Gastro-diplomacy: Ukraine's soft power gambit for stomachs, hearts, and minds

The wind chill factor takes the late February air temperature down to minus 3 celsius. It could be Kyiv but it's actually Stratford, East London.

Upon entering XIX, a Ukrainian restaurant only a few minutes walk away from Stratford International Rail Station, I spy a cartoon poster of Stalin adorning a fake front cover of Vogue furtively peeping out at all arriving customers from behind a stack of Ukrainian wine boxes.

In order to understand the role Ukrainian cuisine has on the cultural level of the war with Russia, I'm going to need to eat it. And this invariably means borsch.

Immortalising beetroot

And as I sit in the wide window watching other customers come in and being greeted in Ukrainian by owner Vinchentso Dulepa and his new bride Iryna, I am brought a vibrant burgundy bowl of the national dish, a dish that symbolises the cultural land-grab that has for three years now taken an all too solid form after Russia's full scale 2022 invasion.

Warming, peppery flavours abound while black bread sits on the side with raw red onion. I’m gratified to see a huge sprig of flat parsley to combat the latter.

There are many different versions of borsch in Ukraine but it's essentially a broth combined with beetroot, sugar beet or fermented beet juice. This version has slow cooked chunks of pork inside.

There is a fabulous depth of colour and the sour cream provides another level of taste and texture. It's gorgeous, wholesome and a truly luminous centrepiece for a discussion of Ukrainian identity.

Borsh and UNESCO

Since Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and then even more critically after war broke out in February 2022, Ukraine has used its culinary heritage as an assertion of cultural independence. And borsch became the focal point in July 2022 when, after intense lobbying, UNESCO recognised the dish as needing 'urgent safeguarding' as an intangible piece of cultural heritage.

"Due to the ongoing war and its negative impact on this tradition, Ukraine asked the Member States of the Committee to fast-track the examination of the nomination file for borsch to be inscribed on the List of Urgent Safeguarding as a case of extreme urgency, in accordance with the rules and procedures of the Convention," UNESCO stated upon its approval on July 1st 2022.

This was seen, accurately, as a political act rejecting Russia’s historical claims that borsch has a shared genesis or that it is in fact singularly emanating from Russia.

Ukrainian chefs have been at the forefront of this effort, promoting Ukrainian cuisine internationally as a form of resistance. Ukrainian food pop-ups, restaurants, and culinary diplomacy events have gained traction worldwide, reinforcing global solidarity with Ukraine. And no-one has been more active in this regard than Yevhen Klopotenko, whose The Authentic Ukrainian Kitchen was released to critical acclaim in May 2024.

"We began to get to know a country through the food of its people," Klopotenko tells Euronews Culture from Kyiv.

"Because food is always a reflection of how and what people live by. What they take pride in and what they want to share with the world. We fall in love through food. We always remember the flavours that accompanied our experience in a new country. Food is the story of people. It is the culture of families. It is part of a national identity.

Take tomatoes, for example, they exist in both Italian and American cuisine. But there is a huge difference in how these two nations treat them and tell their stories about them. Because their culture and history are different."

Klopotenko, winner of Ukraine's version of Masterchef, was instrumental in the UNESCO lobby but says he didn't set out to start an Eastern European culinary clash.

"My mission was to recognise borsch as an aspect of Ukrainian national culture by UNESCO because I was frankly fed up with restaurants around the world calling borsch a Russian soup. 

But submitting the application attracted global attention to this Ukrainian dish, foodies around the world also learned about borsch, its history and global spread. Thanks to borsch, Ukrainian cuisine received a bit of its limelight. Well-deserved limelight, as Ukraine has much to offer."

Gastro-Diplomacy

The term gastro-diplomacy first came to prominence around 2002 when Thailand was putting a spike of funding behind cooks promoting their cuisine, culture and stories around the world. It's no surprise Ukrainians are exerting their soft power skills at one of the grimmest points in their history.

"Today, the table where Ukrainian food is served is one of the tables where Ukraine’s future is being decided," explains Klopotenko. That is why gastro-diplomacy remains one of the key fronts of culinary defence. My mission is to convey the value of Ukraine. Because if foreigners love what we love, their support will be deeper."

Back in Stratford a platter of Salo, which is salt-cured subcutaneous pork fat, arrives accompanied by cloves of raw garlic, pickled cucumber and fresh dill. If you have a date, you'll need to share this but raw garlic and dill, what a glorious combination. I feel like I’m eating something from a forage.

XIX's exclusively Ukrainian Wine list also excites. A Pinotage from the Beykush winery on the Black Sea has much more red berry than the more well-known South African version and less black pepper. But the real hero wine for this was the Kolonist Cabernet Merlot “Haut de gamme” 2020 which has woody sweetness on the nose with strong violet and cassis with a touch of graphite. The winery will be represented at Prowein, the world's largest wine and spirits trade fair held in Dusseldorf later in March.

A Labour of Hercules?

More soft power initiatives continue in 2025 targeting the US market.

These may be the hearts and minds most useful to capture right now. And the person undertaking this labour is Ukrainian cook and author Olia Hercules.

"There's this amazing foundation in the USA called Razom for Ukraine," she tells Euronews Culture. "And they basically send medical help and surgeons to train Ukrainian medical workers. So they invited me to come to Louisiana for a week, to Shreveport and New Orleans, to put a face to Ukraine. I'm going to go there and cook with local chefs for the community, for first responders and even for some politicians. I'm going to tell them stories and I think this combination, this combination of actually tasting something will make some synapses fire here and there."

When UNESCO announced the decision to protect Ukrainian borsch, they cited people being displaced from their "communities of origin and from the cultural contexts necessary for the cooking and consumption of borsch in Ukraine. Moreover, destruction to the surrounding environment and traditional agriculture has prevented communities from accessing local products, such as vegetables, needed to prepare the dish."

Iryna at XIX backs this up.

"The most dangerous thing, and the worst thing that they did, was they burned our fields," she says. "They burned the wheat with bombs and everything in the east of Ukraine. So you don't have a lot of food, like bread. You don't have flour. So, in order to cook, the number one thing is potato, because that's under the ground and it's easy to grow."

From as far back as World War II there has been the practice of hiding food in case of invasion, Iryna explains. "In the Second World War everyone hid the food in the basement. Because everyone knows that everything can happen. My grandmother, my mother, they do all this and have a lot of things in the basement, always. Open the basement and you'll find food for five years. In fact many things are fermented or pickled because it had to be kept for a long time."

Cabbage rolls filled with pork mince and rice come to the table. They are very filling with an authentic sour edge which is mutated just the right amount by mushrooms in their own sauce, which itself goes brilliantly with the oaky Bordeaux blend from the Black Sea.

Cornerstones of Ukrainian Cuisine

"Thanks to our climate, every region of the country has its own unique products," exalts Klopotenko.

"But let's highlight a few distinctly Ukrainian flavours that set our cuisine apart from others around the world. First, sour cream — we add it to countless dishes including borsch. Second, fermented cottage cheese, which we most often use in baked goods. And third, smokiness — smoked pears, smoked meat, smoked fish, and even smoked cheese. We Ukrainians absolutely love it."

Hercules agrees with the diversity of cuisines within the one country as well as the classic ingredients that all regions share.

"Culturally, regional food before the Soviet Union was quite different, but there's always been a few uniting elements, which I feel make us all very Ukrainian. You can be a Crimean Tatar, you can be a Gagauz from near the Moldovan border, or you can be one of the kind of Highlanders and Carpathians, because obviously the environment dictates what you're cooking in your community, but there are just a couple of dishes that make part of our Ukrainian DNA and I know it's such a big stereotype, but it's for sure borsch."

June 21st will see Hercules publish a new book - Strong Roots: A Ukrainian Family Story through War, Exile and Hope. She traces her family back 100 years and finds that at no point were their experiences not shaped in some way by cross border aggression. And so often it comes back to food.

"My parents were actually in occupation when the big invasion broke out in 2022, and sometimes there would be no communication, which would just completely freak me out. And then I'll never forget this one day when my mum finally messaged me and said, we are OK and we found the strength to cook borsch today. It made everything better. And she said 'I just felt it so much in my body today'. There's something in our genetics," says Hercules, "that when you taste borsch, it does incredible things to your brain and you feel stronger and more positive."

And back in Stratford, in one such establishment, sweet cherry dumplings with sour cream and brown sugar bring the education to a crescendo.

The sweetness is actually subtle and welcomes the strawberry and mint accompaniment, while the empanada-thick dumplings are just light enough for there to be this many of them.

Despite the politics of the last few days, Klopotenko believes that culinary soft power is on a forward trajectory and the success of XIX is certainly part of that.

"Ukrainian national cuisine establishments are opening around the world," he says. "Ukrainian food festivals are being held. Step by step, we are making our mark on the global gastronomic map."