If you can get over the generic hotel restaurant look and feel, Ole Kyiv actually serves some comforting Ukrainian classics. And the location, just a pigeon’s scuttle from Old Street, is a handy one.
photo credit: Aleksandra Boruch
You’ll know you’ve arrived when you hit a glass box of a building, hemmed in by a WeWork, with a too big, too empty dining room with a smattering of people who wouldn’t usually cross paths. Some having pots of tea at 7pm, others bribing their excitable children with crispy pucks of deruny. Even the soundtrack—The All-American Rejects, Cage The Elephant, and other songs straight off our teen ‘I want to be Effy from Skins’ playlist—feels cut and paste.
But the chicken kyiv is suitably oozy with garlic butter, and the honey cake hits all the right sweet toffee notes. And the attentive, smiley service does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to bringing some warmth. Just skip the crumbly banosh and opt for boiled, rather than fried, varenyky.
Food RundownVarenyky Sharing Platter
The dough is a little thicker than we’d like, and you should definitely opt for boiled over fried—the fried are a bit tough, the boiled are delicate and slippery. But still, the sauerkraut and potato dumplings, and the potato and cottage cheese (the most successful of the lot), put you in mind of being in front of the TV in a head-to-toe fluffy loungewear set.
photo credit: Aleksandra Boruch
Kyiv Chicken
A serious hunk of breaded meat that doesn’t dribble garlic butter so much as it spurts out on a first tentative cut, and then proceeds to waterfall for a good few seconds.
Banosh With Pork And Mushroom
This corn porridge dish isn’t creamy and silky like it should be, it’s crumbly and dry. Skip it.
photo credit: Aleksandra Boruch
Medovyk
When we tried it, the honey cake had caught on the bottom. It does have a nice toasty sweetness, though, and the sour cream adds a pleasing tang.