From hot dogs with homemade mustard, in the kitchenette of the mother’s house, to the first restaurant with strippers to attract customers and a special light projector used personally to check every morning, after cleaning the place, that there was no dust or crumbs under the tables, up to the oysters served in the Kremlin or the ‘millionaire’s cheesecake’ offered in one of its restaurants. Evgheny Prigozhin’s leap of species took place in 2014, thanks to the natural reservoir of rations for the military. When the ex-convict food entrepreneur extends his economic interests to the mercenaries he places at the disposal of the Kremlin and his adventures around the world, offering Russia’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy posture a flexible armed arm unrelated to the constraints of the law and rules.
While discussing the role of his Wagner in the siege of Bakhmut or the coordination, or otherwise, of the mercenaries with the regular soldiers, it is perhaps useful to recall the origins of the empire built by ‘Putin’s cook’ who, once out of prison, at the beginning of the 1990s, having completed a sentence, the second, after a first one with probation, 13 years in prison for theft with assault, sells hot dogs on the streets of Leningrad, preparing the sauce with his own hands which he flavored sandwiches, earning the equivalent of a thousand dollars a month, net of the one hundred euros per kiosk he paid to organized crime for protection. One version, the one illustrated by Prigozhin in 2011 in an interview with Gorod 812, alternative, for Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Democracy foundation, to that of the money accumulated in the betting round, where Vladimir Putin had the delegation, as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg , gambling and, since 1993, the granting of licenses for the activities of the sector.
However, the money is reinvested in a grocery chain, “Contrast”. The business in neo-capitalist Russia yielded enough to lead the unscrupulous but meticulous Prigozhin to open first a wine shop and then, on Vasilievsky Island, a restaurant, ‘Staraya Stamozhnya’ (House of Traditions, maybe he didn’t know it then but he took the seed of Putin’s ideology) which boasts on its menu the millionaire’s cheeskake, stewed duck leg with sauerkraut, scallops with celery mousse and creamy sauce. He chose as partner Tony Gear, former administrator of the Savoy in London and in those years responsible for the management of the first luxury hotels in the city.
At first, strippers performed in his club to attract customers, but then, given the high quality of the food served there, their presence was no longer necessary. Regular customers include former mayor Anatoly Sobchak and his deputy, Putin or the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich who hired Prigozhin for catering when he received the Queen of Spain at her home in St. Petersburg in 2001 (the musician invited the cook to the concert for his birthday at the Barbican gala concert the following year).
The new President Putin brought the then Japanese Premier Yoshiro Mori to the House of Traditions in April 2000. The Russian President, the cook later explained, appreciated the fact that the patron had no problems in personally serving the table. For this reason, he organizes his birthday with him in 2003. In the meantime, Prigozhin had opened a second restaurant on a boat, the “New Island”, where Putin took the then French President Jacque Chirac in July 2001, to taste Filet with black truffles, caviar on ice and gingerbread served with prunes. This became a custom: the President likes to bring visiting foreign dignitaries to St. Petersburg, then to dinner at Prigozhin’s, as he did with George W. Bush, or, with his catering, to the Hermitage (with the then ) or in the Kremlin, for Dima Rousseff or Narendra Modi. Prigozhin becomes ‘Putin’s cook’.
In 2009, he opens the first and only private restaurant in the State Duma. And it provides catering for the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, as well as organizing the gala dinners for the inauguration of President Dmitry Medvedev.
Thanks to his high-level contacts, and a company founded in the 1990s, Concord, Prigozhin began to obtain lucrative contracts to provide catering for public entities. In 2009, he supplies the canteens of St. Petersburg without premises for preparing food and for this he opens a plant in Yanino, on the outskirts of the city, which will be visited by Putin, accompanied by Prigozhin in a white coat. In 2012 it acquired the contract for meals for Moscow’s canteens for 10.5 billion rubles (220 million euros) and in 2015 another lucrative contract with the defense appeared, for 9 billion rubles.
The company’s slogans are reminiscent of the projector light of the early days: “each of our banquettes is like a work of art”, “We pay great attention to every detail!”, “Tailor-made, chic and just for you”, ” we don’t follow trends, we create them”. But they don’t convince the parents of the children who fell ill in a Moscow school after having lunch at the canteen served by the company, so that they sue.
Another donut without a hole from the restaurant tycoon is that of the fast food chain, Blindonalts, based on blinis in all sauces, filled with jam, meat or potatoes. But the last of the venues closed in 2011.
In the summer of 2014, in the middle of the Donbass operation, Prigozhin asked the Ministry of Defense for land for the training of “volunteers” without ties to the official apparatus but which could be used in the war in Moscow. “The order comes from the Pope”, he said then, as his interlocutors recall, using one of the nicknames used to speak of the President, as reported by the Guardian. He was granted land in Molkino, in the south of the country, where a structure was erected that looked like a colony for children.