How one Ukrainian chef is preventing for culinary independence

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s most well-known chef, Yevhen Klopotenko, calls himself a “culinary independence fighter.” His longtime weapon is borsch, the meaty beet stew that’s synonymous with Ukrainian identification. And he even wielded it final month on Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“Your life will be divided into two: Before you tried my borsch and after you tried my borsch,” Klopotenko informed Blinken, who dined on the 37-year-old chef’s Kyiv restaurant, 100 rokiv tomu vpered (100 years again to the longer term), throughout an official go to. (Typically written “borscht” in English, the stew can be broadly eaten throughout Japanese Europe and Russia.)

Klopotenko is greatest identified for main the profitable marketing campaign to checklist borsch on UNESCO’s checklist of cultural heritage in pressing want of safeguarding. This was a part of his longtime quest to, as he calls it, “de-colonize” Ukraine’s delicacies, which he says has been stifled for hundreds of years by Soviet communism and Russian imperialism. Klopotenko has labored for years with historians to pore by way of Ukrainian literary manuscripts for references about dishes cooked a whole lot of years in the past.

His English-language cookbook, launched earlier this yr, The Genuine Ukrainian Kitchen: Recipes from a Native Chef, was solid as Russia’s full-scale battle on Ukraine raged.

“If you speak about the war, day after day, it’s not giving you good emotions,” Klopotenko says. “But when you cook, you have good emotions. It’s like a continuation of the story about Ukraine.”

Kitchen employees ready meals in Yevhen Klopotenko’s restaurant 100 rokiv tomu vpered in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Aug. 14.

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Recipes embrace borsch (after all), together with a vegetarian model with a plum butter referred to as levkar, as nicely small fluffy cheesecakes (syrnyky) from Lviv, garlicky pork roast and buns (pyrizhky) full of quite a lot of fillings (cabbage and meat). He factors out that the recipes are designed for a house prepare dinner to make simply.

“That’s the idea of this book: to give opportunity [to] all people who speak English to touch our cuisine and to put our culture inside of yourself,” he says. “I want to share our culture.”

NPR first met Klopotenko simply earlier than Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He was sporting a Christmas sweater, holding a beet and nervously joking that he had stockpiled two years’ price of buckwheat to assist survive a brand new invasion by “our crazy neighbor.” Days later, as Russian troops marched towards Kyiv, his restaurant, identified for its connoisseur tackle conventional Ukrainian delicacies, grew to become a bomb shelter. Sheltering together with his household simply outdoors the capital, Klopotenko cooked like every meal can be their final.

“If you saw the film Don’t Look Up, and they were sitting and eating together in the last scene,” he informed NPR simply after the invasion, referring to the moments within the movie earlier than a comet killed everybody on Earth. “I felt something the same.”

In early 2022, as 1000’s of Ukrainians fled cities bombed by Russian troops and headed to western Ukraine, Klopotenko drew inspiration from Spanish chef José Andrés and his charity group World Central Kitchen and opened a pop-up restaurant within the metropolis of Lviv.

“I was standing in the Lviv railway station, I was cooking borsch and I saw the people … crying because [they were] running from the bombing,” he says. “And I felt like there was no more future, only one day, today. And it’s still the same. [The war] is part of life.”

Ready meals wait to be picked up by the waiter within the kitchen of Yevhen Klopotenko’s restaurant 100 rokiv tomu vpered in Kyiv on Aug. 14.

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Now, talking at his bustling restaurant, Klopotenko is noticeably extra subdued than he was earlier than the battle. But together with his green-painted nails, mohawked curls (an tailored Cossack coiffure) and joyous chortle, he nonetheless vibrates with vitality. He waves at a crew establishing on the restaurant to tape a scene for Grasp Chef Ukraine, a contest he gained in 2015. He talks excitedly about plans to open extra eating places, even outdoors Ukraine, and relishes telling a narrative about how his borsch grew to become an ice cream taste as a part of a charity fundraiser for navy drones.

“You eat meat ice cream,” he says. “It’s ice cream without the sugar, just frozen borsch. Even for me it was like …. whoa.”

Klopotenko additionally cooks on his YouTube channel, the place he exhibits his almost half-million subscribers find out how to make not solely borsch and different Ukrainian staples but additionally a great lasagna bolognese. As well as, he travels round Ukraine in search of undiscovered native recipes and needs to peruse the 400-year-old diaries of monks to attempt to discover misplaced Ukrainian dishes.

Individuals eat dinner in Yevhen Klopotenko’s restaurant 100 rokiv tomu vpered in Kyiv on Aug. 14.

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The Soviet Union “killed all our documents about food,” he says, “so we don’t know what Ukrainian food was like in the 16th century or 17th century. I will dig for it. It’s important.”

Klopotenko senses that the world, immersed in new conflicts and atrocities, is shedding curiosity in Ukraine’s plight. He’s seen it occur with different lengthy wars, just like the one which subsumed Syria. He adopted information of that battle carefully and remembers cooking Syrian recipes, “trying in my way to connect with the culture, to support it.” Then the world started tuning out, as if Syria “had just disappeared.”

“I don’t want Ukraine to disappear in such a way,” he says. “That’s my biggest motivation in doing what I do.”

NPR’s Polina Lytvynova contributed to this report from Kyiv.