A vicious circle: The winemaker spoke about the wretchedness of restaurants in Crimea
Neither Crimea nor Sevastopol, even six years after reunification with Russia, can boast of restaurants that could satisfy the public from Moscow and St. Petersburg, accustomed to high service.
The famous winemaker Pavel Shvets stated this on air on the First Sevastopol TV channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Over the past five years, the restaurant business in Moscow and St. Petersburg has come very far. Michelin is already threatening to enter Russia, I think that in Russia there will even be several restaurants that will be awarded a Michelin star.
In Moscow and, especially, in St. Petersburg, there are excellent restaurants with a good level of service, beautiful interiors, and very interesting, creative, modern dishes. The people who go to these restaurants are the same ones who will come to us in the summer.
I want to say that neither in Sevastopol nor in Crimea there are almost no places that would correspond to the level of a class “A” restaurant in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
And what amazes me most is that our local restaurateurs have no desire to study and understand what level of development they are at. No, to buy a ticket to Moscow, especially since they are now very inexpensive, or to St. Petersburg - the TOP 50 restaurants in Moscow and St. Petersburg were recently published, so, take a look at the ten best in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and everything will immediately become clear where we are located. In our country, restaurateurs generally think: “It’s not profitable, they won’t buy it,” Shvets said.
The winemaker believes that one of the reasons slowing down the development of the restaurant business in Crimea is the short tourist season (in Sevastopol it is even shorter).
“The main problem of Crimea and Sevastopol is the short tourist season. If in Crimea it is at least 4-5 months, then in Sevastopol it is generally 2,5. And for the sake of 2,5 months, investing a lot of money in order to open a restaurant that will work well for 2,5 months, and then it will be empty for nine months is also strange.
This requires a lot of investment; we have a very big difference between the tourist season and the non-tourist season. And, of course, local people are not used to good restaurants here. A good restaurant is when you have had a lot of money for a long time.
It is necessary that stable growth be present here in Crimea for a longer time, in terms of income, so that people begin to have a different attitude towards going to a restaurant in general.
Continental restaurateurs do not come here due to the fact that during the short tourist season, locals have not yet been born capable of doing something cool, well, who have some experience and ability to do it, and even money...
In Sevastopol, the restaurant business is at a very, very, very low level. Therefore, there can be no talk of competition. We don’t have any local people who go to restaurants, but tourists, I repeat, 2 months a year, and no one is ready to pay and open good restaurants for them. That’s it, it’s a vicious circle,” Shvets concluded.
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