A knock on the big unmarked picket door reverse Lviv’s metropolis corridor. A person in a army uniform holding a German-made rifle solutions. Password, he calls for.
“Slava Ukrayini.” Glory to Ukraine.
“Heroy am slava,” glory for the heroes, he responds, and opens a passageway hidden behind a wall of books.
The man within the uniform will not be a guard. He is the maître d at Kryivka, a well-liked theme restaurant that evokes Ukraine’s armed struggle for independence towards Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany throughout World War II.
The cavernous restaurant — embellished as a memorabilia-filled underground bunker — has been round for greater than 15 years. And the ambiance stays festive and playful regardless of the brutal and bloody historical past that serves as a backdrop. Patrons nonetheless order multicolored vodka pictures by the row, and the brick partitions are nonetheless embellished with Nineteen Forties-era shrapnel, radios, maps, artillery and lanterns.
But, because the conflict with Russia grinds on, the house, within the comparatively secure western metropolis of Lviv, has taken on a brand new resonance. On a current go to, as an alternative of the overseas vacationers the restaurant used to attract, Ukrainians packed the tables. Locals, troopers on depart and households who had fled bombed-out cities elsewhere within the nation loved the meals and alcohol. Children wandered about, attempting on the gathering of helmets and jackets or dueling with the vintage weapons.
Alina Bulauevska, sitting at a desk together with her household, got here from a close-by city to have a good time her thirty second birthday. “This is an escape for us,” she stated.
Active troopers have left a whole lot of latest army patches — the insignia of their models. At the middle of the show, mounted in a body, is one from Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, the highest commander of Ukraine’s Armed Forces.
The restaurant invited him to go to, stated Ivan Myzychuk, a supervisor. The four-star basic responded by sending his insignia together with an infinite blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag the place he signed his title and drew a coronary heart in purple ink.
“He replied that after we have victory, he will come to celebrate,” Mr. Myzchuk stated.
At a big desk with trays of fats sausages, charred greens and potato pancakes, Yulia Volkova sat together with her husband, kids and some pals. The household has been renting an house in Lviv since they fled the embattled metropolis of Kharkiv within the northeastern a part of the nation final March, becoming a member of some 150,000 folks pushed from their houses who’ve additionally taken up residence right here.
They have eaten on the restaurant a number of occasions. “We love this place,” Ms. Volkova stated by means of a translator.
They have been grateful to be in Lviv. Russian fighters had seized their land and agricultural business, and killed the household of a classmate of her daughter’s once they walked out of a church after praying, Ms. Volkova stated.
“They killed everyone in their way, we saw it ourselves,” she stated, pointing two fingers at her eyes.
Her buddy put down a mug of beer and pulled out his cellphone to indicate a video of the partitions of his residence, pockmarked with bullet holes and embedded shrapnel.
Sievda Kerimova had not too long ago arrived in Lviv from Kyiv for a happier cause. She had come to satisfy her husband, a 26-year-old army officer who had 10 days off.
At a taking pictures gallery off one of many eating rooms, the couple paid 75 hryvnias — about $2 — in order that Ms. Kerimova might shoot 10 plastic bullets at a paper goal stamped with a picture of Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia. In one other room, clients might take intention at an outsized punching bag stenciled along with his face.
Kryivka is considered one of a number of themed eating places and reward retailers operated by !FEST, a Ukrainian restaurant group. Upstairs is one other one, The Most Expensive Galician Restaurant, embellished as a masonic clubhouse. Around the nook is the Lviv Coffee Mine, an infinite underground espresso home and store the place patrons can put on a miner’s helmet and dig for espresso beans and sip lattes.
The eating places usually are not within the business of historic accuracy. At Kryivka, the pervasive patriotism and basic merrymaking eclipses the customarily ugly file of the unique Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which led the struggle for an unbiased Ukraine within the Nineteen Forties, however comprised extremists who massacred Poles and Jews in a marketing campaign of ethnic cleaning.
But recalling the battle for Ukraine’s independence is a technique residents at the moment voice pleasure of their heritage and assist for the conflict effort.
Food and enjoyable — not historical past classes — are on the menu.
Part of the night’s festivities included a hunt for Russian spies, or “Moskali,” a derogatory time period that Ukrainians used to confer with Russians. The sport was led a band of waiters wearing army garb. Diners have been laughingly interrogated, then led to a makeshift jail and requested to sing a patriotic tune earlier than being returned to their desk.
At one level, the wait employees lined up as in a army formation. The chief quizzed the assembled on the variety of Russian tanks or helicopters which were shot down because the conflict started as clients gathered round and cheered.
The temporary efficiency ended with the employees and patrons repeating successive rounds of “Slava Ukrayini. Heroyam slava” in unison.
The second wasn’t fairly on par with the legendary scene from the movie “Casablanca,” when Victor Laszlo leads the group at Rick’s Café Americain in singing La Marseillaise in defiance of Nazi officers. But the feelings have been genuine.
Meanwhile, a principally unnoticed tv mounted on the wall silently beamed out the night news, an interview with Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, speaking in regards to the Russian aerial assaults that day.
Unlike different street-level retailers and eating places that have been required to shut down in the course of the day’s three missile alerts, the underground Kryivka might preserve serving pierogies and vodka.
On one other night, Vitaly Zhoutonizhko, his proper arm in a sling, visited the restaurant for a second time along with his spouse, Alina, and 4-year previous daughter, Kiza. He had been in Lviv for 2 weeks on medical depart from the military, recuperating from an damage he suffered when a shell hit his trench.
When requested why — after being in a bunker close to the entrance line — he would now wish to loosen up in a pretend one, Mr. Zhoutonizhko laughed.
“This is entertainment,” he stated.
So was he going to strive hitting a Putin goal on the taking pictures gallery?
“I am not interested in shooting the image,” he stated. “I have a real target.”
Source: www.nytimes.com