Kitchen aid: left, Olia Hercules. Right, clockwise from left, Patricia Trijbits of Where The Pancakes Are, Joe Laker of Fenn, Big Mamma’s Group’s Victor Lugger, Santiago Lastra of Kol and Shuko Oda of Koya
(Picture: Joe Woodhouse/Collected press handouts )The Ukrainian-born, London-based chef and food-writer Olia Hercules is speaking in the torrents that come with someone who, in their own words, is “running on mad adrenaline”. Two Sundays ago, it was business as usual, as she proudly shared news of husband Joe Woodhouse’s debut cookbook with her 111,000 Instagram followers. By Friday, she was outside Parliament protesting over Vladimir Putin’s invasion of her country. In her hometown, Kakhovka, her mother and father are holed up; her aunt Lyuda, cousin Alyona and other family all are staying nearby. When Hercules speaks to them on the phone, the sound of bullets whistle down the line. Her elder brother Sasha is in Kyiv; he has joined the territorial army.
“How do I feel? S**t,” she says. “How do you think I feel?” She adds: “My first thought was just a very powerful feeling of being powerless.”
With her that Friday was her friend Alissa Timoshkina, another well-known food writer. The pair have been friends since university. “When we went to the protest, just being together, I felt like we needed to join forces,” she says. Timoshkina — “from Russia myself, with my family roots in Ukraine” — says she was “deeply heartbroken and ashamed, as a Russian. Even though I know Russia is not the same as Putin”.
Determined to help, she remembered “the pleasure of working with Clerkenwell Boy and the Cook For Syria campaign a few years ago. I thought I’d reach out to see if he was doing something similar again. After seeing all the super courageous people standing up, I knew something had to be done”.
King of the restaurant influencers, Clerkenwell Boy was more into his usual larks on that Friday — “I was up in the Lake District celebrating Simon Rogan winning his third Michelin star at L’Enclume when Alissa messaged,” he says, sounding somewhat sheepish — but by that evening he, Timoshkina and Hercules had the framework in place for #CookforUkraine. A fundraiser at justgiving.com/cookforukraine went live on Sunday evening, with little more than a story from CB by way of promotion. By the next morning, it stood at £6,000. At the time of publishing, it stands at more than £32,000. “The response has been just… overwhelming. Amazingly overwhelming. My phone is struggling to keep up,” Timoshkina says.
The #CookforUkraine campaign is a broad-reaching thing. It aims to raise both awareness of the crisis and funds to help Unicef’s efforts there and welcomes support in almost any form (and also hopes and to offer a platform for “Ukrainian families and their supporters to share recipes with each other, along with the stories behind those dishes.”) Restaurants, bars, cafés and hotels can add voluntary donations of £1, £2 or £5 to the bill through March, by emailing cookforukraine@gmail.com to get involved. Already, the likes of Casa do Frango, Kricket, Wild Honey, Brutto, Blacklock, Petersham Nurseries, Silo, Soho House, Manteca, Haché, La Rampa, Kol, Fallow, St John, Sessions Arts Club, Da Terra, Cocotte, Homeslice, Ikoyi and Fenn have signed up to the scheme, as have Where The Pancakes Are, Vermuteria and Nest. At the time of publishing, 59 restaurants were on board.
Others are helping with special dishes, with all the proceeds donated to the campaign. The Big Mamma Group, which runs Insta-catnip Italians Gloria, Circolo Popolare and Ave Mario, have a garlic-heavy bruschetta topped with Ukrainian salo served with a shot of vodka (not a Russian one). “The attack is one on democracy and the values on which our ancestors and ourselves build a world order based on respect, collaboration and mutual appreciation,” says the group’s director Victor Lugger. “On the day of the invasion, we did not only feel sad for the human suffering we were witnessing. We have felt fear as well; this is at our doors and... makes us all the more concerned that the Ukrainian suffering is a matter for us all.”
Elsewhere, the city’s Officina 00 are re-creating a Ukrainian dumpling dish, Vareniki, while at all three branches of Japanese Koya will put on what they call a “Ukrainian-inspired udon dish”.
“It really feels like this is not just about Ukraine and it’s an important message to the world, for all our future, to defend ourselves and protect our rights,” says head chef Shuko Oda.
Vegan specialists Club Mexicana are cooking up a dish, too, and founder Meriel Armitage says she’s sure more places will follow suit. “Our industry has a great history of pulling together to support, love and help people in need, so I’m in no doubt that #CookforUkraine will be the start of something incredible.”
This embrace of Ukrainian culture is one Hercules hopes will go further. “People don’t know anything about my culture,” she says. “There’s so much beauty in Ukraine, it’s good for people to understand it better.”
The campaign’s set-up, says Clerkenwell Boy, is deliberately non prescriptive. “Whether it’s about helping people discover recipes so they can host their own fundraising supper clubs, or people going to restaurants that are donating, or doing bake sales, the most immediate thing is just to get people to share their stories.
The campaign aims to raise both awareness of the crisis in Ukraine and funds to help Unicef ’s efforts there
“Everyone can get involved, from buying a coffee to heading out for a Michelin-starred meal. Any money is good because every pound makes a difference.” The Just Giving page, he adds, has “enough Ukrainian recipes to host a three-course dinner or two, including with vegetarian dishes, so we’d really love to see people doing it themselves, all donating”.
With a core team of just six working behind the scenes to facilitate the campaign, Clerkenwell Boy and Timoshkina are encouraging creativity in whatever form it takes. At the Drunken Butler in Farringdon, Yuma Hashemi is laying on a special evening to fundraise, and will send all the profits to the campaign. Chef Romy Gill is launching a fundraising takeaway service — the first on March 10, with one the week after — where people can collect her menu from her house. When she cooks at Carousel on March 12 for the Fitzrovia restaurant’s International Women’s Day supper series, every penny raised will also benefit the campaign, as will a percentage of the sales from her edition of 6 O’clock Gin. “I’m trying to help in any way I can. If we all come together, it does make a difference,” she says. “We always need more people to help!”
One of those who is, is former Davies & Brook head chef Dimtri Magi, who’s hosting a £200-a-head supper at the Estonian embassy on March 7. Half-Estonian, Magi is also half-Russian and, like Timoshkina, struggles to reconcile the Russia he knows with Putin’s vision of it. “I feel ashamed to be Russian at the moment. There are just so many lies, lies, lies, lies on top of lies. My heart is bleeding — we can’t watch one person destroy a country.”
Such lies have fuelled Olia Hercules to temporarily down her pans in favour of her phone, though eventually she says she has plans to launch a cookery school that will fund charity donations. “There’s an information war going on,” she says. “If people can even repost or whatever, if people can just keep it going — don’t let it fizzle out. Just keep spreading good information, because your little retweet, your story, may help — it may connect someone, maybe even save someone’s life.”
Saving lives is rather the point. Unicef highlight that any funds raised will go towards supporting Ukraine’s 7.5 million children who are currently under threat, and funds the delivery of blankets, warm clothes, and kits for hygiene, healthcare and education. £32 pays for a large first aid kit, £46 funds an emergency water and hygiene kit, and £80 would stretch to school supplies for as many as 20 children. The #CookforUkraine campaign is hoping to raise more than £1 million, Timoshkina says, just as its Syrian equivalent did and, with interest in supporting it from across the globe — there’s been contact from America, Canada, New Zealand and more — it’s not unfeasible. Besides, Clerkenwell Boy’s previous fundraiser #CookforSyria, hit more than £1 million, and he had further success with both #BakeforBeirut and #AustraliaIsBurning.
“I want to emphasise the power of food to bring people together,” Timoshkina says. “People have always come together at the table.”
Just keep spreading good information, because your little retweet, your story, may help — it may connect someone, maybe even save someone’s life
As a whole, London is doing just that. Besides the #CookForUkraine campaign, others are raising funds in their own way. Ukrainian bar Pinch in Fitzrovia, which serves a “White Ukrainian” cocktail, is giving 15 per cent of its total profits to the country’s armed forces.
Dark Arts coffee’s new, subtly-named “RUSSIAN WARSHIP GO F*** YOURSELF” coffee is priced at £10, £20, £50 or £100 a box (buyer’s choice), with 100 per cent of every sale aiding those fleeing Ukraine. For the first time in four decades, Kensington’s beloved Il Portico is putting Chicken Kyiv on the menu, with £5 of the £15 price going Ukraine’s way, while Kensal Green’s Parlour is donating the profits from its own Kyiv too, as are bar and restaurant group Drake & Morgan, who are raising money for the Red Cross. In Soho, the famous L’Escargot is also doing a Kyiv, served this time with traditional Ukrainian potato cakes called deruny. £5 from every dish will go to the Ukraine Human Aid Fun. Elsewhere, Rebecca Mascarenhas and two-star chef Phil Howard are hosting dinners on March 14 at Elystan Street, Church Road, Kitchen W8, Home SW15 and Flour + Water to raise cash; it is hoped that £45,000 will be raised on the night for the DEC appeal with matched funding from Coutts bank. Ms Mascarenhas said: “We’ve been completely shocked and outraged by the humanitarian disaster in Ukraine and we’ve always been people to help when we can.” Staff have volunteered to work for free. Elsewhere, the Galvin brothers’ Galvin La Chapelle and next door Bistrot & Bar are both adding £1 onto diners’ bills throughout March to help Action Against Hunger’s Urgent Appeal for Ukraine, as are Hawksmoor across all of their London sites (and the group is even matching the donations itself).
Close by Liverpool Street, Russian born restauranteur Leonid Shutov hosts a £195 a head four course champagne dinner on Sunday at his Bob Bob Ricard City venue in the Cheesegrater tower with all money raised going to Unicef. The meal will include Chicken Kyiv, written with the Ukrainian spelling. Mr Shutov told this paper’s Jonathan Prynn: “There has always been much debate about whether it should be Chicken Kiev or Chicken Kyiv.
“At a time when it was simply a matter of good-humoured neighbourly rivalry we had chosen to go with the accepted Russian spelling – Chicken Kiev. Today it would be an insult to the people of Ukraine to continue to do so.”
Fitzrovia fusion restaurant RAI has created a special four-course menu, available until April 9, from which 100 per cent of proceeds will go to Unicef UK. Priced at £59pp, dishes will range from seared butterfish sashimi with red jalapeno sauce to Chilean seabass with goat’s cheese, broccoli purée and homemade tsukemono sauce.
PizzaExpress is hosting a charity auction and gig with the Howard Jones Acoustic Trio and Steve Harley – in aid of DEC appeal - at its Holborn branch this Thursday, March 10. Ticket prices range from £100 to £1000 and include the show, a live auction presented by Bargain Hunt’s Charles Hanson, a three-course meal and welcome drink. PizzaExpress will match all donations up to £30,000.
Late night bars operator Nightcap, which owns Barrio Bars, Disrepute, London Cocktail Club, Bar Elba, Tonight Josephine, Escapologist Bar, Nikki’s Bar and Blame Gloria has created a cocktail it has called “Lyubov”, Ukrainian for “love.” The blue cocktail topped with a yellow lemon twist will be available through March with all profits going to DEC appeal.
Dining out may not be on anybody’s mind much right now, but with a little care, each bite to eat may help, somehow. “Look, it’s a cliché,” says Clerkenwell Boy, “But it’s really true. Every little helps.”
For more information, visit justgiving.com/cookforukraine
