No electricity? No water? No problem when you run a restaurant in Ukraine

Yahoo

17-02-2025

If you're walking in the street in London, you know you might be hit by a car,' says Alex Cooper. 'Here, it's missiles. It doesn't make you a hero.'
It is deep into winter and we are having brunch in Tatar Bunar, in downtown Odesa, one of around 40 restaurants Cooper, 37, owns in Ukraine. Outside, beneath an icy-blue sky, the cold is starting to bite, but inside is a warm, roomy space. Attentive young staff serve classic Ukrainian breakfast dishes: syrnyky (fried curd cheese pancakes), varenyky dumplings, and banush, a kind of cornmeal porridge.
Next month, Cooper and his business partner, Anna Andriienko, 34, will open Tatar Bunar in London's Shoreditch, 1,500 miles west of Odesa. Not only has Ukraine's military defied Putin's invasion; its restaurateurs are doing their bit, too. 'One Russian imperialistic narrative is that there is no such place as Ukraine,' Andriienko says. 'To fight that, we need to open a restaurant in London. Somebody needs to open in Lisbon, Paris, wherever. We need to write Ukrainian music. To prove that the Russian narrative isn't true.'
Running a restaurant is hard enough at the best of times. War does not make it easier. To the usual problems of staff, suppliers, bills, rent and publicity, you can add the threat of annexation, missile attack, blackouts, staff being called up to the front, disrupted supply chains, your customers fleeing, and a thousand other difficulties most British restaurateurs, mercifully, do not have to worry about.
But people still have to eat. While other entrepreneurs fled as soon as Putin's full-scale invasion began, Cooper stayed, partly out of patriotic duty and partly because he realised his skill set – feeding people – was going to be more important than ever. Having started with a cult burger stall, Cooper Burgers, Cooper is now one of the country's leading food entrepreneurs. 'I announced I was going to stay, when very few restaurateurs did. That helped me to rebuild after the first few months of the war. Other people from the industry wanted to work with me, knowing I was going to stay.'
Between the restrictions on fighting-age men leaving Ukraine and the nightly midnight curfew, other leisure options have been limited since Putin's invasion. Restaurants have been a vital outlet for those trying to carry on with life as usual. Cooper has opened more than 10 new restaurants since the invasion and now employs nearly 1,000 people: 'When the war started, your first thought was that you were going to die. Then, you just want to live. You have this sense that you have been given another life, and you want to create more meaningful projects.'
He and Andriienko hope the London restaurant will be a showcase of Ukrainian food, design and culture, and an informal embassy of the optimistic, Western-facing new Ukraine emerging from the conflict. 'We want to create a cool concept and show what we can achieve,' he says. 'We're the same as any other restaurateurs, we just have different backgrounds, and different things have happened to us over the past two years.'
To illustrate their challenges, they invited me to Ukraine to see their operations. Odesa – a few hours' drive from Chișinău in Moldova, the nearest functioning airport – was the natural place to start. Cooper grew up in Tatarbunary, a farming village two hours south-west of the city. 'I rode my bicycle to school in the morning after we'd fed the pigs,' he recalls. 'We'd take apples and swap them for potatoes. I remember eating pelmeni [dumplings] with sour cream from roadside stalls.'
His father, a former schoolteacher, turned to farming as Soviet restrictions eased during perestroika in the late 1980s. A photo on the wall of the Odesa Tatar Bunar shows his father in a field of watermelon farmers. Today, the family farm still supplies ingredients for Cooper's restaurants. The Shoreditch menu will feature a watermelon dish in his father's honour.
A fter breakfast, we walk along a promenade overlooking the sea. Cooper points out landmarks, including the opera house and the ruined Odesa Hotel, destroyed by a missile barrage in September 2023. In peacetime, Odesa was a jewel of Ukraine, known for its tolerance, liberalism and humour. Now, it lies less than 50 miles from the Russian front. Standing on the famous Potemkin Stairs, designed by British engineer John Upton, you sense the menace beyond the horizon. As a strategic port and cultural hub, Odesa has endured constant air raids. The morning before we arrived, a missile destroyed a residential building near Tatar Bunar, injuring more than a dozen people.
Odesans, like many Ukrainians, are phlegmatic about the risks. As we drive through the city, Cooper points out an upper-story flat destroyed by a drone strike. Below the absent roof hangs an optimistic 'For Sale' sign. 'We don't know if the sign came before or after the hit,' he says.
When sirens sound, as they do several times daily, locals consult apps showing what ordnance the radar has detected. The Iranian-made Shahed drones, with their puttering lawnmower noise, are less alarming than Kinzhal or Kalibr cruise missiles. Being so close to the front, Odesa residents often have just minutes to find shelter. Despite risks, the city's beaches reopened last summer, with locals cautiously returning to the sea, once avoided for fear of mines. The first night of our visit, Putin launches the war's heaviest overnight attack: 188 drones and missiles.
Cooper's restaurants have avoided direct hits, though some in Kharkiv, in the east of the country nearest the front, have had to shut. Not every venture has survived. At the shuttered Odesa food market – a collection of indoor street-food traders similar to those worldwide – an enormous red dragon sculpture still dominates the entrance, a relic of the Chinese New Year celebrations when the war began.
Cooper and Andriienko make an intriguing duo; he the bearish country lad with a deadpan sense of humour and patchy English, she the chic Kyivite who is fully bilingual. There are practical reasons for them to team up for the London project. As a man of fighting age, Cooper cannot easily leave Ukraine, even for a business visit. She is managing the British end of the project while he sorts things in Ukraine. In band terms, he is the rhythm section, she is the frontwoman.
Her restaurants have been closer to destruction. The following day, after we have driven the five hours north to Kyiv, Andriienko shows me around Taras Shevchenko Park, near one of the main Kyiv University buildings. Her café, Al'truyist, is just 200 metres away. When the park was hit by a huge missile strike in October 2022, the explosion was so powerful it blew out all the glass from her neighbours' buildings, although Al'truyist was miraculously spared: 'It was terrible. Luckily all my staff were sheltering.'
The daughter of a successful Kyiv businessman, Andriienko toyed with becoming a lawyer before moving into hospitality. As a woman, she can come and go freely, and has been back and forth to Ukraine for months as the London restaurant takes shape.
Compared to the subdued mood in Odesa, Kyiv feels defiant. All of the restaurants we visit are busy. When the air-raid siren goes off, a few diners start to move away, but most stay firmly put. Stopping for lunch at one of Cooper's Middle Eastern concepts, I recognise a ka'ak bread – a distinctive handbag-shaped bread I have only seen at Common Breads, a Lebanese restaurant near London's bustling Victoria station. Andriienko laughs when I point this out. 'We copied it from Common Breads,' she says. 'I saw it on Instagram and sent it to the chefs.' War is no impediment to nicking an idea off social media.
Still, the physical threat is only one of the many ways war has disrupted the restaurant business. Energy is constantly being attacked; electricity is an occasional luxury. Although most of the ingredients for Cooper's restaurants come from within Ukraine, where almost everything grows, the whole supply chain has suffered. 'Ingredients are more expensive, because they're affected by infrastructure,' Andriienko says. 'Labour costs are pretty much the same. But to survive you need a generator, which costs about $20,000.'
'War teaches you that normality may not be normal,' Cooper adds. 'Electricity isn't normal; it's a cool thing to have. Last year was much worse, when we didn't have water. You need to be able to provide a service, whatever is going on.' Blackouts are so common that some restaurants have started providing 'blackout menus' of food they can prepare without electricity.
Blackouts affect suppliers as well as the restaurants themselves. We visit a workshop on the outskirts of Kyiv where two young husband and wife ceramicists, Svetlana and Ivan, are busy working on the crockery for the London restaurant, including special bowls for the borscht and varenyky. 'We work with the electricity when we have it,' Svetlana says. 'And we can do a lot of work without it. But we have a lot of problems finding clay. We were sourcing it from the Donetsk region, which is right by the frontline.'
Staffing is another worry. All men aged 25 to 60 are eligible for military service, bar those with exemptions. Certain key workers are exempt, as are fathers with three children under 18. This has created a paradoxical situation. The usual assumption in war is that a father would worry about a son turning 18 and being called up to fight. In Ukraine, sons worry that because they have reached maturity, their dads will be taken off to the front. On the flight over, Andriienko receives a call from one of the joiners working on furniture for the London restaurant. Three of his staff have been called up to the army; he will be delayed fulfilling her order.
The threat of conscription hangs over diners as well. Delivery has boomed; male diners are choosing to have food brought to them at home rather than risk being caught by a press gang without the right paperwork. Customer bases have changed, too. The kind of middle-class clientele Cooper's restaurants used to attract have left in their millions, their place taken by displaced Ukrainians from the east and south of the country.
'Nobody in my bubble I knew from before the war is still living in Odesa,' Andriienko says. 'And a lot of people have come to Kyiv from the east. They're a different clientele who need different things. They want simplicity. Nobody wants the over-conceptual stuff that Kyiv wanted before the war. Now it's about simpler food at a lower price.'
The menu at Tatar Bunar in London will be southern Ukrainian; including the food around Odesa and Crimea as well as the Ukrainian classics. There will be a chicken Kyiv. Ukrainian cuisine reflects its history, caught between Poland and Russia: dumplings, pork, dill, borscht. The south has benefited from even more cultural mixing. The ancient Greeks and Romans made it along the coast of the Black Sea and into Crimea, leaving a lasting Mediterranean flavour to the cooking there. Roman soldiers stationed at the 'Trajan walls' built through south-western Ukraine to help keep out nomadic horsemen were given land along the walls and brought their own dishes.
Meanwhile, Crimean Tatars, the ethnic Turkic people who were systematically evicted from the peninsula by both the Tsars and the Communists, have a distinctive cuisine of their own, more similar to Greek or Balkan food. The signature dish is chiberek, a deep-fried turnover filled with meat, served with a spiced tomato sauce and yoghurt: perfect drinking food. If the London restaurant can bring the confidence and attention to detail Cooper has kept up in wartime, it will surely be a hit.
Speak to Cooper and Andriienko and it is clear their relationship to the war is not straightforward. When so many have fought and died, there is guilt at being among the lucky ones. But they are also proud to play even a small part in the transformation in Ukrainian identity that has happened over the past three years.
Since the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian culture has boomed: music, theatre, dance, food. Over dinner at Cooper's flat in Kyiv, Oleksandr Kamyshin, President Zelensky's new chief strategic advisor, tells me he sees Cooper's restaurants as part of 'Ukraine 2.0'. In this vision, Ukraine takes the lessons it has learnt from its long and bloody fight, and shares them with the rest of the world in 'military, medical care, drone manufacture, postal services, railways. And thanks to Cooper, restaurants, too.'
Whatever shape the conflict takes now that Donald Trump is US President, a new generation of Ukrainians are asserting their culture. 'We don't want pity,' says Cooper. 'We don't want people feeling they should only go to a Ukrainian restaurant because of the war. The idea is to show the Ukrainian side of things, Ukrainian food, in the most competitive market in the world.'
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