Savor Scout › Food guides › Russian food
How to find good Russian food
Russian restaurants in the US range from cafeterias serving immigrant neighbourhoods to loud banquet halls built for weddings. The cafeterias usually have the better food; the banquet halls have the better night out.
What separates a good one from a bad one
- Pelmeni made in-house — Small meat dumplings, boiled and served with sour cream or butter. Handmade ones are tender with a thin wrapper; frozen ones are heavy.
- Borscht with sourness — Beet soup with meat stock, cabbage and a sour balance from vinegar or lemon, finished with sour cream and dill. A sweet borscht is a lazy one.
- Salads in mayonnaise — Olivier and herring under a fur coat are rich, layered salads built on mayonnaise. Good versions taste of the vegetables and fish, not just dressing.
- Dill everywhere — Fresh dill is the dominant herb. A kitchen generous with it is cooking the food properly.
- A deli counter — Many Russian places double as delis selling smoked fish, sausages and pickles. A busy counter means fresh stock.
What to order
- Pelmeni — With sour cream.
- Borscht — With rye bread.
- Blini — Thin pancakes with sour cream and caviar, or filled with meat or farmer cheese.
- Beef stroganoff — Beef in a sour-cream mushroom sauce.
- Herring under a fur coat — Layers of herring, beets, potato and mayonnaise. Better than it sounds.
Where to find Russian food
Open listings put 113 Russian restaurants across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.
Cities with the most
New York, NY 14 Seattle, WA 3 Rockville, MD 3 Denver, CO 3
Campuses with the most within a mile
Touro University 4 New School University 4 NYU 4 Baruch 4 FIT 3 KCC 3
A few to start with
- Matryoshka — New York, NY
88 Fulton St, New York - Piroshky Piroshky — Seattle, WA
1000 Pine St, Seattle - Golden Samovar — Rockville, MD
201 N Washington St, Rockville - Red Square Euro Bistro — Denver, CO
1512 Larimer St #38r, Denver
Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.
How Savor Scout looks for it
The search reads for pelmeni, borscht, blini and Russian or Eastern European in reviews, and for deli counters and banquet halls, then lets your sentence decide which one you are after.
Looking in a particular city?
Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.
- New York, NY
- Los Angeles, CA
- Chicago, IL
- Houston, TX
- Philadelphia, PA
- Phoenix, AZ
- San Antonio, TX
- San Diego, CA
- Dallas, TX
- San Jose, CA
- Austin, TX
- Indianapolis, IN
- Jacksonville, FL
- San Francisco, CA
- Columbus, OH
- Charlotte, NC
- Fort Worth, TX
- Detroit, MI
- El Paso, TX
- Memphis, TN
- Seattle, WA
- Denver, CO
- Washington, DC
- Boston, MA
- Nashville, TN
- Baltimore, MD
- Oklahoma City, OK
- Louisville, KY
- Portland, OR
- Las Vegas, NV
- Milwaukee, WI
- Albuquerque, NM
- Tucson, AZ
- Fresno, CA
- Sacramento, CA
- Long Beach, CA
- Kansas City, MO
- Mesa, AZ
- Virginia Beach, VA
- Atlanta, GA
- Colorado Springs, CO
- Omaha, NE
- Raleigh, NC
- Miami, FL
- Oakland, CA
- Minneapolis, MN
- Tulsa, OK
- Cleveland, OH
- Wichita, KS
- Arlington, TX
- New Orleans, LA
- Bakersfield, CA
- Tampa, FL
- Honolulu, HI
- Aurora, CO
- Anaheim, CA
- Santa Ana, CA
- St. Louis, MO
- Riverside, CA
- Corpus Christi, TX
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- Where to eat when you're celebrating something
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