And stuff your fat face cheap with hearty good fast Ukrainian eats
Not just your average shitty Cornish food review (of absolutely no value to the story)
Being only my Second Self, that is, practically a mere semi-corporeal phantom of the Original Hunched Cornish, frozen in a time warp at a diminutive bagel joint next to the city’s main synagogue, The Hunched Cornish doesn’t always have the strength of will to terrorize the gourmand haunts of the flash fiction-like Podil, and tries taking it easy once in a while.
The famous central Khreshchatyk street – far from elegant, glamorous, prestigious, fashionable, or chic, as you might find described in international wire service stories talking through their ass, or, for that matter, by one or two English-language publications in this town trying to convince themselves that they are working in a vibrant major metropolis rather than a pungent moldering regional backwater while telling you in sincere gusts of vested passion just how much they love this great and ancient city (meaning they’re also talking through their ass) – is easily one of Kyiv’s ugliest thoroughfares.
The Khreshchatyk of today is historically a long and deep Stalinist scar, while topographically it looks like a broad, scraped-out ditch or ravine, banked either side by devastatingly morose and eyesore-ish Soviet monoliths, with one end of the street, the main square, looking like a discarded masturbatory fantasy ejaculated by a demented Japanese animator. On weekends, when all the bumpkins come stumbling in, it turns into a shithole.
To find the cafeteria-shaped-themed-and-styled Zdorovenki Buly, which is an old Ukrainian greeting that asks, essentially – ‘How have you been?’; or more precisely, “How’s your health been?’ – which has since been pared down to ‘Zdorov!’; as The Hunched Cornish was saying, to find – basically, it’s behind and to the left of the opaque dark-green-tinted glass-box excrescence you walked out of covering the Khreshchatyk metro stop, or to the right if you’re facing it and not walking backwards.
It’s surprisingly roomy inside, being cavernous and deep (Cornish like…), and when you walk in you can immediately pile as much and as many combinations of salads they have out as you can force into a bowl (or bowls), and then your bowels (or bowel, depending on what the fuck you actually are). It’s all of a price, since, to your pleasant surprise, you’ll find out they don’t weigh the salad to determine your debt. Nor, for that matter, do they bother weighing anything else. And that’s what The Hunched Cornish calls the true generous Ukrainian spirit!
For everything else that you get, you look and ogle and ask – ‘Excuse me, what’s this?’, and the ladies tell you (and if you’re me, fascinated, the ladies ogle back and ask pretty much the same thing), even though every dish is labeled for your Ukrainian-reading convenience (What? Don’t know Ukrainian? You must be really stupid), and then they just whisk out a plate and heap it on for you. And The Hunched Cornish has already told you, it doesn’t get weighed; there’s a basic price per dish, and it’s good, and it’s cheap, and that’s that.
That’s why The Hunched Cornish won’t bother telling you how much it was per item, but just that he got a bowl of spicy Korean-style shredded carrot and some seaweed, and then he got one of the many soups, forgetting which one it was but it was really good, and also a beaten (if not ground and reassembled) and breaded veal cutlet, spicy pasta shells and a spicy mashed potato and pea or pumpkin mush that he drank down with a good-sized glass of uzvar (essence of boiled dried fruit).
What he WILL bother telling you is that the whole meal cost him around UAH 45, or five bucks.
Fucking amazing.
You can order pizza there, too.
The interior is divided into four geographical and ancient historico-cultural themes – one done in something like Indian Rig Veda, another in Far Eastern (maybe Chinese – The Hunched Cornish doesn’t know and The Hunched Cornish doesn’t care), another hall is Ancient Egyptian, and the one The Hunched Cornish enjoyed and found the most relevant, the Ancient Greek section, replete with columns, illustrated figures of the orange-and-black type found on their, uh, china – fuck it!; let’s just call them what they are, or were, which is: plates – the wine vessels, vases, amphorae, and jugs (I don’t know – maybe some of these things are different, or maybe they’re the same; you make the corrections, if you want) together with the meander motif border design, signifying the incomprehensible cosmic paradigm of non-stop eternal infinity, which no one knows shit about, having no experience of it, so they just made shit up, as though they truly knew it to be real. But we know better – don’t we? Heh…
You’ll now excuse The Hunched Cornish as he fulfills one of Kyiv Unedited’s new and (intentionally?) abstruse “writing” requirements, to throw in a literary reference into the story, whether it’s relevant or not; and so: The Hunched Cornish would provide a lot more detail describing what this section of Zdorovenki Buly looks like, but THIS WORK WILL HAVE TO FALL SHORT OF LITERARY GREATNESS BECAUSE THE HUNCHED CORNISH IS NO JOHN UPDIKE.
That should do it.
The Hunched Cornish mentioned relevance, and it’s this: the Ukrainian Cossack theme is superbly mixed into the Ancient Greek one, which works in a propagandistically convincing manner in the spirit of Ivan Kotlyarevsky’s “Aeneid” mock-epic parody (“Aeneida” or, phonetically, “Eneyida”– in Ukrainian) and the Soviet-era “Cossacks” cartoons, so popular even today, they’re practically iconic, because the Ukrainian Cossacks were great democrats, like the Ancient Greeks they emulated, so why don’t you go ahead and deny it or try to contradict me.
That’s it for this. The Half Guinea, as he usually somehow manages, ruined this fine and cheap lunching experience for The Hunched Cornish by once again finding him, baring his jagged teeth, the two central incisors jutting over the lower lip in a shearing crooked V, taunting:
Hey, hey, Hunchy, I thought it was you – no one else makes those terrifying noises when they eat. So, Hunchy, Hunchy, Hunchy, Hunchy – whadya say? – share some of those literary secrets with me over a glass of uzvar! You know, at Kyiv Unedited, it’s a fucking requirement now. Heeeeey, Huuuuunchyyyyy…!!!
The Hunched Cornish, March 24, 2013