SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
We met the famed Ukrainian chef Yevhen Klopotenko just before Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022. He wanted the world to know that the hearty beet stew called borscht is not Russian.
YEVHEN KLOPOTENKO: (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
KLOPOTENKO: You said Ukrainian borscht face? Ukrainian borscht face.
SIMON: Now with the war well into its third year, the chef still cooks and has a new English language cookbook. NPR's Joanna Kakissis spoke to him in Kyiv.
JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: No one leaves Kyiv without trying even Yevhen Klopotenko's smoky, sweet borscht, even if you have just a day in town, like Antony Blinken did last month.
KLOPOTENKO: Hello. Nice to meet you. It's a pleasure for you to be here.
KAKISSIS: The chef told the secretary of state, look, after today, your life will be divided into two parts.
KLOPOTENKO: Before you tried my borscht and after you tried my borscht.
ANTONY BLINKEN: That's what I've heard.
KLOPOTENKO: You've heard that. I think that your dream will come true today.
I will cook borscht once in a month, but then I will change the planet (imitating shooting).
KAKISSIS: Klopotenko is 37, with green-painted nails and what looks like a curly-haired mohawk. We speak at his folksy restaurant where Blinken dined and where we first met the chef before the war.
KLOPOTENKO: Yeah, I remember. I remember sitting there.
KAKISSIS: Yeah. That's right. We were sitting over there. That's right. And a whole lot has happened since then.
KLOPOTENKO: Yeah, yeah.
KAKISSIS: Klopotenko's restaurant became a bomb shelter in the early days of the invasion. As Ukrainians fled west, he opened up a pop-up diner in the western city of Lviv.
KLOPOTENKO: I was standing in the Lviv railway station, I was cooking the borscht, and I saw the people who I was giving them the food and they were, like, crying because they said that I had no food for the three days because I was running from the bombing. And it's still the same. Let's start to be the part of life.
KAKISSIS: Also part of life during this long war, he says, is staying sane. He does it by cooking.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KLOPOTENKO: (Speaking Ukrainian).
KAKISSIS: And showing Ukrainians how to cook. His YouTube channel has almost half a million subscribers.
KLOPOTENKO: If you speak about the war for day after day, it start to be hard, you know, because it's not gives you good emotions But when you cook, you have good emotions. So it's like a continuation of the story about Ukraine.
KAKISSIS: His new cookbook, "The Authentic Ukrainian Kitchen," breaks down those recipes in English. They include a vegetarian version of borscht with plum butter, as well as stuffed buns and small fluffy cheesecakes.
KLOPOTENKO: That's the idea of this book, to give opportunity of all people who speaks English to touch our cuisine and to put our culture inside of yourself. So I want to share our culture.
KAKISSIS: What his cookbook does not include is borscht ice cream. A local ice cream company did turn Klopotenko's borscht into a novelty flavor to raise money for military drones.
KLOPOTENKO: If you will eat the vanilla, OK, it's very nice. You will eat with the pistachio, nice, or with the strawberry, mmm, chocolate, mmm, borscht, ugh.
KAKISSIS: (Laughter).
KLOPOTENKO: Dun, dun, the end (ph).
KAKISSIS: There's only so much you can do with borscht, right?
KLOPOTENKO: Yeah, yeah. I mean, like you eat, for example, meat - meat ice cream. It's ice cream without the sugar. It's just the borscht - borscht, frozen borscht. Even for me it was - you know? Whew.
KAKISSIS: Borscht is now on Unesco's cultural heritage list, largely because of Klopotenko. He says it's part of a wider push to decolonize Ukrainian culture.
KLOPOTENKO: So before the USSR and before the Russian Empire, we were the part of the world, yeah? And then we started to be the part of the Russian Empire or the USSR. We were afraid to lose our identity, like who we are.
KAKISSIS: And that fight for identity, he says, has become more important as this war drags on. He brings up another long war, the one in Syria, which he followed closely. He cooked Syrian recipes in solidarity. And then he says, the world stop paying attention to Syria.
KLOPOTENKO: And so this country just disappears.
KAKISSIS: ...Disappears.
KLOPOTENKO: Yeah, and that's what I felt. And then - yeah, yeah, I don't want Ukraine to disappear in such a way.
KAKISSIS: He's digging through 400-year-old diaries of monks to find lost Ukrainian dishes, he's criss-crossing Ukraine to find undiscovered local recipes, and of course, he's making borscht.
Joanna Kakissis, NPR News, Kyiv. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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