Many Russian Restaurant Owners in the US Oppose the War on Ukraine. They Still Face Bullying and Shame

On February 24, the day Russia began its brazen military assault against Ukraine, Anya El-Wattar looked out into the empty dining room of her two-week-old Russian restaurant, Birch & Rye, in San Francisco’s Castro district. Before it even opened, the restaurant had been booked a full month out, with a waiting list. But as the shocking news of Putin’s invasion reached the US, diners canceled their reservations and El-Wattar, a first-time restaurateur, began to panic.

Restaurant owners across the country share a growing sense of shame and discomfort about being branded as Russian at a time when most of the world is vehemently against the war. Many of these restaurateurs and chefs, including El-Wattar, have been among the most vocal in their support of Ukraine. Yet despite the unequivocal condemnation and charitable initiatives, Russian restaurants in the US now face stigma, bullying, and steeply declining business.

Fallout from the war has caused restaurants like Kachka in Portland, Oregon and Tzarevna in New York City to remove imported Russian ingredients from the menu, rename dishes, and in some cases, reimagine their entire concepts. Despite it all, these restaurateurs see their restaurants as vital in helping counter the many tropes that associate Russia with aggression and evil. 

El-Wattar was only 18 years old when she moved from Moscow to the United States with her family, and she’d grown accustomed to living with the stigma of being Russian in America. As a young immigrant, she would often hesitate to identify herself as Russian, knowing how many American stereotypes exist about Russians as communists and spy villains. But the burden feels heavier now. Her dream to introduce the San Francisco community to her modern Russian cuisine has become a reality, but now, the walls feel like they’re caving in.

On a personal level, the war has stirred up familiar feelings of shame, emotions El-Wattar battled all her life as she struggled to find a sense of belonging in America. She began raising money for Ukraine almost immediately when the war began. Birch & Rye hosted a $2,500-a-head charity dinner for World Central Kitchen with chef Dominique Crenn, donated sales from a special cocktail called “Olena’s Flowers” (named for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s wife) to Doctors Without Borders, and papered the restaurant’s social media accounts with messages condemning the Russian government.

Despite her anti-war sentiments, El-Wattar says that her restaurant has been unfairly targeted. Negative reviews and comments have started surfacing online from dubious sources. Birch & Rye’s social media accounts were bombarded with messages like “Go back to Russia'' and “You don’t belong in San Francisco” from people who claimed to be supporters of Ukraine, and “Not really a true Russian restaurant” from apparent Putin sympathizers. The trolling escalated with messages like “Death to the occupiers!” and now requires daily moderation to remove violent comments and block users.

A similar story played out at Tzarevna, a Russian restaurant in New York owned by Ricky Dolinsky and his business partner and wife, Mariia Dolinsky. The restaurant faced a deluge of trolling—threat calls, graffiti on their signage and outdoor dining area, lewd messages on social media, and fake reviews. Dolinsky and his team promptly covered up the graffiti with paintings of Ukrainian flags, but vandals continued desecrating the area. Earlier this year, a rowdy customer was being disruptive in the dining room, yelling anti-Slavic slurs at Russian-speaking guests and filming them with his cellphone. The Dolinskys had to call the police when he refused to leave. 

For her part, El-Wattar was particularly shaken by a random comment left on a favorable review of the restaurant by a reader who was incensed that Birch & Rye would showcase borscht, a UNESCO-protected cultural heritage food of Ukraine. The restaurant’s borscht is prepared “Lenten” style, the way El-Wattar grew up eating it—a vegan recipe preferred by many devout Russian Orthodox Christians in the days before Easter. El-Wattar acknowledges the deep roots that borscht has in Ukrainian cuisine but insists that borscht has been prepared throughout territories of the former Soviet Union for generations.

Borscht has become a cultural sticking point since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, which ended years of Ukraine and Russia being united under communist rule. The various regional interpretations highlight the culinary differences that now exist in a part of the world still reckoning with the turmoil of its political past. Today, these political borders impose distance between neighboring countries that have many culinary traditions in common—which makes squabbling over provenance a complicated and often futile conversation.

“This restaurant is really not a political statement,” says El-Wattar. “I’m simply trying to tell my story through food.” She’s resisted making wholesale changes to her menu, like sanitizing it of Russian language or pivoting the concept, like some Russian establishments that suddenly became “Eastern European” overnight as grim news flooded in from Ukraine.

El-Wattar took Russian vodka and Russian caviar off her menu and went to great lengths to find non-Russian purveyors to preserve the quality of both products for customers. But she hasn’t taken dishes like borscht off her menu. “I don’t think that the answer for us is to be even more divided, more scared,” she says. 

In Portland, Oregon, Bonnie Morales’s restaurant Kachka, which opened in 2014, has become one of the premier destinations for Russian food in the United States, even though Morales insists that the Russian label never quite fit her restaurant’s spirit. “My parents didn’t come from Russia,” says Morales, “They were refugees from the Soviet Union, from a place (Belarus) that didn't exist as a country until after they left.” Since opening, Morales has reluctantly accepted being labeled as Russian. “I’m not Russian, my food is not Russian. But that is the only word that can be used that folks will understand.”

In July, Morales penned an emotional op-ed in The Washington Post in which she expressed a growing discomfort with her restaurant’s Russian identity in light of the war. But Morales still resists the idea that a cuisine should be ostracized because of the actions of a rogue authoritarian regime.

“We started looking at our menu and thinking: Where have we given oxygen to Russia in a way that we maybe didn't intend to?” Morales says. They changed the name of their signature James Bond–style martini to “From Kachka, With Love” (Kachka replaced “Russia”) and swapped out the former Russian Standard spirit for Reyka Icelandic vodka. Morales still has 60 bottles of Russian vodka sitting in her basement.

“When we opened Kachka, it felt like all this baggage was in the past,” Morales says, referring to her parents’ struggle as emigrants of the former Soviet Union, and her personal trauma of growing up with the stigma of being a Soviet American in the heart of the Cold War. She sees Kachka’s perseverance as an extension of her family’s resiliency. But she also worries that her personal connection to her own identity has become irreparably frayed. “I used to be deeply in love with sharing this with people, and that deep love is gone.”

While some chefs, like El-Wattar and Morales decided not to drastically reimagine their menus, some Russian restaurant owners have decided to overhaul their concepts. “We want to be unmistakably Russian,” Ricky told The New Yorker in late 2021 of his then two-year-old Russian restaurant, “but we want to be more chill about it.” Ricky, a baby-faced 28 year-old, did not get the kind of chill he had hoped for: In the days immediately following the Russian invasion, business at Tzarevna dropped almost 90%.

Mariia was horrified by the terrifying news from Ukraine and condemned the war immediately on Tzarevna’s social media accounts. “We just wanted to make sure that we were offering a safe space for Russians and Ukrainians alike,” she says. Mariia immigrated to the United States nine years ago from Magnitogorsk, a working-class town built around a steel factory she describes as “the Pittsburgh of Russia.” She met Ricky bartending at a restaurant in Manhattan, and the two decided to open their own business together in 2018 after they got married.

For the Dolinskys, the strain of keeping their business above water was becoming increasingly challenging as the months wore on and as the number of occupied tables continued to drop. By early October of this year, they decided to rebrand as Yo+Shoku. They reimagined the space with a new menu in the Yōshoku tradition, a style of Japanese cooking that embraces Western influences. Ricky is American born of Taiwanese and Ukrainian descent. His maternal grandmother is Japanese, and as a chef he’s always been fascinated with the melding of cuisines along the physical and cultural borders of Eastern Europe and Asia.

With the Yo+Shoku menu, the Dolinksys were able to preserve the spirit of some their Tzarevna dishes, retrofitting pan-fried pelmeni dumplings into potstickers that pair with chili crisp and aonori smetana (crème fraîche seasoned with dried seaweed), and reincarnating their borscht as a borscht curry udon. The beetroot broth is infused with dashi and Japanese curry powder and loaded with a tangle of thick noodles and tender strands of caramelized sesame short rib. The Dolinskys don’t see their new restaurant concept as an admission of failure, but rather a step in the healing process. “Yo+Shoku, at its core, is about combining things that normally wouldn’t be combined,” says Mariia, “Especially now when there are so many divisions, the restaurant is about mending that.”

El-Wattar also sees her restaurant as a bridge for people to come together. With the gray cloud of war still lingering overhead, she’s focused on reminding Ukrainian visitors there are Russians that not only care about them but also care about the future of Ukraine. “The heart of this enterprise was to showcase that Russians have a soul,” she says, “And I think that the biggest loss for Russia in this war with Ukraine is that Russia is losing its soul.” The war has changed her perspective on how she runs her business. “The Russian invasion gave our mission a deeper sense of purpose and meaning,” says El-Wattar. “Birch & Rye became more than a restaurant. It’s a hopeful refuge.”