There aren’t many who are as zealous about Ukrainian cuisine as Yevhen Klopotenko, a chef and restauranteur by profession.
Klopotenko experiments trying to combine the incompatible in order to revive authentic Ukrainian cuisine in his restaurant One Hundred Years Ahead of which he is the co-owner and brand chef.
“I am the person who tries to change fixed standards in everything and bring them to the future,” Klopotenko says. “I can’t live by the rules and I need to change everything.”
Klopotenko never liked his parent’s food but they certainly were the first ones who taught him how to cook. While his father taught him how to make Ukraine’s iconic soup, borscht, his mother showed how to make scrambled eggs. So Klopotenko`s experiments with food began with the simpler of the two — eggs.
“I took the scrambled eggs and constantly experimented with flavors: I opened the refrigerator and tried to add different ingredients to the eggs. When I was nine years old, I already had 20 ways of preparing eggs,” he said.
Yevhen Klopotenko, the owner of a restaurant called A 100 Years Back in the Future, talks to Kyiv Post on July 20, 2020. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Travelling broadens taste
Though his egg experiments were fun, his real cooking development began in Britain. In 1991, his grandma, who moved there earlier, invited him to stay with her for a while. London opened a new world of food for Klopotenko since food options were extremely limited in Ukraine back then.
Italy also had a stark effect on Klopotenko’s understanding of food.
“Tortellini and parmesan soup is something I will remember for a lifetime. When there is a plate of soup, and next to it sliced cheese — what do you want me to do with it?” Klopotenko reminisced. “(Ukrainians) do not eat this. The fact that you have to put cheese into the soup, I could not even imagine.”
Continuing with his discovery of various international cuisines, Klopotenko worked in a Mexican restaurant in the United States, and while being on a university program in Germany, he got to work at a McDonald’s franchise.
Klopotenko admits that on any trip abroad he always missed Ukraine and so he carried with him a jar of Ukrainian land.
“Nostalgia is about where your place is. I just feel at the DNA level that my place is (in Ukraine),” he said.
In 2015, he won the culinary show “MasterChef” on the STB television channel. Thanks to his victory, Klopotenko moved to the next professional level — he began studying at the French culinary school Le Cordon Bleu.
Changing Ukrainian food habits
Klopotenko said that he considers it his task to change the culture of food in Ukraine.
Since 2017, he started a project called Cult Food, which was dedicated to changing the diet at school cafeterias, and he compiled a new collection of recipes for educational institutions.
Yevhen Klopotenko (center) wants to change the food culture of Ukraine by revamping the catering system in Ukrainian schools which still use old Soviet recipes. (Courtesy)
Klopotenko began to study the history of cooking, and dug up several authentic books that described what Ukrainians ate from the 17th century to the present. For example, Klopotenko considers Eneyida, a Ukrainian burlesque poem by Ukrainian writer Ivan Kotlyarevsky, as a foundational reference to Ukrainian’s traditional cuisine. So he decided to use it as the basis for creating a menu for his restaurant.
Klopotenko’s restaurant
Later on, in March 2019, together with Inna Popereshnyuk, co-founder of Nova Poshta, a Ukrainian postal and courier company, Klopotenko opened the restaurant One Hundred Years Ahead.
“Until 1917, Ukraine had its own food system, and then the Soviet Union closed it and created its own. And that was a hundred years ago. It’s like back to the future. We have returned to the past to change our future. That’s what the name of the restaurant means,” Klopotenko says.
In the restaurant, Klopotenko, as a chef, modernizes traditional Ukrainian dishes. The menu includes: a bee snack with peanuts and honey, purple cabbage with pine cones, borscht with plum jam and a smoky aroma, and an authentic Ukrainian dish called “Paliushky” which consists of tender roasted mashed potatoes with sorrel and lemon sauce.
Yevhen Klopotenko stands next to his restaurant called A 100 Years Back in the Future on 4 Volodymyrska St. in Kyiv on July 20, 2020. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Borscht as social tool
Klopotenko is convinced that borscht can be used to socialize. For the project “Borscht. The Secret Ingredient” Klopotenko organized a trip to Ukraine to collect obscure recipes from different parts of the country.
The original recipe of the soup includes beetroot, cabbage, tomatoes, potatoes, meat and dill.
But Klopotenko says that everyone prepares borscht in their own way. For example, some even make “black borscht” out of wild boar blood with herbs, yarrow and wildflowers. In Odesa, Klopotenko prepared what he calls “fish white borscht,” as well as borscht based on sugar beet, kvass, and smoked pears. Others might add honey and sauerkraut to their borscht.
“Borscht showed me a world I did not understand. Imagine that we are all different Ukrainians, but same at the same time, because everyone eats borscht,” Klopotenko said.
