Ukrainian chef fights for culinary independence: NPR

KYIV, Ukraine – Ukraine's most famous chef, Yevhen Klopotenko, calls himself a “fighter of culinary independence.” His longtime weapon is borscht, the meaty beet stew that is synonymous with Ukrainian identity. And last month he even used it on Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“Your life will be divided into two parts: before you taste my borscht and after you taste my borscht,” Klopotenko told Blinken, who was having dinner at the 37-year-old chef's Kiev restaurant. 100 rokiv tomu vpered (100 Years Back to the Future), during an official visit. (The stew is often spelled “borscht” in English and is also commonly eaten in Eastern Europe and Russia.)

Klopotenko is best known as the leader of the successful campaign to add borscht to UNESCO's list of cultural heritage in need of urgent protection. This was part of his long-standing effort to “decolonize,” as he calls it, Ukrainian cuisine, which he says has been oppressed for centuries by Soviet communism and Russian imperialism. Klopotenko has been working with historians for years to find references to dishes prepared hundreds of years ago in Ukrainian literary manuscripts.

His English-language cookbook, published earlier this year, Authentic Ukrainian Cuisine: Recipes from a Local Chefwas falsified as Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine raged.

“When you talk about the war day after day, it doesn’t trigger good feelings,” says Klopotenko. “But when you cook, you have good feelings. It’s like a continuation of the story about Ukraine.”

Kitchen workers prepared meals at Yevhen Klopotenko's restaurant 100 rokiv tomu vpered in Kiev, Ukraine, on August 14.

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Recipes include borscht (of course), including a vegetarian version with plum butter called Levkaras well as small fluffy cheesecakes (Syrnyky) from Lviv, garlic roast pork and rolls (Pyrizhky) filled with various fillings (cabbage and meat). He points out that the recipes are designed so that they can be easily prepared by amateur chefs.

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

NPR first met Klopotenko shortly before Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He wore a Christmas sweater, held a turnip and nervously joked that he had hoarded two years' worth of buckwheat to prepare for a new invasion.” Days later, as Russian troops marched toward Kiev, his restaurant, known for its gourmet take on traditional Ukrainian cuisine, became a bomb shelter. Klopotenko was staying with his family just outside the capital and cooked as if every meal was her last.

“If you’ve seen the movie Don't look upand in the last scene they were sitting together eating,” he told NPR shortly after the invasion, referring to the moments in the film before a comet killed everyone on Earth. “I felt something similar.”

When thousands of Ukrainians fled cities bombed by Russian troops in early 2022 and made their way to western Ukraine, Klopotenko was inspired by the Spanish chef José Andrés and his charity World Central Kitchen opened a pop-up restaurant in the city of Lviv.

“I stood at the Lviv train station, cooking borscht and saw people… crying because [they were] “I’m running away from the bombing,” he says. “And I felt like there was no future, just one more day, today. And it's still the same. [The war] is part of life.”

Ready-made meals wait to be picked up by the waiter in the kitchen of Yevhen Klopotenko's restaurant 100 rokiv tomu vpered in Kiev on August 14.

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When Klopotenko speaks now in his busy restaurant, he is much more reserved than before the war. But with his green painted nails and mohawk curls (an adapted Cossack hairstyle) and joyful laughter, still vibrating with energy. He waves to a team lining up at the restaurant to record a scene for “Master Chef Ukraine,” a competition he won in 2015. He excitedly talks about plans to open more restaurants, including outside of Ukraine, and enjoys telling a story about how his borscht became an ice cream flavor as part of a military drone charity fundraiser.

“You eat meat ice cream,” he says. “It's ice cream without sugar, just frozen borscht. Even for me it was like…. Wow.”

Klopotenko also cooks on his YouTube channel, where he shows his nearly half a million subscribers how to make not only borscht and other Ukrainian staples, but also a good lasagne bolognese. In addition, he travels around Ukraine in search of undiscovered local recipes and wants to search for lost Ukrainian dishes in the 400-year-old diaries of monks.

People have dinner at Yevhen Klopotenko's restaurant 100 rokiv tomu vpered in Kiev on August 14.

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The Soviet Union “destroyed all our documents about food,” he says, “so we don't know what Ukrainian food was like in the 16th or 17th centuries.” I'll dig for it. It is important.”

Klopotenko senses that the world is losing interest in Ukraine's plight in the face of new conflicts and atrocities. He has seen this happen in other long wars, such as the war that took Syria. He followed news of that war closely and remembers cooking Syrian recipes and “trying, in my own way, to connect with the culture and support it.” Then the world started shutting down as if Syria had “just disappeared.”

“I don’t want Ukraine to disappear like this,” he says. “That’s my biggest motivation in what I do.”

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