Ian Zilberkweit gets up from the handmade wooden table at Moscow’s first branch of Le Pain Quotidien, the Belgian bakery-cafe for which he holds the Russian franchise, and grabs a jar from a nearby shelf.

“This is artichoke spread, made in Tunisia,” he says, one of about 100 products Le Pain Quotidien sells in a chain that has widened from its Belgian roots to France, Switzerland, the US, the UK, the Middle East, and now to Russia. “But to get this thing into Russia you need a health certificate, and that’s very tough.