Alexander Isayev

Age: 46 years

Tastes are not disputed, they are spoken about. Alexander Isaev is the voice of street-food festivals and a former voice of Kaliningrad radio stations BAS (remember it?!), Maximum, Baltic Plus. People listen to him and trustingly call him Sanych. His background includes a radio program about the best Kaliningrad music, Number One, which resulted in five compilations on the Number One Publishing label. But Isaev’s main achievement is a change in attitude toward street food and the culture of takeaway consumption.

Since 2014, gastro-enthusiast Sanych has been running the largest street food forums and festivals in Russia. His «menu» includes more than fifty gastronomic events in Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, Kursk, Miass, Kaluga, and other cities, as well as five international and all-Russian educational gastronomic forums with the participation of food experts from Great Britain, Germany, Mexico, Hong Kong, Portugal, Ireland, and other countries.

The scale is evidenced by the two major All-Russian gastronomic forums for local product and street food producers, which were held in Kaliningrad in 2020. More than 100 people from 50 Russian regions participated in the forums.

About 60 projects from 20 cities of the country took part in the all-Russian street food exhibition Kaliningrad street food picnic, organized the same year under covid restrictions, and in 2021 they managed to gather gastronomic festivals: in Zelenogradsk, Kurchatov, and Kaluga.

Kaliningrad Street Food is not only a local food festival. The task of the project is to find unique local products and concepts from any region of Russia to develop and promote them all over the country. It is, therefore, not surprising that Alexander Isaev is a member of the expert commission of the federal agency of Rostourism.

On top of this — the annual European street food awards, which he organizes in Russia.