In the Black Sea port of Odessa, Ukraine, elegant 19th and early 20th century buildings from the city’s heyday surround quiet inner courtyards—now occupied by a vibrant cat population. But, says Valeriy Suntsov, a local historian and head of the Danube League of Culture, an NGO working to promote the food culture of the region, it’s in these courtyards that the cuisine of Odessa took on its modern form.
During the Soviet period, many buildings were converted into communal apartments, and the courtyards became centers of cooking and socializing. According to Suntsov, people from the city’s wide array of ethnic groups, who in the past might have kept to themselves, suddenly found themselves close neighbors. Forced to share these spaces, they perhaps began to ask each other what was cooking. “In Odessa,” says Suntsov, “the dishes lost their ethnic boundaries.”
The city of Odessa has a distinct story, shaped by its position as one of the most important ports of the Russian empire, and later the Soviet Union. It was once a meeting point for a dizzying mix of cultures, and for people attracted to the freedom and opportunity it promised. Today, the food of Odessa reflects that story in its mingling of flavors, which often remind one of somewhere else, but have a character all their own.
Odessa is the third largest city in Ukraine, a country at its own historical turning point. Five years ago, the Maidan Revolution brought protesters to the streets demanding democratic reforms—and an ongoing war with Russian-backed separatists broke out in the country’s east.
Young Odessans now embrace both their Ukrainian identity and their city’s unique personality. Against this backdrop, Odessa’s chefs and entrepreneurs are revitalizing its culinary traditions, re-imagining them for a new generation of locals with deep pride in their city, and travelers eager to discover something new.
The place now called Odessa began as a relatively small Tatar village known as Khadjibey. It was part of the Ottoman empire until 1792, when Catherine the Great acquired it for Russia as part of the Treaty of Jassy. With connections to both inland trade routes and the open sea, Odessa was an ideal spot to develop a shipping hub. In 1819, it was made a free port — essentially a duty-free zone, and merchants began arriving in the city from around the world, seizing the opportunities within it.
Armenians, Bulgarians, Germans, Greeks, Italians, Russians, Ukrainians and dozens of others made up the strikingly multi-ethnic character of the city, but its Jewish residents had some of the most lasting impacts on its culture, not to mention its food.
Jewish subjects of the Russian empire were constrained by oppressive restrictions on where and how they could live and work during this period, but within Odessa, found a relative level of freedom. Odessa’s Jewish community grew until the mid-nineteenth century, when it became, according to Charles King in his book, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, “the preeminent port of the Yiddish-speaking world.” The community remained vibrant until the Holocaust decimated its population during WWII.
Today, Odessa’s Jewish community is beginning to experience a revival, and the place of its food in the city’s heritage becomes evident when I ask locals to name the most quintessentially Odessa foods. The answers invariably involve vorschmack.
A classic eastern European Jewish dish, the minced fish spread is traditionally made of herring, tastes pleasantly briny, and is eaten piled atop slices of hearty brown bread. It’s often served as an appetizer—its name means “pre-taste” in Yiddish– and it goes well with a glass of dry white wine.
I discovered this sitting at Café Maman, in the garden behind Odessa’s iconic opera house.
The extravagant rococo theater was built after a fire destroyed the original building in 1873, and I wondered if that put the saga of the opera houses in the same time frame as the appearance of vorschmack. It was likely brought to Odessa by Jewish arrivals from what is now Lithuania, Belarus, eastern Poland, and western Ukraine.
But in today’s Odessa, vorschmack has been embraced by every religious and ethnic group, a prime example, according to Suntsov, of how Odessa cuisine took on its distinctive character in modern times.
Vorschmack is available at establishments all over the city, but at Bernardazzi, a regionally-focused restaurant located inside the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra building, local chef Aleksandr Yourz puts his own spin on it, as he does all the dishes inspired by his childhood in the city. In Yourz’s version, the herring is pureed, topped with cucumber and apple salsa and aioli, and served on a rye cracker. A little kick of freshness enhances the sour, salty fish and the cracker adds light, crunchy texture.
Still, vorschmack is a timeless, simple food, and Yourz isn’t trying to mess with tradition. No one can do Odessa food better than the local grandmothers, he says, so there’s no point in trying to replicate their work. He says early in his career, his grandmother visited a restaurant where he was working. “She said, sometimes I put a lot of ingredients on a plate,” he recalls, laughing, as he puts the finishing touches on a dish. Perhaps, too many.
He’s still looking for new ways to approach Odessa cuisine, but inspired by his grandmother, Yourz now avoids letting his dishes get too complex, especially when re-imagining the classics.
Dmytro Sikorsky is a local restaurateur and food writer, and a dedicated chronicler of the Odessa region’s foods and their origins. Sikorsky owns Bodega Dva Karla (Two Karls), where the focal point of the menu is another rich source of the city’s culinary influences: Bessarabia.
Bessarabia refers to the historical region encompassing parts of modern-day Moldova and Ukraine, including part of the Odessa region. Sikorsky’s knowledge of the region’s food traditions is encyclopedic. He sits down with me before the restaurant gets busy over local wine, made with Odessa Black grapes, and crumbly pieces of bryndza, a tangy sheep cheese mentioned in writing as far back as the Middle Ages.
Sikorsky is pondering the most important Odessa dishes. Tiny, fried goby fish are worth a mention, as are borscht and varenyky – the sour beet soup and filled dumpling combination adored throughout Ukraine. Meanwhile, he traces eggplant caviar—a puree made of the meat at the center of the eggplant, and stuffed peppers—to Ottoman heritage.
Visiting the restaurant later, I’m served placinta, a pie made of fried bread and seasoned cabbage filling. The basis of the recipe was first written down first by the Roman senator Cato the Elder, of ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ fame. “Amazingly,” Sikorsky says, “because [Bessarabia] was at the eastern border of the empire, this recipe still exists in this area.”
A chilly wind is blowing off the sea that night and the placinta is warm and satisfying. I have a brief vision of a Roman soldier stationed far away from home and eating the pie with his hands.
The next dish is mamaliga, made of cornmeal and resembling the taste and texture of polenta, but with the welcome addition of bryndza scattered across the top. Earlier, at the city’s historic Privoz market, I wandered through a vast, airy hall devoted to the stuff, where dozens of women in white aprons sell the cheese from blocks on long metal tables.
As an American Southerner from Georgia, I cannot help but be reminded of the cheesy grits of my childhood when eating mamaliga. Like so many dishes in Odessa, it tastes both familiar and a little mysterious to my palate. I keep having the feeling that I’m nostalgic for a place I’ve never been before.
Photo by Renee Hickman.
A table of women in their 20s and dressed mostly in black joke loudly over the placinta at the center of the room, a couple holding hands tightly head for an isolated corner, and an extended family settle into my table as I’m leaving. Sikorsky says, ironically, it’s his younger customers who bring their parents in to enjoy his restaurant’s traditional foods.
That young Odessans are enthusiastically embracing the classic foods of the region is notable. In recent decades, restaurant-goers in the countries of the former Soviet Union have largely preferred food with origins somewhere else. Wandering the city today, I pass multiple combination pizza/sushi joints emblematic of that desire for all things new and foreign.
But, the trend is changing. Since the 2014 revolution, Ukrainians have fervently embraced many aspects of national identity and cultural heritage, including their cuisine. For people from Odessa, the same seems to also be true of their particular, regional food traditions.
Alexey Dmitriev, the general manager of Bernardazzi, says that until a few years ago, the restaurant had a more generic European menu. Many items, many pages. When they made the switch to a smaller, more local menu, some customers were doubtful. “They know the taste” says Dmitriev of Odessa food, and locals can be tough to please. But the reception to playing with the old favorites has been positive, and travelers seeking the distinctive and particular have positively embraced it.
On one of my last nights in the city, I look inside one of the newer additions to the Odessa restaurant scene, this one specializing in Crimean Tatar food. It’s early in the evening, and the dining room is already filling up.
Since Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, many Crimean Tatars have moved to the Ukrainian mainland to escape persecution by Russian authorities. At the same time, Crimean Tatar restaurants have become increasingly popular among Ukrainian diners who both appreciate the food, like cheburek, a deep-fried turnover of seasoned meat and onions, and want to show solidarity with the displaced people.
During its opening, the restaurant was a hotspot for local celebrities and media personalities, and it remains popular. World events, human migration and history in its first draft continue to shape the food of the city—as they always have. In this case, things seem to have come full circle in a way. The restaurant, appropriately, is called Khadjibey.
