- Russian and Ukrainian-owned restaurants in the US are getting angry calls and emails.
- One Ukrainian business owner said he used the label "Russian food" for convenience.
- "But we aren't victims here, [the] Ukrainian nation is," said one restaurant owner.
Last Sunday was the second day that Andrew Wurth worked after Russia invaded Ukraine – and when the threatening phone calls began.
"They implied they were going to smash up our windows," he said. "They asked if the Toyota in the parking lot was mine. They were watching the store."
Wurth is from Ohio but is a student of Slavic & East European Studies at The Ohio State University and works as a prodazets (that's Russian for cashier, he said) at Diana Deli, a Russian and European foodstuffs store in Columbus, to practice his Russian. One of the owners is Ukrainian and the other is Russian.
"We have both Russian and Ukrainian employees at all levels," Wurth said. "We didn't want this war."
Still, some customers have walked in, thought of it is a Russian food store, and walked out. He estimated that it was about one or two people every hour, when he worked Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
Diana Deli is one of four establishments Insider spoke with that reported an uptick in angry emails and phone calls, three of which that also have seen a decline in customers, since Russia invaded Ukraine. All of the establishments are nominally Russian and searchable via Apple Maps and Google with that label, but many are owned or co-owned by people from Ukraine and serve food that reflects the countries' mixed heritage and culture.
At New York City restaurant Sveta, the "Russian" label was merely a matter of convenience and marketing, said co-owner Alan Aguichev. His mother and the restaurant's namesake, Sveta, immigrated from Ukraine to the US and ran her own restaurant in Queens that is now closed.
"We always thought Russian cuisine and Ukrainian cuisine are basically the same thing," said Aguichev. "It was for people to have a better understanding of what they're eating."
Now, Aguichev is removing any mention of Russian food from the restaurant's various online presences–social media, Yelp, website–and changing it to "European."
But he can only control so much, considering the difficulty of scrubbing the internet, he said. (I easily found the restaurant by searching "Russian food.")
On the first day of the invasion last week, someone emailed Aguichev with the subject line "Hate Russians," and the text said "Go home." He's also seen a slight drop in customers.
Russia and Ukraine have a long cultural and geopolitical history. According to Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize winner and expert, who spoke on the topic on CBS, Russia and Ukraine share an origin in a late Middle Ages civilization called Kievan Rus, which was supposedly founded by the Vikings in the ninth century.
After Russia's revolution in 1917, Ukraine fought for independence, but lost and became part of the Soviet Union until it dissolved in 1991. Ukraine has been an independent country since then. In 2021, Vladimir Putin demanded that no former Soviet Union countries, like Ukraine, be allowed to join NATO, and he claimed last month that Ukraine had no real record of being an independent statehood.
'A Difficult Time'
Rina Atroshenko was seven when she left Ukraine with her parents in 1975, while it was part of the Soviet Union. After she created Traktir in West Hollywood, California, the restaurant fed a diverse audience, and she served Russian-Ukranian cuisine.
"Russian cuisine is diverse with influences from many countries and regions surroundings such as Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Poland, and Latvia just to name a few," the website says.
Now, she's fielding angry phone calls asking if she supports the country.
"I'm having a difficult time with the phone calls," Atroshenko said. "I'm walking in the protests yesterday in Santa Monica with everybody." Atroshenko also has contacted her "sign guy" to see if he can cover the "Russian cuisine" sign with a Ukrainian flag, and she's also ordered flags to be put up in the windows.
Staff at Russian eatery Tzarevna on the Lower East Side in Manhattan are also nervous. According to co-owner Mariia Dolinsky, employees are afraid to speak Russian to each other, and one person is saying they're from Belarus when customers ask — in addition to several angry calls to the hostess stand. Business is down about 50%, she said.
Dolinsky is from Russia, and her husband is of Taiwanese and Ukrainian heritage. "We are against this war and are not shy about it," she wrote via email, and noted they put a sign outside the restaurant with their position – and are working on a promotion to give proceeds from a certain meal to charities in Ukraine.
"But we aren't victims here, [the] Ukrainian nation is," Dolinsky said.
