This place is actually easier to find than has been suggested in the past - the Chinese/oriental food and goods kiosk in Lybidsky Market. As for the fish, head to Turhenivska for fresh fish.
/P>
Saturday night friends of mine were preparing their own sushi up in Poznyaki; the day before that, a colleague announced his intentions to prepare his own sushi. Not long before that, another acquaintance had wondered aloud where you can get the right components.
I decided I wanted to make sushi, too.
So we followed the trail out to Lybidsky Market, that sprawl of mercenary energy off the subway stop of the same name. On a glowering October afternoon, there was a sinister vibration to the place. Vendors glowered from behind their heaps of Taiwanese sneakers; as I sometimes do in Kyiv’s markets, I felt like a mark.
Fish Story
What you have to do, if you’re making sushi, is fight to the back of the market, and to the right. Ask anybody who looks honest for the “kitaysky rynok.” God willing, you’ll end up at the market’s ultimate corner. If you keep on walking, you’ll descend toward disgusting toilets; to your left, you’ll find a set of stairs leading up into a shed.
After you ascend them, make a right and walk past depressing stalls to the extreme end of the hall. Pass through the door at the end, and you’re in the so-called Chinese market – which isn’t really a market, but rather a warren of rooms holding kiosks tended by what look like lonely Chinese.
But everything for Japanese sushi is in those rooms, even though they’re ostensibly Chinese: packets of dried nori, that green seaweed in which you’ll roll your rolls; sesame seeds packed in chubby plastic bags the size of a softball; the round sticky rice that conduces to proper shaping; rice vinegar, without which your rice will taste un-Japanese; rice wine for cooking, packaged in plastic jugs appropriate to anti-freeze; sake; packages of wasabi paste; chopsticks; and everything else, from tofu to strange cabbages to a world of packaged noodles to greens.
Relatively little Ukrainian or Russian, much less English, seems to be spoken here. It’s as if you’ve stepped into a wormhole and ended up in Canton province, or at least on East Broadway in Manhattan. The proprietors sit around, killing time. “Harah-so! Harah-so!” drawled the woman with whom we dealt in response to every one of our queries. She was untutored in the Slavic tongues – and yet, by some process of telepathy, we left with everything we needed. Probably all Westerners come in there looking for the same stuff.
The last room, where so many of the dry-goods are sold, was governed by a native Ukrainian who seemed pleased that, with our arrival, she had someone to talk to. If she’s there, prepare yourself for a tour through the world of Chinese packaged products. You’ll need it, as few items are labeled in any European language. One, pointing a bag of noodles, she shrugged and gave a wry smile. “Well,” she said sweetly, “the Chinese like it.”
What’s not available from her, at least, is pickled ginger in small portions. You can either buy from her a pillow-sized bag of the stuff or, more wisely, drop by Yakitoria, the Japanese-food restaurant on Lesi Ukrainky, and order some portions of it to go.
Now you’ve got everything you need – nori, rice, rice vinegar, sake, chopsticks, sesame seeds – except for sushi flatware.
And, of course, fish and sushi serving materials. For them, see the photographs and captions on the other side on this page. Vegetables and eggs, you know where to get.
