I have been thinking on how to celebrate my birthday, I thought of inviting my parents to my favorite restaurant. When I brought it up, they were all upset “why don’t you invite us to your home? Why don’t you cook for us? Restaurant is all reheated food, home cooked fresh food is much better” etc. We have lived in Europe for almost my whole life, I don’t really understand what’s wrong with going out to eat or why they expect me to invite them to my house and prepare a festive meal on my birthday.
What does that have to do with being russian?
I get the sense that it’s very common or at least used to be common in Soviet Union to always invite your friends to your home and treat them to home made meals when there was something to celebrate. It seems that going out to restaurants used to be not an option for whatever reason, but I can only guess.
In Soviet Russia the restaurant is you!
You do understand that in communist Russia there were very few restaurants, and only the select few could afford to get in and eat there? Eating out wasn’t a thing at all.
My Russian parents go out for every occasion because they would rather have someone else cook and clean. Plus the food is much more diverse and usually better cooked.
Judging by how now in Russia there are hundreds of thousands of restaurants, I would say that not all Russian parents prefer home cooked meals. But yours do.
I have many russian (+ukrainian/kazakhstan etc.) friends and in fact they have a somewhat different attitude to food and restaurants as compared to europeans.
From my point of view they enjoy preparing food together, everyone brings something with them (salad, pickles, vodka… all of course self made), whereas in european countries I feel its more expected that the host provides the food already on the table or you go to a restaurant.