Tatars eat a ton of meat. Like, truly a ridiculous amount of it. So much so that you will find it ruining a lot of your orders if you were naïve enough to assume that the “cheese soup” you ordered “should not” have any meat in it… For those who are trying to stay away from meat (and even for pescatarians like me), local food in Kazan or Tatarstan in general is quite unsuitable to say the least. This made it all the more interesting for me to challenge myself quite a bit by exploring the three most famous fast-food franchises in this part of the Russian Federation: Tubatay, KSTB, and Tatmak. Read on to find out what these Vkusno i Tochka wannabes are like for those who do not eat meat. Spoiler alert! They do not offer much…
Tubatay – https://tubatay.com
Tubatay is, to my knowledge, the biggest franchise in the region, likely bigger than Western giants like KFC as well as the local ones like Vkusno i Tochka. I could see it in almost every single street corner and more often than not, their branches were flooded with patrons. This is understandable when you see how fast and professionally, they work. You can order through their electronic kiosks or via a cashier, and no matter how, the food will arrive in a few minutes. Prices are reasonable too, with five USD being quite enough to fill up most bellies. Kystybys are what they excel at, and these are basically a type of flatbread with a filling of your choice. Those fillings range from rather basic minced meat options to milk porridges, but for those who want to play it safe (and meatless) there is really only a potato option, oh and the one I got, potato and mushrooms. What an innovation… Joking aside, the taste was okay, if not a bit bland. The green sauce was just not good at all, but it was likely the wrong move on our part, and the fried dumplings with even more potato filling were quite tasty though a bit oily. Tatar tea was the best thing I got during this lunch so next time I would stick to it and some desserts to go along with it, which I found quite delicious after giving a small bite to a cake my friend bought over there.
KSTB – https://kstb.cafe
A rival of Tubatay and yet another place specializing in selling kystybys, there is not much to add when one writes about KSTB that I have not already written about Tubatay. It is the same system, and the prices as well as the overall atmosphere are similar. I would prefer the kystyby here to be fair, just because it was less fatty. The cheese soup was rather tasty too, but it had a huge chunk of chicken in it that was not very welcome nor required. The cute little dessert on the side is a baked dough filled with rice, raisins, and brown sugar. It sure was interesting, though nothing I would pay for again in the future. Not that it was bad mind you, it just did not do the trick for me.
Tatmak – https://tat-mak.ru
My favourite Tatar fast food franchise just has to be Tatmak. Completely coincidentally, it was also the cheapest one. To be fair, even if it was more expensive, this one would take the cup from me due to a singular item on their menu, the so-called Tatar pizza. These “pizzas” are anything but pizzas. Being a slightly flaky dough that is filled with “goods” and then wrapped in half, these pockets of joy are a bit more expensive than a single USD and are as tasty as it gets, especially for drunkards as I have heard. I opted for this place for breakfast a couple of times, and the results were good in both cases. Mine was filled with cheese, mushrooms, mayo, tomato sauce, and some in-house mystery sauce, and with that flaky exterior, it was all I needed to start my day right. I knew deep down that if I were to study in Kazan instead of Nizhny Novgorod (which was a very real possibility), I would have just stuck to this fine establishment for the most part and gain a ton of weight in the process…