Editor's Note: Former Kyiv Post staff writer Stefan Korshak expounds on xenophobia and Arizona BBQ.
I was a reporter on the junket that the Arizona Group organized to celebrate the opening of its new restaurant in Donetsk. They chartered a plane, passed out free beer, and had a real good old time.
It was almost like the days of the Raj when India existed for the entertainment and the economic benefit of the ruling class, which by the way is a different color and culture than the locals. We were the English.
This is not to fault the people on the plane or the Ukrainians that work for them or the restaurant itself, which is probably the single most successful example of canned Western culture here to date. They are making tons of money. They have the supply system wired. The government inspectors are licked. The customers keep coming back.
I grew up in Houston, and I can honestly say what you munch and swill at the Arizona BBQs is Southwestern right down to the guacamole.
Power to the canny businessmen from Hamburg, the U.S. seaboards, and Kyiv and Donetsk if they can make a ton of money selling that kind of atmosphere, food, and service.
It ain’t easy to turn a profit in this country, and the restaurant business is especially grim no matter where you go. I have no problem with the managers. Guys, I salute you.
But your customers are another matter. I know that those people in their suits and blue jeans and company pins are great for the bank balance. But you know, I gotta admit that sometimes they get a little wearing. Maybe I’m losing sensitivity to my own culture. Certainly, they aren’t too interested in the one here.
But when a American ex-fratboy clutches a Corona in one hand and his girlfriend in the other and tells me about how he has international business kicked, and who needs Russian because ‘all the smart ones speak English,’ I suspect my countryman is missing something.
Or when a European fellow rails at the hotel lady because she is taking – as that is the way she has done it for the last 30 years – too long to register his passport, it honestly seems to me that he is being impatient and obnoxious in equally unnecessary quantities.
The guy from Iowa may think it’s great that you can speak only English and get exactly what you want just like at home. He could care less about what the overwhelming majority of citizens of this country would say about dropping 40 bucks on a meal and drinks. (Roughly: ‘You moron, you can feed a family of four for a week for that.’)
He just wants his chips and dip and to not feel like he’s in a post-Soviet society, and by God he’s willing to pay good money for it.
He is the consumer and he is right, definitely. It is his inalienable right to spend his hard-earned (or maybe his company’s) income in a bubble of Western reality.
As it is the right of the Ukrainian citizens to observe. The impression left cannot always be favorable. Xenophobia is traditional and to some extent excusable in societies like Ukraine which have long gone unexposed to things foreign. What do you call it if many of the foreigners in Ukraine have little need for the local culture because after all you can do business without it, and you can spend your free time in great places like the Arizona?
(Stefan Korshak is a Post staff writer and the former owner of a Tex-Mex restaurant in Odessa.)
