I met my dinner companion near the exit of the Poshtova Ploshcha (which translates roughly as Postal Square) metro station in Podil. He arrived almost exactly on time, just a few minutes after 4:30 p.m., and we proceeded down Sahaydachnoho Street, the unofficial main drag of Kyiv’s historical riverside district.
We had business to discuss and needed a quiet venue with decent-to-good food at reasonable to just-above-reasonable prices.
We scoped out prospective establishments, but either the tables were too close together to allow sufficient leg room for our lengthy frames, the clientele looked too posh, or the interior suggested more a bar lounge with a grill than a proper eatery with a trained cooking staff. The rest of the places were fast food: pizza, sushi, or Ukrainian dumplings served up fast and greasy.
And then we came across Shangri-La, named after the fictional Eastern paradise described in the 1933 novel “Lost Horizon” by British author James Hilton.
The red wooden front porch looked vaguely exotic, but once inside, things got more intriguing.
A stout Uzbek in a business suit challenged – or welcomed – us at the foot of the staircase leading up to the main dining hall on the second floor.
Here we encountered the usual Eastern kitsch interior of pillowed seating, dim lighting and meditational music. But it didn’t look too cheesy. And, best of all, nowhere was to be seen the all-too-familiar party of wannabe toughs puffing on water pipes and barking orders at chubby-cheeked waitresses in Baghdad pajamas.
Once we learned that the kitchen was equipped with an open-fire barbeque grill and that the raised, curtained booth down the hall had not been reserved, we decided to stay.
A glance at the menu warned us that it wouldn’t be cheap, but the atmosphere was thoroughly relaxing, and our waitress surprisingly charming: “This is my first day at work,” she candidly declared. But her complete ignorance of the menu was more than compensated by her unpretentious manner and bubbly presence.
The grilled meat was tasty and greaseless; the salad sufficiently fresh if somewhat meager in size; the tea overpriced. But the best surprise was that they served uzvar, a drink made from dried fruit, and just the ticket to moisten a tongue dried out by Eastern spices and red meat.
But alas, fate was not to leave us in the harmonious and contented state of mind described in Hilton’s novel. And the reason for our rude, premature awakening back into the realty of Kyiv living was a measly piece of bread – not an oven-baked unleavened loaf, or even a basket of fluffy white slices, but a dried-out portion of pita from a bag that had been apparently just lying around in the kitchen!
The kitchen didn’t have the oven-baked unleavened loaf that I had wanted to order, so I had asked the young waitress to scratch up a piece of pita to go with my meat and salad. She did just that, and I was grateful, until, when we got the bill, my sharp-eyed companion noticed that the conspicuously unavailable “administrator” had all the same charged me for the unleavened loaf, which was priced at 60 hryvnias (or almost 8 USD!!! at today’s exchange rate).
The meditative music wasn’t enough to restrain my anger, and I demanded to speak to the person with the calculator. Instead, they continued to send back to us the hapless young intern whose sincere attempts to clarify the situation failed to keep us from leaving Shangri-La in a huff.
I even felt a little sorry for the stout Uzbek below, who like an untrained guard dog sensed something was wrong, but didn’t exactly know what to do, and instead sort of accompanied us out in the same attentive but mildly threatening way in which he’d greeted us.
John Smith, February 4, 2013