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Time Out
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Tatar Bunar
Tatar Bunar is a very nice place for a meal. Tall, spindly trees grow out of huge pots and the branches drape over tables. Tall windows are hung with elegant white curtains. A buzzing open kitchen sits at the centre and there's a little shaded courtyard out the back. But more than that, it's got a 'this new restaurant is a big deal' feel to it, like joining the three-hour queue for Oma for the first time. Waiters are rushed off of their feet (but handling it), and the place is packed. For many excited guests, this is their first time trying Ukrainian food, and amid a Ukrainian food boom in London (Sino, another Ukrainian restaurant, has just opened in Notting Hill) – things feel exciting. Very exciting. Tartare comes with elderberry capers, pickled cucumbers, and my new favourite discovery, sprats mayo The clientele is, expectedly, a bit posh – we're in Shoreditch after all, and at a restaurant everybody is talking about – but prices here are genuinely reasonable, the food rich and decadent, and the portions generous. We sit up at the bar facing the kitchen, where watch chefs sear meat on the grill and drizzle oil over starters. They are performing a rather serious operation here; the arrival of food is rapid, and you get the feeling waiters have you on a two-hour timer, ready to slap down the bill and greet the next customer. But like I said, it's exciting. My first starter is pickled cherry tomatoes on a bed of lemon yoghurt, and pretty much a mandatory order, noted as Tatar Bunar's 'best dish' on its own menu. It's a lovely, glossy thing, punchy, vinegary and covered in fresh herbs. Before I can catch my breath, the tartare is here too. It was at this point that I began to wish I could slow the whole process down, and spend an hour with each of these lovely little meals, giving them my undying attention. The tartare is served in a whopping great wooden bowl with soft onion bread. It's made from both lamb and beef, and not totally raw as it's seared ever so slightly on the grill. It comes with a tangy hit of tiny elderberry capers, pickled cucumbers, and my new favourite discovery, sprats mayo, which is exactly what it sounds like. And get this – it's topped with bryndza, a mellow sheep's cheese, meaning each bite hits the back of your throat with salty, savoury flavour. Our next starter is mellow and smooth. It's sprats and potatoes, and each element is served in its own little dish – the silky sprats, laid flat, smooth and boneless like a piece of art – the boiled potatoes, naked and buttered and scattered with dill – and the bright pink pickled onions. As a trio they're things of simplicity and beauty, soft and delicate. We're recommended the lamb chops, deeply smoky and tender, and the cheburek, a deep-fried pastry filled with tender minced lamb, similar to a Turkish börek, which is huge, and the perfect crispy, puffy vessel for sour cream and ajika, a spicy, red peppery chill sauce. For dessert, we tried the texturally confusing, but wonderful crepes with cottage cheese and jam, and the soft cheese-filled varenyk, a Ukrainian dumpling, with a crème brûlée top. Speaking of dumplings, there were three different kinds of savoury ones we couldn't squeeze in. Despite the amount of dishes we tried, it's almost unimaginable there's still half a menu here I'm yet to try. I honestly can't wait to come back. The vibe A buzzy Shoreditch restaurant that looks set to become one of London's hardest-to-secure reservations. The food A Ukrainian menu where tomatoes, potatoes, dumplings and grill-fired meats are the stars of the show. The drink Ukrainian wines, vodkas and cocktails, and a beer or two thrown in with the soft drinks.
Forbes
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
The London Restaurants And Bars To Book Now: May 2025
People like to ask us food writers where to eat and drink. The question arrives by text, voice note, sometimes even in that panicked mid-dinner moment when your mate find out their Hinge crush wants to take things offline. No matter the instinct, what they're really asking is this: what are you excited about right now? What's worth the Uber, the splurge, the two-week waitlist? So here you go: five spots I haven't shut up about lately—not necessarily the ones that are the talk of the town, but the ones that stayed with me. Some are new. Others have quietly hit their stride. All of them feel like places doing something honest, brilliant, and slightly obsessive in the best way. There's a Ukrainian restaurant in Shoreditch that nearly made me cry into a dumpling; a chaotic west London dinner party disguised as a night in Cuba; a long-loved bar with a fantastic new food and drink menu—importantly, not just in a 'post it on Stories' kind of way. This month's list isn't about hype. It's about where I'd send someone who really wants to eat and drink well. Minced meat varenyks at Tatar Bunar Quietly extraordinary, Tatar Bunar is co-founded by Ukrainian restaurateurs Anna Andriienko and Alex Cooper, whose group runs more than 30 restaurants back home. While Cooper remains in Odesa helping with humanitarian relief, Andriienko brought their shared vision to life in Shoreditch in a whitewashed space on Curtain Road. TL;Dr? You should go now, while you can still get a table. Importantly, Tatar Bunar is not some surface-level Slavic pastiche. The food, by Kyiv chef Kateryna Tkachuk, is both deeply regional and softly modern: rabbit skewers grilled over grapevines; subtly-spiced tomatoes that even now, writing this, make my mouth water; a creme brûlée packed with varenyk. There's pickled everything, excellent house bread, and a sense of quiet conviction in every dish. My discerning Ukrainian dinner date was so impressed with the restaurant's nostalgic-yet-elevated dishes it almost brought us both to tears; if that's not a five-star review, I'm not sure what is. Address: 152 Curtain Road, EC2A 3AT The Smoke Stack at Heard It's not the first Michelin star chef-backed burger spot in London, but it might be the first one that feels genuinely fun. Heard comes from Jordan Bailey (formerly of two-star Restaurant Sat Bains) and sits in Flat Iron Square with the kind of understated swagger you'd expect from someone who's already proven they can do tweezers and tasting menus. Here, the brief is tighter. Burgers only. But they are serious. The meat is 35-day-aged British beef, cooked smash-style (so it's all crispy fringe and molten core), tucked into roast potato buns. There's tonnes on offer within the many interactions, including house pickles, Ogleshield cheese, and a 'secret sauce' that tastes like someone lab-tested it for umami. They're not reinventing the burger so much as restoring its dignity—less junk-food nostalgia, more clarity, technique, precision. There's cold beer, natural wine, and a casual confidence to the whole thing that extends to its very lovely staff. My advice? Don't skip the Smoke Stack. Address: 1 Flat Iron Square, SE1 0AB Kapara, London A little bit of Tel Aviv on Manette Street, Kapara is brought to us by one of the nicest men in the industry, Israeli chef Eran Tibi (of Bala Baya fame), as a true expression of the food and culture he loves; vibrant, joyful, a little bit wild. The food goes big on texture, spice and indulgence: cloud-like challah with za'atar butter, lamb neck tagine layered with rose harissa and saffron, a beautiful Jerusalem artichoke dish that wouldn't look out of place in a white-tablecloth tasting menu. Which is, in fact, what you should book. The £68 menu is generous and precise, balancing big, traditional flavors with truly inventive new takes—including his 'Ode to the Wilding Women' from his recent appearance on Great British Menu. It's an edit of Tibi's best work to date. Address: 10 Manette Street, W1D 4AL Paradise Under The Stars At a time when half of London's immersive dining 'experiences' feel like poorly lit theatre with mediocre food, Paradise Under the Stars pulls off something arguably difficult: a genuinely good dinner with a genuinely good time. Set in a hall in West Kensington, the space has been transformed into a 1950s Havana supper club—complete with house band, table-side daiquiris, and a perfectly-lit stage that feels like it's always seconds from a dance break. The food is a blend of Cuban-Latin big hitters, generous and joyful: ceviche 'Cojimar', Lechon Asado (mojo-marinated pork loin, slow-roasted spiced pork, salsa, et al),. But what really makes it is the atmosphere. A sparkling energy runs through the entire night: everyone's dressed up, the wine's flowing, and if you don't end up dancing by the second course, you're the only one. Address: 9 Beaumont Avenue W14 9LP The Glade Bar at Sketch It's easy to forget, between the Instagrammable egg-pod loos and velvet maximalism, that Sketch is still one of the most exacting hospitality operations in London. Case in point: The Glade Bar. Long seen as the fanciful bar you passed through on your way to afternoon tea, it's now staking a claim as a destination in its own right with a serious new cocktail programme and a renewed focus on luxury drinking. Bar Director Martino Franchi has built something ambitious here: a 21-strong cocktail list divided into three sections—Roots (for classics), Alchemy (for reimaginings), and Essence (for non-alcoholic drinks that aren't an afterthought). The kind of menu where even an Espresso Martini has a plot twist; the Alchemy version is crystal clear, distilled for clarity, while the Essence edition delivers full intensity with zero alcohol, if you were wondering. A Negroni gets smoked, a Gin Basil Smash gets yuzu and pepper, a Rum Punch gets clarified with milk. And they all look as good as they taste. Basically, you can now sit under the mossy canopy, sip something special, and snack on lobster rolls without ever touching the dining room proper. Address: 9 Conduit Street, W1S 2XG
The Guardian
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Tatar Bunar, London E2: ‘No faff, no lectures. Just dinner, and lots of it' – restaurant review
Tatar Bunar, a new Ukrainian restaurant in Shoreditch, east London, is styled as quaintly and charmingly rustic: wooden-fronted, with sage curtains, glass-panelled doors and stacks of higgledy-piggledy plates artfully arranged on shelves. Then there's the food: sprats, potato latkes, varenyky, borscht and an abundance of wild mushrooms, and all of it influenced by chef Alex Cooper's home town of Tatarbunary in southern Ukraine. It's no mean feat to take on a corner of Curtain Road just yards from the shrieking neon ballpit that is the Ballie Ballerson cocktail bar and a Simmonds 'fun pub', and somehow create Tatar Bunar's nigh-rural ambience, or the odd sense that it's been here since for ever. But then, Tatar Bunar is Ukrainian, so in recent years Cooper and his co-owner, Anna Andriienko, have faced down far bigger problems than tricky interior design. Their new restaurant, the owners say, is an attempt to open up Ukrainian cuisine to a British audience. During the build and launch, Cooper remained in his homeland, where he uses the pair's original restaurant as a food distribution point, while Andriienko was based in London. The result – featuring Ukrainian ceramics and materials from the Carpathian region in the country's southwest, as well as putting the cooking in the very capable hands of Kate Tkachuk – certainly feels like a mini satellite version of their successful mothership, Tatar Bunar in Odesa. What Tatar Bunar certainly does not feel like, however, is 'a humble little restaurant run by proud people from a war-blighted country to keep their hope alive, etc', or any other such patronising nonsense. This is a confident, expertly staged, rather sexy dining spot with flattering, soft peachy lighting, Bessarabian wagyu on the grill and Black Sea yafe nagar by the glass. In fact, it's all rather glam: servers are clad in floor-length, rust-coloured gowns and the bill arrives with a postcard of a Ukrainian shepherd at twilight. The crowd, when I visited, were in the main tall, sharp cheek-boned, model-esque types speaking Slavic languages, and within minutes of entering I muttered to myself: 'This is going to be a terribly hard place to get into within a fortnight.' For a start, at a time when the London restaurant scene is awash with pricey European small plates that send you home hungry and angry, Tatar Bunar dishes up whopping great portions of sating carbs, cream and potatoes. Take the potato latkes with creamy wild mushrooms, which for £12 is a satisfying bowl of earthy joy. Or the £13 sprats 'starter', featuring roughly 10 fish, all boned, flattened, salted and served with a bowl of buttered boiled potatoes and a mound of pickled red onion. Or the truly delicious Bunar tartare: a semi-cooked lamb/beef tartare, if such a contradiction even exists, with a hunk of grilled bread. Similarly, there is nothing slinky or measly about the varenyky, or dumplings, offering. A varenyk, I have learned, is akin to a Polish pierogi that, aesthetically, verges on a Jamaican patty. They are big, plump and here stuffed with minced meat or cabbage, or more mushroom and peppery potato. By the time we had finished those 'small' plates and were moving on to mains, we were already well aware that we had chronically over-ordered. But who could blame us? I've spent 12 months being sold four small artichokes alone on a plate for £22. In modern London, no one actually expects to be fed any more; these days, it's more about the experience. Then along comes Tatar Bunar and its luscious lamb chops with show-stopping spicy pickled tomatoes. Oh, those tomatoes … so sweet, so powerful. And chunks of grilled cod with soft flakes, crisp skin and a generous pile of buttered samphire. No faff, no fuss, no lecture with each course, no long-winded explanation as to the cooking techniques involved, and no hovering or unwelcome input at all. Just dinner, and lots of it. Regardless of the lack of tableside lectures, I picked up a lot about Ukrainian cookery during the course of our meal, or at least Cooper and Tkachuk's interpretation of it. Does the crisp-topped, generous, two-person portion of creme brulee strictly need to have an unexpected layer of pleasingly stodgy dumplings in the base of the dish? Well, yes, I rather think it does. And the crepes – short, fatly stuffed and folded, one filled with cheese, one with berries and a third with rich, black, fragrant poppy seed sauce – came in a bowl of glorious custard. Tatar Bunar is indulgent, delicious and a breath of fresh air. And it's already most definitely a highlight of 2025. Tatar Bunar 152 Curtain Road, London EC2, 07771 013190 Open dinner only, Tues-Sun, 6-10.30pm (10pm Sun). From about £50 a head à la carte, plus drinks and service
Yahoo
17-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
No electricity? No water? No problem when you run a restaurant in Ukraine
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.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
17-02-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
No electricity? No water? No problem when you run a restaurant in Ukraine
'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. After 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.'
