A western Ukrainian city of chocolate, coffee and sleeping lions, Lviv is capturing history in a curious way. Enough of fresh-ground cliches and picture posing with another church in Lviv! Check out the restaurant life there as it will tell you more about the city’s background than a trip to a museum.
Going down the dark corridor of the first venue, watch your step – Russians dug a treacherous hole. In the red and black lights of another historical restaurant, watch your bottom – you may get flogged by a lady in leather.
These two restaurants are sometimes busier than castles or cathedrals in Lviv. They teach history in a way you are likely to remember.
Lesson one is from an underground guerrilla food hut, or Kryyivka. Squeezed in a dark nook at the central market square, it looks like nothing more than a wooden door at the first sight. As you knock, a small window opens and a face with a gun pokes out asking what you want. Your password – Glory to Ukraine – will unbar the door yet for another interrogation. The same face turns out to be a guard in the uniform of the Ukrainian Partisan Army, or UPA, with a real gun. Now he wants to know if you are a Russian or if you carry a ban on Ukrainian literature. Should you pass this exam too, he will give you a shot of medovukha – a honey-flavored vodka similar to mead. Unless you are Russian, dropping dead like flies after this drink, according to the guard, you can now barge in.
Behind a secret door in a book case, there are three rooms with wooden furniture, iron plates and heaps of pictures with Ukrainian insurgents. In sepia and black and white colors, they stare at you from the walls and a menu of a 60-year-old history. Recipes, as we were told, have been gathered from veterans of the UPA army all over the country. Traditional Ukrainian cuisine dishes like salo or lard, cabbage rolls or dumplings with meat sport revolutionary names with anti-Russian flavor.
For instance, “Drunken Muscovites” stand for river carp on a frying pan for Hr 15. “Nightingale Smile” is a grilled carp for Hr 26. The menu is written in western Ukrainian dialect which makes it sometimes hard even for Kyivans to figure out the dishes. Soups, for instance, read as “zoups” and sauces as “smaruvydla.”
After a long day in the city, we opted for the “Feast in the Forest” – jacket potatoes baked with garlic and lard for Hr 8, a large borsch for Hr 10 and a “Half Meter of Sausage” for Hr 30.
Unlike Kyiv pubs, servings are huge and prices are small. The food is served in iron plates, wooden boards and frying pans. For no extra fee, you can try on army helmets and shoot a gun in the air at the bar. Students waiting on you will only be happy to share their version of the controversial insurgent army’s history fighting both the Nazis and the Communists in the Second World War.
I asked them if they were really hostile to Russians in this pub. The answer came from a table next to ours. People from eastern Ukraine and Russia sipping beer said they took this pub as a good joke and another chance to bury the hatchet of war.
Hopping through the puddles on the cobbled medieval streets, we felt in need of a guilty pleasure to wash away the rain. A cafe with an intriguing statue to the father of masochism, Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, seemed like the right place for dessert.
History lesson two came from the Masoch’s Cafe on Serbian street. The famous writer was born in Lviv and first became popular for his stories about Ukrainian life. Later in Germany, he expressed his fantasies about dominant women in other novels, thus paving a road to the term “masochism.”
For years, the communists tabooed his Ukrainian roots. Contemporaries wiped the dust off his name and opened a bar celebrating his fantasies.
Apart from a wide choice of fondue, we found whips, metal cuffs, chains and collars for those feeling uninspired by food alone.
Their menu has only two clear-cut entries like bulls testicles as a hot starter for Hr 24 and soup from a bull’s penis for Hr 29. Other dishes come from European cuisine but with sexually explicit names. We opted for a vegetable fondue for Hr 89. I forgot that not all fondues come with cheese dips, so we had to boil our mushrooms and cauliflower in olive oil.
Under red lights, waitresses have walked someone out on a leash for a “torture.” We prepared for a regular display of wicked fetishes, but unlike Kryyivka, the cafe was less than its name suggested. Masoch is a friendly bar with a naughty decor, and unless you ask for a whip, you will not feel like a famous Ukrainian. For the two hours that we were there, no one asked. For the sake of experiment, my friend volunteered thinking it would be a make-believe flog. It was not and for the rest of the dessert, his hands were slightly shaking. He later complained that he expected a special femme fatale to deliver the pain. Instead, a cute waitress with a friendly face in a traditional Ukrainian shirt slapped him a couple of times.
We finished the evening with a chocolate and orange fondue which meant to include strawberries, kiwi, and mint for Hr 59. It arrived with canned cherries instead of strawberries but I did not grumble since we had a free whip.
Most people who come to this place expect more of a brutal strip bar than a small cozy coffee house with a few chains on the door. The Commission on Ethics and Morale was biting its elbows too, having discovered only a bookish reference to Leo Masoch instead of a display of sexual violence.
Apart from Kruyivka and Masoch Cafe, Lviv has a few more theme restaurants to explore. Do not miss Kypol – an elegant restaurant with antique tables, crockery and old family pictures of 19th century nobility.
And if you are hungry for a good book with a touch of jazz in the background, go to the art cafe Cabinet for an intellectual snack.
Kryyivka (ploscha Rynok, tel. (032) 254-6119);
Masoch (Serbska 7, tel. (032) 272-1872);
Kypol (Chaikovskogo 37, tel. (032) 261-4454/82);
Cabinet (Vynnychenka 12, tel. (032) 276-5832).
