Recommendations from the Kyiv Independent: A food tour of Ukraine (Patreon)

Dear Kyiv Independent members, 

This is Elsa Court, a news editor at the Kyiv Independent. Today I’d like to recommend a series of Ukrainian YouTube videos that aren’t just entertaining and informative, but also have great English subtitles.  

Misha Katsurin is a Ukrainian restaurateur, and together with his friend and filmmaker Anton Ptushkin, he has produced a series of food documentaries on his YouTube channel.

Katsurin grew up in Berdiansk, a city on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast that has been occupied by Russia since February 2022. Ptushkin was born in Luhansk, which has been occupied since 2014, and moved to Kyiv a decade ago. 

Both men grew up in Russian-speaking families and have now, like many other Ukrainians, switched to speaking Ukrainian. The pair are not just exploring food through the documentaries, but also the Ukrainian language and culture from Kharkiv in the northeast to the region of Bessarabia in the southwest. 

The first episode of the series, titled “Food of Kyiv – The Big Guide” was published in October 2022, and now has 2.8 million views. Their gastronomic journey through Ukraine’s capital shows the range of food on offer – from some of the most authentic spots beloved by locals, to popular student hangouts, to high-end restaurants developing avant-garde cuisine. Following the popularity of this video, the pair recently released a second episode dedicated to Kyiv, which already has 1.5 million views. 

Before the full-scale invasion, Katsurin showed his travels to places like Lebanon and Thailand, where he got the inspiration for his menus (one of his restaurants in Kyiv, Thailand Hi, is a favorite of mine). He is now discovering inspiration closer to home. Each episode is around an hour long and features traditional cuisine, historical facts, and the behind-the-scenes stories of local businesses. 

The videos also emphasize that Ukraine is a multicultural country – something that isn’t always apparent in Western media. Through the video on Kharkiv, for example, I learned that the city has the largest community of Vietnamese people in Ukraine, something that becomes clear when Katsurin shows the number of quality Vietnamese restaurants in the city. 

The pair also visit a Georgian restaurant in Kharkiv run by a family who fled the city of Sukhumi in the early 1990s when Russia instigated a war in Georgia’s Abkhazia region. In the episode on Dnipro, the pair highlight the variety of kosher food on offer due to the historically large Jewish population in the city, while the episode on Kyiv shows delicious Central Asian plov (pilaf rice) being cooked in a market outside a local mosque.

Katsurin and Ptushkin are light-hearted, but each episode touches on Russia’s ongoing war in some way, such as showing the work of a restaurant’s volunteering initiative to highlighting a fundraising campaign. I’d really recommend the videos to anyone learning Ukrainian as the subtitles provide a great translation, as well as for anyone interested in Ukraine’s diversity, entrepreneurial spirit, and food culture – or just looking for some recipe inspiration.  

Katsurin’s channel is here https://www.youtube.com/@misha_katsurin/videos

The first video of the series, on Kyiv, is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIkDtgtEQVk 

(Click the settings button on the video to select English subtitles).