Last Thursday The Day carried a front-page interview with the designer Liliya Pustovit, who talked about Ukrainians’ feelings of freedom and self-identity in the European context. I don’t know about our common identity, but everything is fine with Liliya, proof of which was the launch of her new collection during the opening of the Ukrainian Week of Fashion. The event was a showpiece of European sophistication and inner freedom, and only people who possess these qualities can form their own space. One of Ukraine’s hottest new people is unquestionably Denys Komarenko, who is a trend-setter in the world of cooking. Today we offer you Komarenko’s thoughts on food, cooking, and his dreams of opening his own restaurant.
Every cook dreams of becoming a chef, and all chefs dream of opening their own restaurants. I have been nurturing the idea of establishing a restaurant of my own for all 12 years that I have worked as a chef. There’s nothing concrete so far, but I would like this restaurant to be close to the people, our people.
Naturally, I will be very glad to host not only residents of Kyiv and people from other parts of our country but also out-of-towners and guests from Mars. Still our people are going to be the majority. MY restaurant, if it is ever created, will mostly cater to our people — with its cuisine, interior design, service, and the name, which is very important.
If you call a restaurant Van Gogh, it will not be ours exactly. But Ivan Franko is another thing. I want it to bear the spirit of an important Ukrainian personality if it is to be named after one. Franko is a soft name (he was indeed a softhearted person, in spite of being an “eternal revolutionary” and “stonemason”), so the restaurant would be soft, too, with a soft-looking interior design, soft emotional surroundings, etc. Naturally, when you attach a name to a certain entity — and a restaurant is a living organism — you determine its destiny.
Then you have to support, raise, coddle it, and take care of it; you have to educate it in the spirit of and according to the name with which you “baptized” it. All this is achieved by means of the interior design, cuisine, employees, and customers.
This restaurant’s cuisine should appeal to customers. Right now I am cooking French cuisine, and French cuisine is, by all accounts, an organism that absorbs the best of the whole world and then offers it as its own. This is the essence of French cuisine, because the French used to borrow everything from everybody and then made it their own.
But I can’t say that my cooking is French cuisine. No, there is French cuisine and then there’s my cuisine. In the 12 years that I have been working as a chef, I have developed my own type of cooking. And all the cooks who have been doing cooking foreign cuisines, for example, Japanese, Chinese, etc., for 15 to 20 years, eventually make it their own cuisine. Each of them has a certain basis on which they rely: for instance, my foundation is French cuisine with its techniques, foodstuffs, and wines.
While studying the work of other people, we draw conclusions: we like or dislike something. You can borrow something and add it to the cuisine that you have created with hard work, but the resulting “cocktail” will still have its own particular features. This is by no means plagiarism. The cuisine will not depend on the restaurant’s name; in other words, whatever name will be chosen, it will not affect my vision of cooking.
Our society is making headway. As recently as five years ago the Ukrainians did not understand a lot about cuisine, but now there are more and more people who know about food, which pleases me very much. It is difficult to deal with a customer who does not know that raw meat can be eaten. You offer him a raw-meat carpaccio, but he is afraid, he is unaware that this can be eaten, that it is not harmful.
You begin to explain brass tacks to him; he listens to you but still mistrusts and wants to check it out. Yes, we’ve had simply terrible meat over the past 70 years — in the Soviet Union and immediately after its collapse. But meat is totally different in a good restaurant, and people begin to see that it can be eaten in a variety of styles. How do they do this? As a rule, they taste dishes in restaurants when they travel abroad. Only then do they agree: yes, you’re right, you really can eat this. Foreign things have always been a standard to adhere to. Still, little by little, our cooks are beginning to win the public’s trust.
Earlier, we were fighters on an invisible front-line. Moreover, our work was considered unrewarding. Now cooks are authorities. And while in the past a restaurant’s image was formed by managers and administrators, and customers did not know chefs by sight or by name, now things are different. We not only come out into the dining room, we are known by name, and we know the names of our regular clientele. I always phone my regular patrons if something new comes on the menu: otherwise how will they know about it? Diners respond with gratitude, they come and taste it.
In the restaurant of my dreams I would like to create the spirit of a theater. In general, restaurants and theaters resemble one another. As the founder of the Trump Card restaurant chain says, people come to the restaurant as if it were a theater. It depends on us how they will spend their time and what emotions and impressions they will gain. We show our emotions in the way we cook dishes. These emotions should be passed on to our customers. The dish has been eaten, and the curtain has been drawn. But the main thing is that the customers gain a wonderful, lasting impression.
Now you know what chefs dream about. Ordinary cooks should dream of becoming chefs. I like working with ambitious people. To date, I have trained 15 cooks, who are employed as chefs in 15 Ukrainian restaurants. As for my dream, I am not forcing the issue. I know that the time will come when it will come true.
