What is Russian table service?

In Russian service, the food is sent out of the kitchen piping hot when the time is right for it, and offered to diners by waiters, serving from a diner's left side. Meats are sent out of the kitchen already carved on platters.

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Promotion

Russian service is a form of table service.

Russians have been known for revolutions from time to time, and they also caused a revolution in the dining room in terms of how food was served. In Russian service, diners are served their food already dished out for them on plates. This was a huge change when the practice arrived in Western Europe in the early 1800s. In the classic, “old” French way (1600s to mid-1800s), as well as English service, all the dishes for a particular course were put on the table in dishes, and you helped yourself, taking what interested you (if you could get to it.) Carving was done at the table, and hot dishes would frequently get cold, especially if they were out of reach on the other side of a crowded table. In Russian service, the food is sent out of the kitchen piping hot when the time is right for it, and offered to diners by waiters, serving from a diner’s left side. Meats are sent out of the kitchen already carved on platters. This innovation reduced crowding on tables, and gave the chef more control, so that the dishes he meant to be experienced hot would be.

Larouuse Gastronomique (1977) says,

“The service à la russe, popularized by Urban Dubois round about 1860, is less rich, less representative and expressive of luxury, but it has the advantage of meeting in full the imperious demands of the table to “serve hot”. The fundamental rule of this service is that everything should be organized in advance to this end… In service à la russe everything can be served piping hot if whoever is in charge of the kitchen can calculate from the time for which the meal is fixed the moment which he must begin to dish up, working out for this purpose the time taken in cooking and the exact instant at which the food must be presented to the guests.”

Larouuse Gastronomique (1988) says,

“It was Prince Alexander Borisovitch Kourakine, the tsar’s ambassador to Paris during the Second Empire [Ed: Emperor Napoleon III, 1852 – 1870], who introduced service à la russe into high society, from where it spread through the catering world. For the grand dinners he gave at the embassy he launched a new form of service, which Urbain Dubois popularized around 1880 [Ed: sic, Larousse revised the date from 1860 to 1880] and introduced to middle-class homes… The aim was to eat hot dishes as hot as possible; instead of leaving guests to choose from a variety of dishes, the order was arranged in advance and the dishes presented one after the other…. It was easier to serve dishes hot, as a set time for the meal allowed the chef to calculate cooking times accordingly. In service à la russe the guests are divided into groups of 8, 10, or 12, each of which is served by a maître d’hôtel who is instructed in advance which guests to serve first…” The food historian Alan Davidson noted the social changes this change in service style caused in wealthier homes:

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Promotion

“This new style of table service provided for dishes being served to guests at their seats by servants who handed them round. It therefore required more servants. There was also the need for table decorations to take up the spaces which the dishes themselves would have occupied under the old system. Valerie Mars (1994) has drawn attention to the difficulty in discerning when the new system was first introduced and to the considerable controversy which it brought about in aristocratic or plutocratic circles in England, where some opposition and incomprehension persisted until almost the end of the century. She observes that Mrs Beeton (1861) ‘advised against dinners à la russe in households without sufficient resources’, i.e. the sort of household for whose mistresses she was writing.”

Literature and Lore

In “Lady Chesterfield’s Letters to Her Daughter”, Lady Constance Chesterfield writes disapprovingly of the new Russian service invading English dining rooms:

cooksinfo.com - Russian service - CooksInfo Food Encyclopaedia

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