Home From Home: Domestication, Alienation, and Food in a Ukrainian Restaurant in London
How can we overcome the crisis of universalism and redefine the personal? A Ukrainian model of domestication might provide some answers
I visited Tatar Bunar, the new Ukrainian restaurant in London, last week.
(This is not a paid promotion.)
Image: Wall at Tatar Bunar (author’s amazing photograph)
Tatar Bunar has received justified and raved reviews since it opened, in traditional and in social media, so I was excited to go. Though with selfcaveats: why would you leave your own house and go out to a Ukrainian restaurant?
Tatar Bunar’s arrival in Shoreditch comes amidst various inflection points, changes on the fields in Ukraine, changes in attitudes towards Ukraine and Ukrainians, as well as—more importantly—changes in the London food scene. (Look at me, the simple Manc gone all cosmopolitan.)
I shall return to some of the broader points below.
But, crucially, on the scran: other Ukrainian eateries have recently opened in London. Here I am thinking of Sino in Notting Hill and Sho in Finsbury Park, though I have yet to visit either.
Mriya, the fancy but delicious bistro on the Old Brompton Road, has recently updated its menu from a specific Ukraine focus to something more Ukraine-inspired. I haven’t been since the changes, but it still looks amazing.
Tatar Bunar has a professed focus on Bessarabian food, though there is an eclecticism that works. It has ambrosial salo that tingles before melting, homemade breads and cheeses, ideal chebureki as big as my id. An open fire for a range of meats of rich vegetables.
Image: Salo at Tatar Bunar (author’s amazing photograph)
And here the salads are crucial: pickled tomatoes so ridiculously tasty that they could give local cocaine addicts an antioxidant alternative.
Image: Borsch at Tatar Bunar (author’s photograph)
Vegetables (yeah, I eat them) highlight for me the exquisite simplicity and special function of Ukraine cuisine. Ukrainian cooking does not traditionally rely on long, sophisticated cooking techniques or complex spices, but on the cook’s personal relationship with the essence of the components and their ability to bring that out. There is a reliance on the quality and freshness of the ingredients, especially the vegetables, and on how the cook uses the naturalness of the meal to communicate and consolidate a special, intimate relationship with their guest.
Image: Salad at Tatar Bunar (author’s photograph)
Yes, it often feels numinous. And this is best conveyed inside the home. This is why eating in Ukrainians’ homes, or even better in their dachas, is always so much better than eating in Ukrainian restaurants. Many Ukrainians grow their own food in their gardens, preserving a close, almost sacred relationship with the land around them, maintaining that intimacy deep into the winter in a spectrum of jars.
Image: Inside a Ukrainian home (author’s photograph)
Tatar Bunar is the only Ukrainian restaurant, inside or outside Ukraine, that comes close to preserving that deep domesticity. The flavours are superbly curated, but underline a profoundly personal touch. The restaurant’s focus on the homemade is crucial; but so is the kindness of the staff, so is the Ukrainian décor. It is a unique place that preserves the domestic amidst the urban, the personal against the universal (in a world where the universal is becoming so abstracted as to be meaningless). It is worth going out for: I almost expected them to invite me to remove my shoes at the door and offer me tapochki.
Image: Kebab at Tatar Bunar (author’s photograph)
And all this in an age where cities are being destroyed, houses are ripped open, where a burgeoning cultural expression is battered, where the people daily face the increasing threat of annihilation in their own homes.
Thinking about the Ukrainian home
I am not Ukrainian. But the meal at Tatar Bunar did strangely highlight many of these issues that I and millions must be experiencing, all in our own way, about how we come to terms with strange types of physical alienation at this time.
Image: Décor at Tatar Bunar (author’s photograph)
This is true for Ukrainians, especially those ripped from their homes and who have fled, who are experiencing differing types of somatic separation brutally enforced by a foreign ideology.
Food does play a spiritual role in many cultures, particularly in Christian ones (and, of course, there are books written about this). However, Ukraine appears to have kept a special focus on the importance of food as a cultural, almost spiritual, force that regulates relationships, relationships between the person and their family, the person and their nation.
It is not surprising that many Ukrainians when abroad miss their bread the most (one of their loaves, the palatable palianytsia even acting as a shibboleth and unifier), and moving that some British hosts who took in Ukrainian refugees in 2022 were given lists of various recipes to help their guests feel more at home.
The ideal relationship with food is mediated through the Ukrainian home. The Ukrainian expression of the domestic and its importance seems to me completely different from the Russians: more serene, more humane.
(That’s an encompassing comment that seems too ridiculous to manage. I am aware of my focus on the cultural, despite the problematics in the definition of culture; I am aware of my prioritisation of culture as a force that influences people’s behaviours. So I shall apply caution, but mitigate my generalisations by focusing on the political actions of the Ukrainians’ evil but overgrown infant neighbour.)
Image: The Russian violation of the Ukrainian home, the opposite movement of what Tatar Bunar does; photograph shared widely on social media, though taken from the BBC news online and credited on the website to Yan Dobronosov
I have written previously about Russian philosophy and its component writings as a peculiar expression of national identity (Robin Aizlewood, my long-suffering PhD supervisor, made this point first), especially when that identity has predominantly been expressed in opposition, mainly in opposition to Europe. And not just in opposition to Europe, but in opposition to an invented Europe which is constantly being reconstructed in the same processes that thinkers strive to reinvent Russia. I have also written about how Russian philosophy applies demands upon its recipients to realise its precepts (although typically on a national level). Contemporary culturologist Mikhail Epstein refers to Russia as an ‘ideocracy’, a philosophical-political space that imprisons its people in idealistic programmes and forces them to try to realise their thought, no matter how bizarre.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that modern (i.e. from the beginning of the nineteenth century) Russian philosophy largely ignores the home. Russian philosophy calls upon people to define Russia by how they seek to transform the world. Matter must be transfigured, but must be transfigured in a particularly Russian way.
This has led to a particular type of thinking, and to a nationalist system of ethics. This system of ethics defines what it means to be Russian, or rather what it means to do Russian. Russianness becomes contingent on the moral exigency to go out and act in a specific Russian way; not on restricting oneself to quite, indoors contemplation for its own sake.
In many ways, Russian thought is anti-home, demanding its protagonists abandon the domestic in favour of the Russian.
Towards and back away from a Russian oikonomia
It is superficially strange that Russian thought would largely shun the domestic, given the authority of conservative and family-based voices among its protagonists, as well as in current political-philosophical discourse.
However, further thought gives cause to reflect upon the complexities and seeming contradictions in such thinking. I am not the first to note: the Russian state claims to be the global custodian of family values (though the Americans are calling them to onto their weak beer), yet its president is reported to be a serial adulterer with several illegitimate children, and its spiritual leader is apparently a corrupt secret agent-businessman who covets money and luxury goods, all in a country which has (statistics are fuzzy) possibly way over 400,000 abortions per year.
The complexities of Russian thought in this area emerge, to my mind, in the historical difficulties of constituting a proper oikonomia, or economy (in the religious-philosophical meaning). Russia has tried to adopt, reluctantly, sneakily, elements of European thought, but it has struggled for centuries, millennia, with Christology and Pneumatology—and also problems with food.
Oikonomia in the ancient Greek meaning (as far as I understand, I am not a Classical expert) refers to the management of a household, in the reverence for the household gods as well as the practical everyday planning of the family and their affairs, especially meals.
Oikonomia, however, has a crucial and related meaning in Christian theory, describing the activity of the Persons of God on earth. Oikonomia is therefore different from, though lies alongside, theology, which describes the activity of the Trinity in Itself. Humanity, therefore, should understand oikonomia and should aligned their activities appropriately, participating in the domestication of the Godhead on earth through our own activity.
I tried to argue (poorly) while doing my doctorate that Russian thought experiences crucial issues in the transition from theory to practical action, because the history of Russian religious culture has a flawed Christology; it cannot explain adequately the Incarnation of Jesus and the nature of Christ.
Russian religious thought therefore has not fully developed an anthropology that underlines the innate divinity of the human or their relationship, on earth, with God. This incongruence has slid into many problems in Russian thought and the culture that is compelled to realise it.
Perhaps this is down to problems in Russian oikonomia and a flawed political domestication. Who would have thought that you could explain Russian information manipulation through a long-standing tradition in Russian religious culture to cope with the dyophysitism of Christ?
The distorted Russian home: the case of Rozanov, rejection and destruction
I mentioned above that modern Russian philosophy largely ignores the home.
There is a notable exception to this. I wrote my (very poor) doctorate on Vasilii Rozanov, the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century thinker who tried, unsystematically and in a typically Russian manner, to reconcile and reject simultaneously various components of Russian thought: native soil conservativism, neo-Kantianism, Solovyev’s approach to integrated knowledge, and others. Rozanov also took on the final strains of organic literary criticism and applied this to his thinking about how to transfigure Russia.
Rozanov fused all the above elements, as I noted, in a uniquely Russian way—in a way that both accepts and rejects the traditions of Russian thought (and this complex acceptance and rejection of tradition is a specific mode of Russian thinking). What we end up with is a rabid body of writing that has to focus on the body and its reproductive functions.
But this body and its fecundity can, for the most atypical and typical Russian thinker, be only Russian. Because of that, Rozanov’s thought is focused on the home (where people have sex), but also destroys the home. Rozanov demands that all places, in particular churches, be turned into homes, and that people should have intercourse in them to sanctify the efforts to ensure the continuity of life. This is an extreme domestication that in fact negates the home as a personal construct.
This life, though, is rooted in the Russian soil, and here Rozanov moulds horrifically the worst aspects of early twentieth-century thought and brings them to an even infandous extreme: the biological-spiritual superiority of the Russian body.
Much of Rozanov’s writings centre around his own family life, and how his publications feed his household. Yet this oikonomia tries so hard to mediate the personal-somatic with the national, that the relationship between the part and the whole ultimately collapses.
Rozanov, for his focus on the Russian family, its continuation, and the hearth as the regulator of rituals that enable that continuation, died in his home, starved to death by the Bolsheviks. His children died without heirs. He has no offspring.
However, Rozanov lives on, in some lines of nationalist Russian thought and political discourse. He is still the most extreme Russian thinker, an anti-eschatological but deeply apocalyptic writer, who worshipped Russian sperm and advocated its forceful use as a holy means of converting Ukrainians into Russians.
The distorted Russian home: the Kremlin apartment
I’ll slip in a little offtopik here, and a example of poor Russian domestication.
Russian President Vladimir Putin a few weeks ago invited state journalist Pavel Zarubin into the supposed presidential resident inside the Kremlin. Putin showed Zarubin around the apartment and its kitchen, then invited him to sit and drink tea and kefir.
The scene was appalling, not just for the gaudy gold, but for the attempt to portray Putin’s homely side. It is even more sickening that people might be taken in by this faked cosiness. Especially when the Kremlin is doing so much to destroy other lives, and sending its soldiers to rape Ukrainians in their own homes.
Image: Putin tries to look all cosy with Zarubin; neither removed their shoes or seemed to understand the complexity of the iconography watching over them
A new home
As suggested above, this Substack is deeply cultural, in that it muses, likely simplistically, what ‘culture’ might mean and how it impacts beliefs and behaviours. (It is also a deliberate revolt against and apology for my previous work on Rozanov.)
Those thoughts do lead into musings about information manipulation and its study, my paid work, in that I am consistently considering ways in which such information manipulation (alongside other things) promotes and leverages cultural coercion. Disinformation result of bad Christology.
But anyway, back to the particular. Is there an argument that the Russian home is culturally broken, that there is in that country no way at the moment for the home to act as the mediator between the political and the personal?
Russian men in their hundreds of thousands have chosen to leave their homes, their wives, their children, and to march on Ukraine to destroy Ukrainian homes, to rape Ukrainian women, and to kill Ukrainian children.
They also nick Ukrainian food: the spring of 2022 in particular was marked by Russian troops storming through Ukrainian villages, ransacking their supplies, killing their chickens and pigs. That attack on Ukrainian food was not just a physical assault against a people that still remember experientially the Holodomor, but a spiritual violation.
I thought about all this in Tatar Bunar, in the middle of London, in a small cosy place that was the closest feeling I have had of Ukraine outside a Ukrainian home. Ukraine is the Ukrainian home. This loss of the Ukrainian home, the destruction of houses, is one of the disasters of the invasion, and surely a considered aim of the barbarian hordes.
(Conversely, I shall always associate my life in Russia, in complex ways, to the streets of St Petersburg, a city that is totally unRussian in a specifically Russian way.)
This is why the experience at Tatar Bunar was so important to me, the reminder of a special tenderness, publicly but unspeakably intimate. People, cities, nations can be brutal. We can all be brutal.
But societies need to push past this in order to function. Could a proper model of domestication help? I thought of Tatar Bunar and the personal consideration of the staff, many of whom are likely expelled from their own homes. I thought of the way its chefs care for their food, the way they pay careful attention to each ingredient, using intimacy to bring out the best of their flavours in a, well, almost religious way.
This is the importance of the domestic ritual performed correctly: always the same way, but each time with renewed and unique meaning. This is how the home can mediate the relationship between the imagined and the intensely personal, the spiritual and the material.
It was an evening that for me exemplified everything I love about Ukraine. And perhaps this provides a model for how we could think about relationships now. The potentiality of domestication might provide a model for better social and political thinking and doing. It might help us think about ways to preserve better public personhood, where the consideration of the other, as if in a home, could cut through alienation and hostility.
Just dessert
It rained Londonly as we left Tatar Bunar and dispersed ourselves into a highly alienating city. Sated but strangely sad. Perhaps, inside that building, we had glanced at our phones and read the news.
I had been eating with some Ukrainians, and as their backs rained and vanished I could tell that they were still thinking about the pickled tomatoes. I was fixating on the varenyk crème brule, something ingenious which timid restaurant reviewers foolishly suggest is for two people: I scoffed mine unsharing, and would have licked out a shallower bowl.
Image: Varenyk crème brule at Tatar Bunar (author’s photograph)
It has been very difficult for people my age to understand that the unique aspects of Russian culture which we lauded (well, okay, here I talk for myself, cognisant of the selfindulgence) were the very things that could be distorted and made hideous. Ukrainians experience this every day. They have been living it for generations. I curse myself for not having thought about this sooner.
It is likely that this war, which has already lasted centuries, will continue much longer. There is so much to consider, so much to do. Ukrainians understand that they have to fight back: the special elements of their culture, would otherwise be lost forever. Their homes would otherwise be lost forever. We would lose the meaning of the Ukrainian home, buried under the rubble of Russian eschatology.
Russia is doing so much to exacerbate and exploit the crisis of universalism, which is doing so much to destroy our societies and our homes. We should do well to take note from the Ukrainians and their response, and do all we can to help them.