This classically styled Central Asian restaurant at Protasiv Yar made of yurts invites the nomadic to settle in for a feast.
Surprisingly, the two yurts – tents, to a Central Asian – standing side by side right next to the Protasiv Yar ski hill look only slightly out of place. Throughout the 13th and 14th centuries, yurts would have been a common sight, scattered on various hills in and around Kyiv. As I sit with Mykhail Ivanovych, who owns the newish Uzbek restaurant Bataye, he points to a hill near Protasiv Yar and tells me how Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, sacked Kyiv. You better believe yurts would have been everywhere in Kyiv afterwards.
Bataye isn’t a place to go for a quick lunch or dinner. As I take off my shoes at the door, Mykhail invites me in for tea (Hr 10 per pot), a huge grin on his aging face. After a tour of the place he shows me the proper way to sit on the pillows behind the knee-high tables and begins telling me stories about his restaurant.
Open for a little less than a year, Bataye is much like other Central Asian restaurants as far as the food goes. Meat is a staple on the menu, and it’s good.
“Meat! Meat in everything!” Mykhail exclaims with a laugh.
The baursak – Kazakh bread (Hr 10) – is delicious, and it happens to be the only thing we ate that did not have meat in it. The tiny, oily pieces of sweet bread went well with the tea, which cut through the grease.
There is a great deal of respect for family elders in Central Asian culture, Mykhail tells me – whatever they say goes, and they always get to sit at the head table. He said younger people often prefer to sit in back, where they get away with filling their tea pots with wine or vodka, eluding the eyes of older people who look askance at alcohol.
After the tea came shorva (Hr 15), a soup served in a small bowl with potatoes, onions and (of course) meat. The portion is smallish for the price, but it tastes good. Then came plov, that Central Asian rice-meat dish – sort of an Uzbek paella.
You’re supposed to eat plov with your hands, and to humor Mykhail I tried to do just that, making him laugh. The plov is nice, but a little bland, and – again – the serving is small. Halfway through, I switched to a fork to finish it.
The yurts, by the way, with their circular frames of intertwined sticks, are decorated inside with magnificent Kazakh rugs. Inside six or seven tables form a ring around the inside of the yurt. Ceilings rise up, up, up about four or five meters. Relaxed on my pillows, I tripped out as I looked up at the dangling tassels.
Finally the server brought out the manti (Hr 25). Manti are like varenyki. They’re dumplings of – you guessed it – meat and onion, and these were tasty and decent in size. We didn’t eat any, but they have that wonderful spicy noodle soup known as lagman (Hr. 25), in case you were looking for it. The tea was done; it was time to go. It’s good bet that the comfort of the yurts, the hospitality and the food will draw me again. Maybe these yurts on the Kyivan hill will even be around a bit longer than Batu Khan’s.
