I tell you, coming up with these clever page names is absolutely exhausting. I mean, who’s going to know this page’s title is a pun of a movie from 1985, which itself was based on a 1984 novel, or that it was a song by Wang Chung from that movie, or another song by Tupac from 1996? Why do I even bother? I’ll tell you why — because it amuses me, and isn’t that what a personal website and blog is really all about? Self-amusement? In any case, here are a few thoughts about the meals and foods I had while in Ukraine.

Restaurants / Рестораны
It’s sometimes a little hard to know where a cafe ends and a restaurant begins, because there really seems to be a lot of overlap in Ukraine. For instance, I was meeting my friend, Anna the English teacher, at a Greek cafe named Ellada, but the place was freaking big. Definitely a restaurant, definitely. Anna and I didn’t stay there — it was Sunday and it looked like there were doing a private party, so we went next door to a place called “Picnic.” Really, that was the name, just like the English word, only in Russian letters.

Whenever possible I would ask for the menu in English, and I was usually told there wasn’t an English version. As I result my dining choices tended to be a little limited, unless there were pictures, or there was someone like Anna who could help translate, or I was able to recognize some of the words, like суп (soup), салат (salad) or Фокачча (focaccia). Actually those were the easy ones; when you sound out the Russian letters, its actually the same word in English. Of course, that didn’t help me with a lot of the ingredients, but I did reasonably well.

I’ve been trying to remember, and I think my cafe/restaurant count for this trip is five. There was a restaurant at the hotel that I made use of a couple times, and that menu had both Russian and English on it. Then the was the alligator restaurant (more on that in a moment), Picnic, some place in eastern Mariupol, and a sidewalk place in Berdyansk. That’s 5, plus there was a street market, but no one would call that place a restaurant. The McDonalds is still there, but they were a little busy the one time I considered going, so I gave that place a pass. (I made up for that by going to the McDonalds at the Munich airport.)

The “alligator” restaurant was a place down by the Azov Sea which has a little statue of an alligator in the front. (The place has a real name, but I’ve totally forgotten what it was.) Apparently, a few years ago (only five or six years) a traveling circus came to Mariupol, and they had — wait for it — an alligator in one of their acts. At some point the alligator escaped and was the terror of Mariupol because no one knew where it was. People weren’t going to the seashore for fear that the alligator would be there, and apparently that hurt this restaurant’s business quite a bit. After about six weeks they finally caught the alligator (which had gotten to a rather distant part of Mariupol, probably by way of the Kalmius River) and the hysteria finally died down. As a memento of that event, the restaurant had the alligator statue made, and now it sits out front to welcome visitors.

Oh, what foods these morsels be…
So what did I have while I was there? Good question. I can’t say it was anything overly exotic, unless you count the fact that it was all Ukrainian food. I had borsch again — who can go to Ukraine and not have borsch? — but it was the red borsch; I had hoped to try the green borsch, but that wasn’t on the menu. Something I missed on my last trip was vareniki, but I made up for it this time around. Vareniki are kind of like Chinese potstickers; they come steamed in a nice little urn, with a little sour cream and dill. All in all they weren’t too bad.

I had a couple salads, but they weren’t really salads as we typically think of salads. I had a German sausage salad, which was a mix of cucumbers, onions and other root-type vegetables with some chopped salami-type sausage. A little mayonnaise type dressing as a binder and then served on a single leaf of Romaine. Another salad was a Greek salad, which probably was very much like you think: olives, tomatoes, feta cheese and so on. It wasn’t really my cup of tea. There were also a couple others, one with chicken and the other with ham and beef; always cold and mixed with assorted chopped vegetables. That’s pretty much what salads are to Ukrainians; they probably wouldn’t recognize our Cobb or simple lettuce salads.

In emails with my friend Anna, she would occasionally tell me about picnics with friends where they had “shishlak.” I looked it up once, and the definition defined it as a shish kebab prepared over a barbeque. Shishlak, shish kebab… sure, that makes sense. So, when I tried it one night I was expected a shish kebab — meat and veggies on a skewer that had been barbecued — but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Instead of nice, bite-sized pieces of meat, it came as these big honking chunks, kind of like a piece of steak that was 4″ long and 1½” square on the other sides. Like I said, a chunk. It did seem to have been grilled, and there did seem to be a skewer hole, but it was definitely not a shish kebab. Still very tasty. (Oddly, the restaurant didn’t have any chicken shishlak; beef, lamb, pork, even fish, but not chicken. I need to try and figure out if that’s just not done, if that restaurant just didn’t have that.)

There were some other native dishes as well, but the only other one I’ll mention was this greasy deep-fried thing that, if I’m not mistaken, was what Anna had suggested last year that I try. (I don’t recall the name, but I think it begins with a “ch”.) It was a ground meat mixture with onions and spices, folded into a half-moon pastry (think quesadilla) and then deep-fried. Very tasty when warm (it lost a little luster when it cooled), but very greasy; I really needed more napkins than I had. This is a pretty common street food, and I saw it at several vendors around downtown.

Oh, and you know what else I saw everywhere: shawarma. I mean everywhere. I may have seen this before (I’m not sure) but I didn’t really know the name of it until the end of “The Avengers.” But seriously, you almost couldn’t go a block without seeing a shawarma sign, vendor or restaurant. Also, more than last year, I was seeing lots of sushi (or in Russian, суши). Sushi makes a little more sense; people in Mariupol do like fish. But shawarma?