Kiev + Sushi = Happy K

This time last week I was sitting down to a lovely lunch in Kiev at a Spanish restaurant I stumbled on called Arbequina. A small, quirky place, it’s a stone’s throw from Independence Square. It took me a while (and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a cappuccino) to decide what I wanted to eat. Nearly the entire menu tempted me, but I was in the mood for something comforting and homey and I finally settled on sliced turkey breast with onion marmelade and mashed beans. (If you’d like to see the menu, click here….it’s in Ukrainian but you can run it through Google translate for an idea of what deliciousness was on offer).  It was just what I was in the mood for. Although stuffed after finishing the turkey, I ordered a piece of fig and mascarpone tart for dessert. I’m very glad that I did: creamy, figgy, and slightly sweet. Mmmm-mmm. I wish I had been in Kiev longer because I would have definitely gone back. They do have English speakers on staff and there is an English menu.

The location of Arbequina.

The monstrously delicious fig and mascarpone tart.

The main reason I chose to spend the weekend in Kiev was because WizzAir started offering flights between Kutaisi and Kiev in September (as far as I know, this is the only flight coming in and out of Kutaisi at the moment). The Kutaisi airport is about a 20-minute taxi ride from my apartment, so it’s a pretty easy trip to make. Once I bought my tickets and started looking into what Kiev had to offer, though, I got really excited.

Kiev is a sushi town. I didn’t believe it either, but once I was there, I saw that it was true. It seems like you can get sushi everywhere: in cafes, Italian restaurants, Asian restaurants, and, of course, sushi restaurants. I was in Kiev for only two-and-a-half days, but I ate sushi three times.

The first place I settled into was a Japanese restaurant called Nobu. Excited to be at the cusp of a good sushi feast, I quickly decided on what I wanted: a spinach and sesame salad, a piece of wild salmon sushi, tuna gunkan, tom yum salmon gunkan, and salmon gunkan. What stopped me from ordering more? The prices. The four pieces I ordered were more than $20. Too expensive. However, the spinach and sesame salad was very good (and very Japanese) as was the tom yum salmon (although all the gunkans were way overly mayonnaised). The other three pieces were meh, the service was s-l-o-w, and it’s not a place I would go back to. Total cost: $35.

The not-worth-the-price sushi from Nobu.

Sushi, round two: Мураками (Murakami). This is a chain and there was one near my hotel (and right next to the Maserati dealership). They, too, had an English menu. The prices here were more reasonable, plus there was borscht listed along side the various miso soups (and was probably the most Ukrainian thing I ate all weekend). Sushi-wise, I feasted. I had an Alaska roll (yup, the same as in the US, even with tobiko on top), tamago, salmon, unagi, tuna, and a kappa maki. All that plus the borscht, a sparkling water, and a beer was about $30. Not cheap (especially considering that the night before my dinner had been a chicken doner that had cost me about $2.75), but I thought it was far better value than what I’d experienced at Nobu, and the quality of fish was good.

My sushi order at Мураками.

Sushi, the finale: Сушия (Sushiya). Also a chain, I went to the one by the Japanese embassy because I thought that might be a good sign. Although the service was exceedingly slow (even though the restaurant was almost completely empty, it took 25 minutes to receive my sushi after I ordered it and nearly 20 minutes from the time I requested the bill until I had it in-hand to pay). I ordered an unagi roll, a kappa maki, two pieces of smoked salmon, two pieces of “baked” salmon (which didn’t seem at all different from regular salmon sushi), some miso soup (because Сушия didn’t have borscht on the menu), and a bottle of sparkling water. The total? About $22.50.

A perfectly decent round of sushi.

Of the three sushi places, I think I liked Murakami the best although Sushiya was quite fine as well. Of course, nothing beats Tokyo’s fresher-than-fresh sushi places in Tsukiji, but considering that going to Japan for the weekend was not an option, what I found in Kiev absolutely fit the bill.