Ukrainian chef fights to save his country’s cuisine

“READY to cook?” Standing behind the island in his studio kitchen, looking at me through the screen, Yevhen Klopotenko is getting ready to teach me how to make Ukrainian dumplings.

- OLGA MASSOV

The sun streams through his expansive windows; the space feels peaceful. If you were in my kitchen observing the Zoom, you'd never know that on the other end of this call is a war zone.

We're separated by continents. I’m safely ensconced in a Maryland suburb, while the Ukrainian chef and restaurateur is in Kyiv, living through another year of the war with Russia. We're both surrounded by natural light, despite the seven-hour time difference.

I had originally planned to cook with Klopotenko in person when he was scheduled to be in the US to promote his second English cookbook, The Authentic Ukrainian Kitchen, published last spring by Voracious. But since the Russian invasion, Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 have been forbidden from leaving the country due to martial law, and those 25 and older can be drafted. So we're cooking virtually.

Klopotenko, 38, is tall and lanky, with a mop of curly hair and fingernails painted in blue and yellow, the colours of the Ukrainian flag. His gaze is sharp, with a twinkle of defiance. This is, after all, the man who in 2020 started the petition with Unesco to recognise borshch as part of Ukrainian national heritage, and got his wish in 2022 - the same year Russia launched its brutal full-scale invasion of his country.

As he writes in his cookbook introduction, his raison d’étre is to improve the food culture in Ukraine and raise awareness of its culinary legacy.

Klopotenko had long understood borshch’s significance to the nation’s sense of self, as the dish is often mistaken for being Russian. But the public reaction when it won its Unesco recognition still surprised even him. Millions of Ukrainians woke up one day eating just borshch, but when they went to sleep, they were eating “a world heritage dish. ... It’s as if everyone had said, ‘We're ready to invite you to be a part of the world.’ We were finally on the map,” he says.