When Ukraine chef became trapped in London he decided to help the war effort the way he knew how

In the early hours of 24 February, Yurii Kovryzhenko was asleep in the Ukrainian embassy in London. As his country’s most famous chef – Ukraine’s answer to Jamie Oliver – and an official ambassador for their cuisine, the 39-year-old was here to prepare a banquet for politicians and business people. But all that was about to change. 

At 3am he was awoken by his phone buzzing with messages from his PR manager. ‘The Russians are bombing…’ said the text. Yurii woke his girlfriend, Olga: ‘Call your parents. The war’s started!’ 

Over the next few days the couple tried to piece together the whereabouts of their family and friends. When they spoke to Olga’s mother, who lives in Dnipro (a large city in Central Ukraine), they could hear the Russian bombs exploding. Meanwhile, Yurii’s mother was stuck in a bomb shelter in Kyiv with her dog. 

‘The Russians were bombing so hard that she’d only go home to wash and change her clothes. She sent me photos of the food volunteers cooking in the shelters – boiled pasta, with oil and a few peppers.’ That he was supposed to have been cooking a feast while his mother was having to survive on basic rations was horrible. ‘We couldn’t eat,’ he says. 

The couple hardly slept for the next ten days – they were constantly on their phones, obsessively scrolling for news or attempting to contact people. They felt helpless and had no idea what they should do next. Yurii considered going home to fight, desperate to do something. ‘I thought about returning to join the army but I don’t have the skills,’ he says. ‘The guilt is hard. We haven’t heard the bombs, experienced the wild fear, the hunger… haven’t queued at the border like our friends.’ 

For the next six weeks, the couple camped at the Ukrainian embassy, a white stucco palace in Holland Park. ‘It was so weird being there, at the epicentre of the political crisis, surrounded by officials working 24 hours a day,’ says Olga, 33. ‘The embassy ran a volunteer camp on the ground floor and Yurii cooked for them.’ 

Over the ensuing weeks, what was happening to their families became clearer. Yurii’s mother fled to Germany with her dog (his father had died before the war). ‘My grandad was a Soviet judge. He hated Germans,’ says Yurii. ‘It’s surreal that they are sheltering his daughter from the Russians.’ 

Yuri is on a mission to raise the profile of Ukrainian food. To help their country they began fundraising through the London restaurant Carousel, which runs a culinary hub for chefs from all over the world

Olga’s parents, meanwhile, were determined to stay put at her father’s chicken factory in Dnipro out of a sense of duty to his many workers. ‘If the Russians come they will flee to Western Ukraine, as long as they can find the petrol,’ says Olga. ‘There is always a moment when you feel you should be there. But there’s no point in us going back to Ukraine at the moment.’ 

Yurii and Olga hadn’t been together long before becoming trapped in London. They’d fallen in love on a goat farm last November when Yurii was filming a show for Ukrainian TV about small food producers – and the farmers were clients of Olga, who is one of Ukraine’s top artisan food PRs. 

Still determined to play a part in their country’s war effort, the couple decided to use their skills to raise money for Ukraine. The pair began fundraising through the London restaurant Carousel, which runs a culinary hub for chefs from all over the world. Yurii now works there regularly as a guest chef. Yurii and Olga have also cooked numerous dinners, including a gala with Bill Nighy, a fundraiser with Jamie Oliver and a lunch for 1,000 people with Irish chef Richard Corrigan at Grosvenor House. So far they have raised nearly £500,000. 

Their efforts also helped them find somewhere to live – in April they met a woman at a fundraising event at the Razumovsky Academy music venue in Kensal Green, Northwest London, who offered them a room in her house in Chelsea, so they were able to leave the embassy. 

But as well as raising money, Yurii and Olga want to raise the profile of Ukrainian food. This was their mission before the war started and they are determined for it to continue since its cuisine was severely tarnished by communism. ‘It destroyed people’s memories of how to cook,’ Yurii says. 

When I lived in Kyiv as the Daily Mail’s correspondent 30 years ago, I remember the city’s famous Bessarabsky market overflowing with spices, sweet tomatoes and cherries, bouquets of coriander, chalky cliffs of cheese and Caravaggio-esque butchery counters. But years of communism Yurii is on a mission to raise the profile of Ukranian food had reduced the cuisine to a leaden mix of beef stroganoff and pickled vegetables. 

Labelled as Ukraine’s answer to Jamie Oliver, the two chefs are pictured here in April preparing for a Cook For Ukraine charity fundraiser

A tall, slim man with the dynamic charm that made him a TV star, Yurii is a Zen Buddhist, with tattoos of carp and chrysanthemums running up his arms. His journey to becoming a chef was an unconventional one. Originally a sculptor, working in precious metals for Ukraine’s oligarch elite (‘I used to make pairs of metre-long silver iguana book stands’), he lost his high-net-worth clients in the 2008 crash and went bust. 

He fled to a Buddhist monastery in France where he spent a year chopping vegetables and roasting meat in the kitchens. On returning to Ukraine he wanted to work as a cook, and was astounded to discover how much cachet his French training had given him. ‘If you’ve learnt to cook in France, you’re a chef!’ he says. After bolstering his experience with professional training at the Ritz Escoffier in Paris, as well as time in Spain and Italy, in 2012, Yurii was asked to set up a Ukrainian restaurant in Tbilisi in Georgia. Two years later he returned to his home country to open another restaurant in Lviv called Vintage Nouveau – Ukrainian Fine Dining. ‘My chicken Kyiv was the best in the country,’ he says. 

Yurii aged three in Kyiv. ‘I was holding a herring skeleton,’ he says. ‘That was the point’. On Yurii’s 39th birthday just a few weeks ago, their British hostess threw him a dinner party at the Chelsea Arts Club

Since then he has also set up another Ukrainian restaurant in South Korea, and won awards for his work, as well as starting his television career.

His first TV show, Strava Chesty (Dish of Honour) had him hunting out grannies in remote villages. ‘We were trying to find family recipes that had survived communism and the Holodomor [the 1930s manmade Ukrainian famine caused by Stalin, during which up to five million people starved to death]. He also found several Holodomor survivors: ‘They shared the stories of what they did eat – grass and bark.’ 

Four years before the current war broke out, Yurii re-created the Holodomor recipes in a food truck outside the EU parliament in Brussels to remind people of previous Russian-inflicted terror on Ukraine. 

Now it seems unlikely that Yurii and Olga will be able to return to Ukraine in the near future. ‘We both work in hospitality and tourism,’ says Olga, ‘and there will be no money for that in Ukraine for ages.’ 

But the couple have been offered a ray of hope. A regular customer of Yurii’s old restaurant in Tbilisi, who lives between London and Georgia, knew someone who was trying to open a restaurant in London but lacked a business partner and chef. Now they have signed the lease on a restaurant in Old Brompton Road. 

‘We’re calling it Mriya, which means “dream” in Ukrainian,’ Olga tells me, smiling at last as we sit in the restaurant’s garden eating vareniki – sweet dumplings stuffed with ricotta and berries. 

‘We are going to use the restaurant to fundraise for Ukraine,’ adds Yurii. ‘We want it to be a centre of Ukrainian culture, for the community.’ 

On Yurii’s 39th birthday just a few weeks ago, their British hostess threw him a dinner party at the Chelsea Arts Club. There they served him a cake which had the inscription: Slava Ukraini – Glory to Ukraine. Yurii wept.