How one Ukrainian chef is fighting for culinary independence

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s most famous chef, Yevhen Klopotenko, calls himself a “culinary independence fighter.” His longtime weapon is borsch, the meaty beet stew that’s synonymous with Ukrainian identity. And he even wielded it last 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 told Blinken, who dined at the 37-year-old chef’s Kyiv restaurant, 100 rokiv tomu vpered (100 years back to the future), during an official visit. (Often written “borscht” in English, the stew is also widely eaten across Eastern Europe and Russia.)

Klopotenko is best known for leading the successful campaign to list borsch on UNESCO’s list of cultural heritage in urgent need of safeguarding. This was part of his longtime quest to, as he calls it, “de-colonize” Ukraine’s cuisine, which he says has been stifled for centuries by Soviet communism and Russian imperialism. Klopotenko has worked for years with historians to pore through Ukrainian literary manuscripts for references about dishes cooked hundreds of years ago.

His English-language cookbook, released earlier this year, The Authentic Ukrainian Kitchen: Recipes from a Native Chef, was forged as Russia’s full-scale war 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.”

Recipes include borsch (of course), including a vegetarian version with a plum butter called levkar, as well small fluffy cheesecakes (syrnyky) from Lviv, garlicky pork roast and buns (pyrizhky) stuffed with a variety of fillings (cabbage and meat). He points out that the recipes are designed for a home cook to make easily.

“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 just before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He was wearing a Christmas sweater, holding a beet and nervously joking that he had stockpiled two years’ worth of buckwheat to help survive a new invasion by “our crazy neighbor.” Days later, as Russian troops marched toward Kyiv, his restaurant, known for its gourmet take on traditional Ukrainian cuisine, became a bomb shelter. Sheltering with his family just outside the capital, Klopotenko cooked like each meal would be their last.

“If you saw the film Don’t Look Up, and they were sitting and eating together in the last scene,” he told NPR just after the invasion, referring to the moments in the film before a comet killed everyone on Earth. “I felt something the same.”

In early 2022, as thousands of Ukrainians fled cities bombed by Russian troops and headed to western Ukraine, Klopotenko drew inspiration from Spanish chef José Andrés and his charity organization World Central Kitchen and opened a pop-up restaurant in the city 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.”

Now, speaking at his bustling restaurant, Klopotenko is noticeably more subdued than he was before the war. Yet with his green-painted nails, mohawked curls (an adapted Cossack hairstyle) and joyous laugh, he still vibrates with energy. He waves at a crew setting up at the restaurant to tape a scene for Master Chef Ukraine, a competition he won in 2015. He talks excitedly about plans to open more restaurants, even outside Ukraine, and relishes telling a story about how his borsch became an ice cream flavor as part of a charity fundraiser for military 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 also cooks on his YouTube channel, where he shows his nearly half-million subscribers how to make not only borsch and other Ukrainian staples but also a good lasagna bolognese. In addition, he travels around Ukraine looking for undiscovered local recipes and wants to peruse the 400-year-old diaries of monks to try to find lost Ukrainian dishes.

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 losing interest in Ukraine’s plight. He’s seen it happen with other long wars, like the one that subsumed Syria. He followed news of that war closely and remembers cooking Syrian recipes, “trying in my way to connect with the culture, to support it.” Then the world began 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.