vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #146 / Social life / Reading article...

There were skewers of grilled beef, and cakes covered with berries and fruit. There were rolls of pastry and meat, and an octopus lay slain on a platter.

One sweaty chef showed off "The Sea Bottom," covered not with drums of nuclear waste and blobs of sunken spilled oil, but starfish and scallops and a king crab large enough to carry off a 10-year-old child.

The krai's second annual cooking contest, held at the White House July 16, drew chefs from 70 restaurants, hotels and canteens from 12 cities around the krai. And they demonstrated that food from Primorye goes beyond mere pelmeny and pancakes and potatoes.

"It is a custom here to define who's the best in a profession, among medics, among teachers and others," said Svetlana Chistokletova, chairwoman of the Krai Trade Committee.

As restaurants are developing, she added, it is natural to have contests among cooks. And it gave food businesses a chance to recruit chefs from throughout the region.

Cooks let their imaginations run hog-wild. Pavel Veretennikov, chef from Acfes Seiyo, created "The Sea Bottom" because the hotel's largely Japanese clientele loves seafood. There were a few non-sequiturs, though. Whole baked chickens, their beaks and coxcombs still attached to their shriveled heads, were arranged like ducks on a glassy fake pond. Some of the barnyard fowl wore paper duck beaks; all were stuffed with minced pork and pistachios.

Svetlana Koba from Ussury Restaurant whipped up a cake shaped like a ship. But the White House's own cooks, sneaking out of the kitchen to snitch samples, were unimpressed.

"We recently made a white ship for a graduation celebration, and that ship was better than these ships here," scoffed Irina Slyusazenko, a White House cook.

In the end, neither the ships nor the crab won. Yelena Vlasenko from Chaika pastry company took first prize in the confectionary category, while Nina Nesterenko from Kiwi Horizon restaurant in Nakhodka won for cookery.