The Kyiv bar scene is dying.
That’s the conclusion of two enterprising young men determined to do something to revive the city’s nightlife. They are opening an entertainment complex far from the city center in the Kyiv region of Vinograd.
“The fact is that even popular places go downhill or die after only a couple months. The owner either gets caught in the red tape or stops taking an active interest in making the club work or simply uses it to launder money,” said Gary Shor, manager of Boomerang restaurant-nightclub complex, which is scheduled to be completed in early September. The establishment has been undergoing a steady transformation since it opened its Internet cafe in March.
Shor and Boomerang owner Mykola Kovalov are trying to turn the business mistakes of other clubs into a recipe for success.
A Ukrainian-born American, Shor initially got into the nightclub business after completing a two-year stint with the Israeli army, when he went on to manage the Howard Johnson hotel-nightclub in the popular Red Sea resort of Eilat.
He then moved to Kyiv and became manager of the popular, now-defunct Harley Club. Shor, now 31 and with a young family, said he might have been ready to bid farewell to the nightclub scene entirely if it were not for Kovalov and the vision he has for Boomerang.
“This is an owner who has no other businesses – it’s not his hobby; it’s his daily bread,” Shor said. “He’s someone who’ll be here working hard everyday.”
Indeed, Kovalov, 30, comes to Boomerang with both the experience of running a grocery store and of someone who has spent a lot of time observing the bar scene in major cities like Moscow and Miami. While Kovalov wouldn’t say how much money was being invested into his new club, he did say he was confident it wouldn’t go the way of so many other local endeavors – belly up or empty within weeks of opening.
“I’m not worried because in creating and designing Boomerang, I’m putting myself in the place of the customer rather than the owner,” he said, “and we’ve had plenty of friends and acquaintances giving their opinions.”
Boomerang was once a gastronom. Located in a neighborhood of apartment blocks, the setting is both charming and promising. The surrounding area is immense, with plenty of trees, a groomed lawn and a church, as well as a large pond known as Baby Blue Lake.
The name Boomerang was the brainchild of Kovalov’s wife, Iryna. She devised the concept in hopes of seeing “clients returning again and again.” A boomerang symbol graces the dance floor and there’s a boomerang-shaped table in the works, but management said they won’t be “overbearing or cheesy” on the theme-bar idea.
Among the lessons Kovalov and Shor said they’ve learned is that patrons want quality, and they’re aiming for a target clientele of upper middle-class, young Ukrainian professionals. The pair are betting their clients will be willing to make the 20-minute drive to Vinograd to experience a level of entertainment and service that promises to bend over backward to please.
To make things happen with minimal red tape, Shor and Kovalov admit that they have support from some powerful people. Shor said Boomerang will be a secure yet friendly place. The disco will be open to all at first, but eventually, stringent face-control and a membership system will be introduced.
Shor has brought with him former Harley Club chef Yevgen Vovk. He is cooking up some tasty morsels in the grill bar-patio, which is already open. It offers goumet salads in the Hr 20 to Hr 40 range, meat dishes, including marinated shashlyk (Hr 30 for 310 grams) and about 50 kinds of cocktails and imported beers like Guinness (Hr 12 for a half-liter) and Obolon (Hr 4.50 for a half-liter).
Boomerang is planning even snazzier dishes and wines for the restaurant, including Alaskan king crab, designed to lure not only upwardly mobile Ukrainians but also the foreign elite, many of who are moving into several newly constructed apartment buildings in Vinograd.
With the restaurant scheduled to open shortly after the nightclub, Kovalov insists he is taking the time to do things right. He hopes will be around for the long term – two to three years, he estimates.
“In America you can plan 10 or 15 years ahead, but in Ukraine that’s a very long time,” he said. “Here, sometimes you can only plan as far as the next president.”
Box
BOOMERANG
14 Prospekt Radyanska.
Tel: 434-8527.
