How one Ukrainian chef is fighting 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 probably be divided into two: Earlier than you tried my borsch and after you tried my borsch,” Klopotenko instructed Blinken, who dined on the 37-year-old chef’s Kyiv restaurant, 100 rokiv tomu vpered (100 years again to the long run), throughout an official go to. (Usually written “borscht” in English, the stew can also be extensively eaten throughout Jap Europe and Russia.)

Klopotenko is finest recognized 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 tons of of years in the past.

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

“Should you converse concerning the conflict, day after day, it’s not supplying you with good feelings,” Klopotenko says. “However while you cook dinner, you’ve got good feelings. It’s like a continuation of the story about Ukraine.”

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

“That’s the concept of this e book: to offer alternative [to] all individuals who converse English to the touch our delicacies and to place our tradition inside your self,” he says. “I need to share our tradition.”

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

“Should you noticed the movie Don’t Look Up, and so they have been sitting and consuming collectively within the final scene,” he instructed NPR simply after the invasion, referring to the moments within the movie earlier than a comet killed everybody on Earth. “I felt one thing the identical.”

In early 2022, as hundreds 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 used to be standing within the Lviv railway station, I used to be cooking borsch and I noticed the folks … crying as a result of [they were] working from the bombing,” he says. “And I felt like there was no extra future, solely in the future, right now. And it’s nonetheless the identical. [The war] is a part of life.”

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Now, talking at his bustling restaurant, Klopotenko is noticeably extra subdued than he was earlier than the conflict. But along with his green-painted nails, mohawked curls (an tailored Cossack coiffure) and joyous giggle, he nonetheless vibrates with vitality. He waves at a crew organising on the restaurant to tape a scene for Grasp Chef Ukraine, a contest he received in 2015. He talks excitedly about plans to open extra eating places, even exterior 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 with out the sugar, simply frozen borsch. Even for me it was like …. whoa.”

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

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The Soviet Union “killed all our paperwork about meals,” he says, “so we don’t know what Ukrainian meals was like within the sixteenth century or seventeenth century. I’ll dig for it. It’s vital.”

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 conflict carefully and remembers cooking Syrian recipes, “attempting in my method to join with the tradition, to help it.” Then the world started tuning out, as if Syria “had simply disappeared.”

“I don’t need Ukraine to vanish in such a manner,” he says. “That’s my largest motivation in doing what I do.”

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

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