in the past few days certainly have not disappointed in such respects.
But as more Asians flow into the city, such mentality may also change over time. Large numbers of Asian students studying full-time in local universities complain about lack of convenient food options in and near their schools. It is certain that shrewd businessmen seize upon such opportunities to create a new crop of casual dining establishments catering to such a crowd. With foreign students numbering in the thousands, and more thrifty travelers from other parts of Russia and the world visiting, midrange dining has a bright future here.
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