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New Cafeteria: Two Floors, Set Meals for 110 Roubles and Special Cheesecakes
The cafeteria is one of the main points of attraction for students in any HSE building. Now HSE students in the humanities and physics, who study at 21/4 Staraya Basmannaya Ulitsa, also have one to visit. The HSE news service visited the renovated cafeteria to learn whether it’s better than the legendary cafeteria on Myasnitskaya (spoiler alert: it seems so) and to ask the brand chef what meals are worth trying.
The cafeteria occupies two floors in the ‘L’ building on Staraya Basmannaya. In fact, these are two separate rooms with different design concepts. The first floor is a special offer area that serves burgers, pizza, pasta, pancakes, fruit and coffee. It is open from 8.30 to 17.00.
On the second floor there is a traditional canteen with food-serving counters that feature a variety of salads, soups and hot meals, side dishes and drinks. Here you can take prepacked meals to go in order to have a snack during a short break. The second floor is open from 8.30 to 20.00. You can pay for your meal with cash, card or mobile phone.
Compass Group, an international leader in corporate nutrition services that operates in 50 countries around the world, was chosen as the food supply company at Staraya Basmannaya following a tender.
‘If we take into account the peculiarities of Russian legislation and the lack of experience in working with professional food service operators in state universities, holding a full-fledged tender and engaging a world renowned food operator as a result is unprecedented step that will bring many advantages to students and lecturers,’ says Elena Kakabadze, Head of the Office of Staff and Student Benefits.
In Russia, the company provides meals to more than 100 corporate canteens in large Russian and international companies, including Kaspersky Lab, Mail Group, Adidas, Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO, Sberbank and many others.
‘Breakfast starts at 8.30 and ends at 11.30 followed by lunch. We make cheesecakes (syrniki) from natural cottage cheese according to a special recipe that contains neither flour nor semolina. If students are interested, we can always demonstrate the cooking process and organize a master class,’ says Dmitry Tkachev, brand chief of Compass Group.
‘All desserts are made in our confectionery department from natural products: marshmallow from black currant, marmalades, dietary and vegetarian sweets, cookies with dried tomatoes, parmesan and spinach. You can also come and create your own pasta dish – you can choose penne, fettuccine or spaghetti, and add bacon, mushrooms, cream or tomato sauce. You can also come for lunch on the second floor. There will always be a variety of dishes — the menu will not repeat for four weeks,’ he adds.
The new cafeteria works full cycle. This means that all meals will be cooked from scratch without using semi-finished products. Every day students and staff will be offered a set lunch consisting of five dishes (salad, soup, hot meal with side dish and a drink), which will cost 110 roubles, and for 250 roubles you can choose an average lunch from other meals yourself. We also plan to organize world cuisine days and add various national dishes to the menu.
Students have already enjoyed visiting the new cafeteria. ‘We're so happy! Now we don’t need to leave the building to go to different cafes, we can just eat here, and it’s great!’ say Zlata Liman and Maria Shepshelevich, 1st-year students of the programme in Philology.