Have you ever been to a restaurant that made you say “you have got to be kidding me!” when they brought out the food?

I took a high school trip to the Soviet Union in 1985. Being teenagers, we absolutely abhorred the dinners we were served in the hotel, so mostly we subsisted on the candy we brought from home.

One afternoon a couple friends and I ventured out into Leningrad to find a decent meal. Of course, there were no fast food joints or pizza places, just one nondescript restaurant after another. We picked one at random and went in.

It was midafternoon and the place was almost empty. We were seated at a table and handed menus in Russian which we couldn’t understand, and our waiter spoke no English. After a few frustrating minutes of trying to communicate “cheeseburger” to him, he waved his hands impatiently, gathered the menus, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Twenty minutes later he returned with an enormous tray of food. We sat slack jawed as dish after dish of hot food was set on the table. One of my friends said, “But we didn’t order all this,” and the waiter barked something in Russian at him, which I loosely interpreted as, “Shut up and eat.”

There may not have been quite this much food:

But it sure seemed that way at the time.

I whispered to the guys, “How much is all this gonna cost?!” We weren’t exactly flush with rubles.

But we’d figure out how to cross that bridge when we came to it. For now, we gorged on sausages and meat dumplings and baked fish and boiled potatoes until we thought we’d burst, and we left a lot more food than we ate.

When the waiter presented us with the bill, we were stunned for a second time. After figuring out the exchange rate, that meal which could have fed a small army was only $15!