Russian Word of the Day

As weird as this sounds, sometimes it's the English words in Russian that confuse me, not the Russian words. For instance, all over Kazan these days there are signs on restaurants that read Бизнес-ланч "Business Lunch." "What the heck is that?" I ask the locals. They look at me as if I am an idiot and say, "Those are English words. You should understand them." Well that's just it. I do understand them. In the US a business lunch is a lunch where you do business. It's not the name of an item on a menu.¹

Nowadays in Russia a бизнес-ланч is essentially a particular menu offered at a fixed price. No substitutions, please. I think the best translation for it may be "lunch special" or what some menus lable a prix fixe meal. One of the many restaurants in Kazan that offer such meals is called "Meat House."

My students love this place because you can get meat without mayonaisse or sour cream on it. What? No mayo or sour cream, you say? It can't be run by Russians then. You are correct: the food is prepared by Turks. I was interested in the meal represented on this ad:

They offered it for 149 rubles, which is about 5 bucks. I decided to try it. How well did it match the advertisment? You be the judge:

The drink is lemonade. The lentil soup could have used a bit more salt. The bread was good, but I'm not a fan of bread. The donair (Canadian spelling) is finely shaved chicken accompanied by rice and some cabbage, and the salad is made half of croutons and half of vegetables tossed in what the Russians consider a Caesar sauce, but it doesn't have the sardine flavor that an American Caesar Salad requires. Here are some sample sentence:

Business lunches, in the sense of lunches where you do business, are vital in the US. When I was preparing this blog-entry, I came across a business-lunch link from Microsoft. Apparently they consider it important enough to give some basic guideliness for the event. Read it here for your amusment.

One last grammatical comment: бизнес-ланч is a phrase that is currently in a grammatical no-man's land. Although most people decline it, as a foreign phrase it is sometimes not declined by others. The orthographic dictionary at gramota.ru treats it as declineable, so that's the best approach for a foreigner to use. In the case of the examples above, one of my current native-speaker informants sometimes declined it and sometimes didn't. If it disappoints you that the Russian language is sometimes inconsistent, then you must take advice from about 2 minutes 5 seconds into the sword fight in The Princess Bride: "Get used to disappointment."

¹ Well, this not necessarily 100% true. Probably there are some restaurants somewhere in the US that have "business lunch" written on their menu. My point here is that "business lunch" in the sense of a particular meal selection for a particular price is not a standard phrase in American English.