25: The Sofa Soldier of Kharkiv

A chef's diary from a country under siege. With recipes.

Hi there,

It’s a strange feeling to speak with someone who may be killed at any moment. You ask the normal things–how are you doing?; what did you do yesterday?--and you bond over the things you share—a love of dogs, a fondness for khachapuri. But all the while one of you is sitting safe and warm in her home, and the other is in an apartment with bombed out windows, listening to the mortars fall, and wondering if this is the one.

There are so many things that are profoundly shocking about the war in Ukraine. But one of them is the way in which ordinary people—living in lovely European cities, posting on Instagram, getting together with friends for coffee and wine, working as teachers, sale clerks, doctors, plumbers, journalists, waiters, bartenders and chefs—have overnight seen their days upended, their homes and cities destroyed, their lives and the lives of everyone they love endangered. 

Their ordinariness sends a chill down the back. I suspect I’m not alone in having spent a good part of these past 17 days trying to imagine what I would do if it were me in Kyiv or Mariupol, living my ordinary life until Russian bombs started falling. And all the while knowing that war is impossible to imagine until you are in it. 

So for the next while, I’m going to let Ukrainians in the restaurant and bar community describe it themselves. I’m going to publish their accounts and interviews here in fairly quick succession (or at least ‘quick’ in Bord terms) because the situation there is urgent, and I’m removing the paywall for the same reason. But should their stories inspire you to subscribe—or send a gift subscription to someone—I  will, for the foreseeable future, donate the fees to World Central Kitchen, which is working to feed both the military in Ukraine and refugees fleeing into Poland, and Cook for Ukraine, an international campaign by the hospitality community that is raising funds for Unicef’s work with children and families in Ukraine. 

I know this isn’t the reason you signed up to receive Bord. But I hope you find these stories of these ordinary people in the hospitality industry, as moving as I do.  

Thank you for reading,

Lisa

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Igor Mezencev (photo by Dima Bahta)...

Igor Mezencev is a chef and the founder of ТОПОТ (“Stomp”), a program that takes chefs into the wilderness with botanists, hunters, and other experts, and teaches them to cook with what they find. He also cooks at a bar in Kharkiv where the menu consists almost entirely of Ukrainian ingredients. If you attended the 50 Best ceremony in Brussels last year, you may have met him there.

Along with his wife Anna and their French bulldog Josep, Igor lives in Saltovka, (a neighborhood in Kharkiv that has been under the heavy shelling in recent days). On February 23, they took Josep to the vet where the dog, much to their despair, was diagnosed with heart disease. After, he went to work where he continued developing the new menu. He went home in the evening, and drank wine with Anna. A few hours later, the invasion began.

Below, his account, lightly edited, of the siege:

 On the first day, the dog woke me up. Half an hour later, the shells came. My wife told me to come to the window, and even though I heard her, I couldn’t move. She repeated herself, look what is happening, but I was paralyzed, I could not even move my hand. I understood the war had come. 

Finally, the noise stopped and I went to the window. It was 5 am and the horizon was red with fire. Normally, I love to look out our windows, drink coffee and enjoy the moment, but this is a moment I will never forget. We had already begun to get our things together before this, we had packed a suitcase. But no one believed that they would attack us and that we would have to defend ourselves. 

We gathered our things and went to the basement of the apartment. I don’t remember the rest of that day, probably because I was in shock. I only remember that the mattress from the sofa bed perfectly fit the bathroom floor. That’s where we slept the first night. 

The next day we realized we needed a plan–not only an evacuation plan, but a plan for how we would run things at home. We looked at how much food we had, the sequence of actions, and how we would evacuate, we wrote it all down. We still thought it would end in a couple of days, but deep down, I think we understood it was only the beginning.

All day we heard shells fly and explode all around us. And so three days passed. We were well-prepared, we had a freezer full of meat and fish.  I knew that I could bake bread and cook food. But then the trouble came: one of the rockets hit the power plant and our entire district was left without electricity. In our area, many houses have no gas; the entire house runs on electricity, and when that is gone, you can’t do anything. 

I have a project called Topot, that brings together Ukrainian chefs, and teaches them to survive in the wild, to cook food from what they find in the woods. Many of us have gas burners, sleeping bags and special utensils, so in some ways, I was prepared. I went out on the balcony–of course it wasn’t safe, but what else could I do when I couldn’t even make tea indoors? And so on the balcony, I cooked soup and made strong coffee that I kept in a thermos. 

One thing I remember is what happened on the first day of Spring (March 1). Normally, it is a holiday that everyone in this city celebrates with barbecues. But this year, people came outside and prepared food or just boiled water. It was sad, but that was the best any of us could do.

By day 6 of the war, our supplies were running lower and lower and we needed medicine for our dog, flour, and fresh vegetables or fruit; we figured we could keep it on the balcony since it was cold there. We had made a stew from the meat we had stored in the freezer, since that wasn’t working anymore and at least this way it would keep a little longer. But we still needed medicine and food. 

There were always long queues of people waiting to get into the grocery store–they would go right after the curfew ended at 6 in the morning. So we woke up early one day, put on warm clothes, and went ourselves, but by the time we got there, there were already hundreds of people waiting in line. The store didn’t even open until 9am, and once it did, it only let 10 people at a time. It was noon before we got inside, and once we had everything we needed, we had to wait another 2 hours in another queue to pay by card. We ended up buying about 50 kg of food, and then had to carry it home 3 kilometers on foot. 

The khachapuri Igor made for dinner on the 15th day of the war. Because his neighborhood is without electricity, he baked it on a camp stove

On the way, we saw the places where they distributed humanitarian aid and the queues there were so long, it was just shocking. When we got home, we immediately divided the food, keeping some for ourselves, and setting aside the rest to bring to our parents. As we were doing that, aircraft flew over and began bombing the city. The bar where I worked was destroyed, the streets I walked down, our beautiful parks. 

I realized I didn’t have a place to work anymore but at the same time I wanted to help people. A journalist in Kyiv said they could help put us in touch with World Central Kitchen. So now I am helping them, putting chefs from different cities in contact with each other, bringing in a supermarket chain to supply food, and a  logistics company to distribute it. I’ve started calling myself Sofa Soldier Igor Mezencev. 

On the 7th and 8th days, I went on a mission to buy medicine for neighbors, relatives, and friends. I went out early, but sometimes the pharmacies simply didn’t open, so even if you were first in line, you would then have to go someplace else, and by that time, you would be last in line there. By this time of the year, it was luckily already light, and that was our salvation. 

By now we had run out of flour and yeast, and it was hard to get those at the supermarket. But we needed bread. So I tried to make it from green buckwheat. It was very simple: I soaked the buckwheat for 12 hours, one part water to one part grain, and covered it.  When it had turned to mush, I added sugar and let it sit another six hours, then added salt. There’s a supermarket here that often advertises their buckwheat baguette, and when this is all over, I’m going to share my recipe with them because I am sure mine was tastier. 

We live next to a sausage- processing plant, and since the factory wasn’t working, the meat was going to spoil. So we went there, collected the meat, and shared it with people in the neighborhood who have dogs so they could feed them. I think we helped people a little.  

By the 10th, 11th, and 12th days of the war, half of my city was gone. There was shooting in residential areas by now, and everything was coming closer. Our windows had been shattered on the second day,  but now there weren’t any left anywhere in the neighborhood. 

You are probably wondering why we haven’t left yet, or taken steps to evacuate.  There is a very simple answer: we have parents. I have a disabled mother, and she practically can’t walk; my wife’s parents live outside the city where it is very difficult for them to find food and medicine,  we have a lot of pets of different sizes and we can’t just leave all this. And also, yes, the humanitarian corridors are often being shelled.

The 13th day of the war was International Women's Day all over the world. I congratulate women, but the Russians also decided to congratulate everyone here, and began to launch rockets on our district.

On the 14th day, I made a big pot of borscht, and on the 15th, khachapuri for dinner.

The last few days there has been very heavy shelling; today they hit the hospital, which is not far from me. You can hear explosions all day. I think that the Russian forces are not advancing because the ground was frozen–it’s now -17º at night.

Thank God we are all still alive. I am sure we will win together! 

ktoukraine

A post shared by Igor Mezencev ↟ (@ktoukraine)