A restaurateur opening Kyiv’s first gelatterias
“Some waiters in Leonardo still don’t know who I am,” said Dino dal Borgo in fluent Russian. Dino is one of two partners who recently opened the first gellaterias in Kyiv – small cafes that serve gelato, homemade Italian ice cream. He appeared to be absolutely satisfied with the fact that waiters can’t recognize him, since it enables him to control the work of the personnel without drawing too much attention. “Otherwise they would get anxious and start bustling around,” he laughed.
As Dino frankly remarked, there are still shortcomings with the service, though he controls everything directly. He calls such a precise attention to detail “an Italian style of doing business.” While we were sitting and discussing, or actually, while Dino was emphatically talking and I was listening, we could see no waiters anywhere near our table. Dino stressed the situation as an example of his words and once again shook his head, scolding flaws in the service.
Dino decided to live in Ukraine permanently in order to achieve better results. “If you leave your business for a week, you lose a month – while the cat’s away the mice will play,” he remarked. By now he has spent almost two years in Ukraine and seems absolutely satisfied with his life here. Though, of course there are certain difficulties, like the local mentality and style of doing business. “To do a simple bank transaction, you will wait for three days. But I understand that we foreigners should respect the local system of work and try to adapt to it,” Dino explained. Though he lives quite far from the city center, he nevertheless finds life in Kyiv rather safe in comparison to Marcel, France, “where it’s truly dangerous to live.”
According to Dino, he and his partner’s main aim was to open a mid-level restaurant, where a regular citizen could try gelato and pizza. Eight months ago they opened a gelatteria near the metro station Zoloti Vorota, then three months ago – the small restaurant Leonardo at Bessarabska Square and one month from now they are opening a new place on Yaroslaviv Val, where the menu will include not only gelato and pizza but other Italian dishes as well.
When opening new places, Dino pays a lot of attention to perfecting customer service that won’t deteriorate in the future – “I really hate it when people invest a lot of money in a new restaurant and in a year the quality of products and service gets worse,” he exclaimed.
Before coming for the interview, I was curious whether Leonardo is somehow connected to the company La Gelatteria Italiana, selling gelato in Globus. Dino assured me that these two enterprises are not connected but he cannot consider them competitors. “If a small Italian town has 50,000 people and a dozen of gelatterias, there is a competition, but in Kyiv there are around five or six million people and there are three gelatterias. It’s not a competition, on the contrary – we try to do good work to introduce Italian cuisine to Ukraine,” he said.
According to Dino, Ukrainians and Russians are among those nations that love ice cream, but they don’t compare to Germans in their passion. He recalled the time he worked in Germany and was astonished by the quantities of gelato they sold there.
Actually, Dino is connected to the restaurant business not as a partner only – he is a cook himself. After graduating from a lyceum six years ago, he decided to work as a cook and started helping his cousin, who had already worked as a professional cook in America. “He said – ‘you are my cousin but that means nothing – it will be difficult’,” Dino recalled. After two years’ experience at his cousin’s kitchen, Dino worked two more years in Spain, France and Italy, at the end of which he received an offer to open an Italian confectionery in Ukraine, already as a partner.
“I work a lot while I’m young to have good results,” Dino proclaimed. He’s not a fan of posh hangouts and would rather prefer “to make a shashlyk in a forest with my friends, travel somewhere or visit rock’n’roll concerts at Bochka, 44 or the Beatles bar on Pushkinska.” Dino said that while spending an evening at home he likes cooking, watching movies, and reading books, including a book on yoga and a book by Italian movie director, writer, and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini that he read recently.
He is also interested in sports. As Dino remarked, he played rugby for more than 16 years, and although he cannot play it here, he still watches the games on TV; the last one he watched at O’Brien’s Irish pub was Italy versus Scotland. “I also like snowboarding – next week with my friends we are going to the Carpathian Mountains; and I like dancing – when I just came to Kyiv I took lessons twice a week but now I don’t have enough time for everything unfortunately,” Dino added.
