Ukrainian chef Zhenya Mykhailenko learned his trade working three jobs in and around Los Angeles, cooking in a fine-dining restaurant, at a big waterfront wedding venue and for thousands of fans outside college football games.
“So I knew how to do quality food and how to do massive amounts of food,” he says of his skill set when arriving home in February 2014, just as the Maidan revolution neared its bloody conclusion and Ukraine’s leaders of the time prepared to flee to Russia.
Eight years later, as he was building his own chain of ramen restaurants in Kyiv, Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine gave Mykhailenko a chance to combine his skills and transform the quality of food provided to at least some of his country’s soldiers.
With Russian troops already in Kyiv’s suburbs, Mykhailenko, wife Mary and some kitchen staff hunkered down in the basement of one his restaurants and began cooking for a battalion that had responded to an offer of help that he posted online.
“They told me to drive down a certain road and then call,” says the chef, who has a kitchen knife, garlic, ginger, dill and other ingredients, and tables for converting weights and measures tattooed on his arms.
“So we went out there with a van full of food. We drove into the forest and were sitting there, hearing explosions to the left and right, thinking: ‘What the f**k are we doing here?’ Then three huge Humvees with machine guns attached come out of the forest and one of the soldiers asks: ‘Are you Zhenya?’”
His team started cooking for the battalion every day, and when the Russians were forced to retreat from Kyiv and the unit was sent to a front-line area some 600km to the southeast, it had no intention of reverting to standard army rations.
“They said come down to Zaporizhzhia and gave me an abandoned building to work in, with lots of old Soviet equipment that didn’t work and two good fridges. With help from friends and volunteers, I slowly brought all the equipment from one of my restaurant kitchens in Kyiv – one van, one stove and one stainless-steel table at a time.”
While most of Ukraine’s soldiers fight on a mix of modern military rations and tinned meat and other supplies reminiscent of the Soviet days, the special forces battalion fed by Mykhailenko’s team receives deliveries to the front line three times a week of food that is as fresh as wartime conditions allow.
Breakfast could be an omelette with feta cheese and mushrooms and potato latkes, or porridge with granola and nuts, and the second meal of the day could be borscht soup and a hearty salad, lasagne or a big roast chicken sandwich with vegetables; the kitchen bakes its own bread and cakes and prepares its own ham and smoked bacon.
Over Christmas and New Year, Mykhailenko’s team will give the soldiers special food packages containing items associated with Ukrainian holiday meals at home – mandarins or tangerines, persimmons, sprats “and other little things you would see on a traditional table”.
“The freshest food is the most nutritious, so we get meat straight from the slaughterhouse and vegetables from the farmers’ fields. We cook and blast chill the meals down to two degrees ... then move them in refrigerated vans along the front line, where we have specially refrigerated rooms where the units can come and load up whatever they need,” he explains.
It is a mammoth logistical task for the kitchen in Zaporizhzhia and its delivery drivers, because the battalion – which can include 850 or more soldiers – is scattered in groups along a front line that stretches for well over 1,000km, from Kherson in the southeast to Sumy in the north and Ukrainian-held parts of Russia’s Kursk region.
They are now delivering up to 10,000 portions a week and have prepared about a million packed meals to the battalion, whose troops also get what Mykhailenko (39) calls a “full buffet service” when they are back at their base for rest and training.
The chef says his system makes large-scale catering remarkably cheap and could be applied across the military and in hospitals and schools, yet a state still dogged by corruption and red tape shows no eagerness to learn and modernise on this front.
“A government or not-for-profit organisation could reduce the base costs of school lunches, for example ... but the problem is they treat food as a business,” he explains.
“There is no understanding in the military of how this should be done ... I had to figure out everything from zero and build everything up as I see it, and as the soldiers told me what they needed we figured out how to provide nutrition for them in the special circumstances they face.”
The cooks in Zaporizhzhia also face unusual challenges, and had to move their entire kitchen urgently last year after a local informer revealed its location to the Russians.
“There are always strikes nearby, literally every day. A couple of weeks ago a guided bomb fell two kilometres from us. Another day they were shooting rockets and pieces fell right next to our base,” Mykhailenko says.
His team in Zaporizhzhia includes staff and a mix of Ukrainian and foreign volunteers who generally work 20 shifts of 12-16 hours before taking a break from the front. His charity, Magic Food Army, helps arrange paperwork for the foreigners and raises money for the project.
Mykhailenko decorates the walls of his restaurants with black-and-white photos of culinary heroes – Marco Pierre White, Anthony Bourdain and others – and they also watch over his front-line kitchen, which should give his cooks some idea of the standards he sets.
“I don’t have the luxury of firing people when they don’t do the s**t that I need them to do, because I don’t have a line of people waiting to do this job. So they still need to be persuaded. I’m not screaming and shouting all the time. At this point I can make people feel uncomfortable without screaming at them.”
Mykhailenko is not alone in trying to transform the way Ukraine’s soldiers are fed, but he says the Soviet approach to food preparation – without finesse or the desire to bring pleasure – has left the country with a dearth of good cooks.
“There are other chefs out there – particularly the ones I trained and put into other battalions – who know how to work well ... but unfortunately the command doesn’t always give them everything they need. Sometimes they have to work with ancient, prehistoric equipment but they do the best they can.”
He believes that Ukraine’s cooking, like all aspects of its culture, must be nurtured after centuries of Russian repression, and the state’s provision of good food – whether for its soldiers, schoolchildren or hospital patients – would show that it cared for and respected its citizens.
“That’s how you remove the corruption from a society corrupted by the USSR,” he says. “That’s the easy way to show you care. People ask me, how do we raise morale in the military? Give them good food, for starters – it’s not that hard.”
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