Since the Russian invasion began, lines have stretched down the street outside a Ukrainian-owned cafe in a trendy part of Washington. Blocks away, at the city’s long-popular Russia House restaurant, five windows have been smashed in and owners are thinking they might not reopen.
With the war an ocean away, restaurants have become something of a culinary front line for Americans to channel support for Kyiv by queuing for a seat and a pastry, while hoping to inflict a bit of pain on Moscow, if only by proxy.
Sisters Anastasiia and Vira Derun, who own D Light Cafe and Bakery in the Adams Morgan neighborhood, are from Bila Tserkva, a city south of Kyiv that has found itself on the direct path of cruise missiles launched at the capital from the Black Sea.
Photo: AFP
The pair are wracked with fear for their family, and now, they are grappling with non-stop throngs of customers at their door.
“We don’t really sleep at night because we always keep checking [the news], but then we have to be here early morning,” Anastasiia Derun said.
During the weekend, dozens of people wait outside the cafe. On weekdays, the pastry case is quickly emptied by a constant stream of customers.
Photo: AFP
Overwhelmed, they stopped giving free Ukrainian flag cookies to people who came in to make donations in hopes it would keep the crowds down — and at one point contemplated halting fundraising for Ukraine altogether.
However, after raising US$7,500, the sisters could not put away the donation box, and they now have three volunteers helping manage the masses and run water to tables.
Abby Wright, a 23-year-old seated outside D Light Cafe over the weekend said she had come with her friends “understanding fully that there’s more tangible ways to support Ukraine than just buying coffee.”
Yet the experience, she said, allowed her to have “a little contact with that culture.”
A dozen blocks away, at Russia House, a Washington staple for more than two decades, the picture could not be more different.
The owners had been on the verge of reopening after a two-year COVID-19 hiatus when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine.
The restaurant has since been vandalized twice, in what police characterized as a hate crime, and its owners are contemplating whether to reopen at all given the public’s new distaste for all things Russia.
“We were an easy target,” said co-owner Aaron McGovern, estimating up to US$20,000 in damage.
The destruction included smashed windows, an uprooted stair railing and signs left behind with messages like “Don’t eat at the Putin House.”
McGovern said that as he swept up the glass, a passerby shot him the middle finger.
Since the invasion, Ike Gazaryan, owner of Pushkin Russian Restaurant in San Diego, has likewise received multiple threats, including a call from a screaming man “promising to blow something up.”
The irony, is that most Russian business owners in the US are extremely sympathetic to Ukraine, having themselves fled the former Soviet Union or Putin’s Russia, he said.
Ethnically Armenian, his family fled Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Russia before landing in the US.
His restaurant serves up food from a variety of former Soviet republics against a backdrop of damask wallpaper and chandeliers, but he said it has Russia in its name, because “everybody knows where Russia is — so you do this for marketing purposes.”
He estimated that the now-toxic Russian branding is driving clientele down 30 to 40 percent.
At the distinctly Ukrainian restaurant Veselka in Manhattan’s East Village, the opposite holds true.
Lines of up to 100 people have wrapped around the eatery and owner Jason Birchard, whose Ukrainian immigrant grandfather was the founder, said business is now “probably double to what I normally do.”
In Austin, Texas, restaurateur Varda Monamour, who was born in Crimea before moving to Moscow, simply yanked the word “Russian” off the exterior of her restaurant, formerly known as Russian House.
Where the letters once stood are now ghost markings. Her restaurant is to be called The House.
Its former name “just brings pain to people of Ukraine and others, even Russians,” Monamour said.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary
RSS