Mriya lives at the end of Old Brompton Road where South Kensington turns into Earl’s Court and, as if by some alchemy, becomes interesting. It is a Ukrainian restaurant, but something more touching too: a memorial and a retreat. It opened in August, in the sixth month of Putin’s war. Twelve of its 15 staff are displaced Ukrainians and their stories are common immigrant stories of renewal and loss. The kitchen porter is a mathematics teacher, the waiter is an English teacher, and the chef, Yurii Kovryzhenko, is one of the most famous in Ukraine.

Mriya is the name of the largest cargo aircraft ever built, designed by Ukrainian engineers, which was destroyed by the Russians at the beginning of the war. Everything there is to say about Putin, Sigmund Freud, who fled his own tyrant, said already, and the Battle of Stalingrad did the rest. Mriya also means dream, though not a fantastical one. It is less Putin’s dream than a version of Dorothy Gale’s: if you can’t go home, make an impersonation of it at the fag end of Kensington.

From the outside, Mriya is a common London shop winnowed out of a tall Victorian house. I am fascinated by buildings at the edges of fashionable districts: as London expands, they seem less destinations than passing places. The interior is subdued, with wooden floors and spotlights, and this is deliberate: Mriya is a gallery. There is a vast urn of dried wheat on a shelf, stiff and unrelenting, reminding us that Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe, and in normal times wheat flows from its plains. There is a single wall, whitewashed and rough, to impersonate part of an idealised Ukrainian cottage. There are bright, round modernist tables made by Ukrainian designers; low, fluffy chairs, also by Ukrainian designers, which convey the idea of sitting on small compliant sheep, which is pleasing; a grey metal candelabra shooting skyward, stern but not beautiful; a thick knotted monochrome rug on a bench; an antique blue kitchen cupboard from three wars ago. There is Ukrainian art on the walls: a string of red flowers, maybe roses, falling down the canvas; a diner painted in silhouette, pulling a silver dome off a piece of meat in a parody of savagery and hope; an indistinct face with a dark tearstain.

This restaurant does not exist to make oblivious joy, as is the custom, but to gather whatever fragments it can find, and pray for more, as if in a church that serves borscht. The staff are courteous and grave: the eyes of co-founder Olga Tsybytovska melt with the possibility of tears as she tells me why she created Mriya. This is not modern hospitality: it is closer to the ancient kind, which was communion.

We order a charcuterie board of tender meats; pampushka, a sweet, soft bread of knitted loaves which feels so like challah, the designated Jewish loaf, I ache: eastern Europe was the Jewish world two wars ago. It is served with borscht, a beef, potato and beetroot soup which, in Kovryzhenko’s hands, manages to be both delicate and violent: it is superb. The chicken Kyiv is round, like Mr Happy’s face, a conceit I love. The bone is atop and curved, and so the Kyiv seems like a wondrous flesh apple, a variation for a fairy tale. Pudding is bright and flinty cakes: a honey cake and a Kyiv cake, which look like tiny and fantastical castles in the gloom.

Mriya is both the best Ukrainian restaurant you will find and a rebuke to tyrants everywhere. For that, and for itself, you should come here.

The post The best Ukrainian restaurant you will find: Mriya reviewed appeared first on The Spectator.