A knock on the large unmarked wooden door opposite Lviv City Hall. A man in a military uniform with a German-made rifle answers. Password, he asks.
“Slava Ukrayini.” Honor to Ukraine.
“Heroy ben slava,” glory to the heroes, he replies, opening a passage hidden behind a wall of books.
The man in the uniform is not a guard. He is the maître d of Kryivka, a popular themed restaurant that evokes Ukraine’s armed struggle for independence from Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany during World War II.
The cavernous restaurant – decorated like a memorabilia-filled underground bunker – has been around for more than 15 years. And the atmosphere remains festive and playful despite the brutal and bloody history that serves as a backdrop. Patrons still order multicolored vodka shots by the row, and the brick walls are still decorated with 1940s shrapnel, radios, maps, artillery, and lanterns.
But as the war with Russia continues, space, in the relatively safe western city of Lviv, has taken on a new resonance. On a recent visit, Ukrainians packed the tables rather than the foreign tourists the restaurant attracted. Local residents, soldiers on leave and families who had fled bombed cities elsewhere in the country enjoyed the food and alcohol. Children wandered around, trying on the collection of helmets and jackets or dueling with the antique guns.
Alina Bulauevska, sitting at a table with her family, came from a nearby town to celebrate her 32nd birthday. “This is an escape for us,” she said.
Active soldiers have left behind hundreds of contemporary military patches – the insignia of their units. In the center of the screen, mounted in a frame, is one of General Valery Zaluzhny, the Supreme Commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
The restaurant invited him to visit, one of the managers said. The four-star general responded by sending his badge along with a huge blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag on which he signed his name and drew a heart in red ink.
“He replied that he will come and celebrate after we get the win,” said the manager.
At a large table with dishes of fatty sausages, charred vegetables and potato pancakes, Yulia Volkova sat with her husband, children and a few friends. The family has been renting an apartment in Lviv since fleeing the disputed city of Kharkiv in the country’s northeast last March. They joined some 150,000 people who had been driven from their homes and moved here as well.
They have eaten at the restaurant several times. “We love this place,” Ms. Volkova said through an interpreter.
They were thankful to be in Lviv. Russian fighters had seized their land and farm and killed the family of a classmate of her daughter as they walked out of a church after prayer, Ms. Volkova said.
“They killed everyone their way, we saw it ourselves,” she said, pointing two fingers to her eyes.
Her boyfriend put down a mug of beer and pulled out his phone to show a video of the walls of his home, pockmarked with bullet holes and embedded shrapnel.
Sievda Kerimova had recently arrived in Lviv from Kiev for a happier reason. She had come to meet her husband, a 26-year-old military officer who had 10 days off.
In a shooting gallery next to one of the dining rooms, the couple paid 75 hryvnias – about $2 – so Ms. Kerimova could fire 10 plastic bullets at a paper target with an image of Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia. In another room, customers could aim for an oversized punching bag with his face stenciled on it.
Kryivka is one of many themed restaurants and gift shops operated by !FEST, a Ukrainian restaurant group. Upstairs is another, The Most Expensive Galician Restaurant, decorated as a masonic club house. Around the corner is the Lviv Coffee Mine, a huge underground coffee house and shop where customers can wear a miner’s helmet and dig for coffee beans and sip lattes.
The restaurants are not concerned with historical accuracy. In Kryivka, ubiquitous patriotism and general merriment overshadow the often-ugly record of the original Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which led the fight for an independent Ukraine in the 1940s, but consisted of extremists who massacred Poles and Jews in a campaign of ethnic cleansing .
But remembering the struggle for Ukraine’s independence is one way citizens today express their pride in their heritage and their support for the war effort.
Food and fun – not history lessons – are on the menu.
Part of the evening’s festivities was a hunt for Russian spies, or “Moskali,” a derogatory term Ukrainians used to refer to Russians. The game was led by a group of waiters dressed in military attire. Diners were interrogated with laughter, then led to a makeshift prison and asked to sing a patriotic song before being returned to their table.
At one point, the wait staff lined up as if in a military formation. The leader questioned those present about the number of Russian tanks or helicopters shot down since the start of the war, while patrons gathered and cheered.
The short performance ended with the staff and customers repeating consecutive rounds of “Slava Ukrayini”. Heroyam slava” in unison.
The moment didn’t quite match the legendary scene from the movie “Casablanca,” when Victor Laszlo leads the crowd in Rick’s Café Americain and sings La Marseillaise in defiance of Nazi officers. But the feelings were authentic.
Meanwhile, a largely unnoticed television on the wall quietly beamed the evening news, an interview with Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, who spoke of the Russian airstrikes that day.
Unlike other street-level shops and restaurants that had to close during the day’s three missile warnings, the underground Kryivka was able to continue serving pierogies and vodka.
On another evening, Vitaly Zhoutonizhko, his right arm in a sling, visited the restaurant for the second time with his wife, Alina, and 4-year-old daughter, Kiza. He was in Lviv for two weeks on medical leave from the army, recovering from an injury he received when a shell hit his trench.
When asked why – after being in a bunker near the front line – he would now want to relax in a fake bunker, Mr. Zhoutonizhko laughed.
“This is entertainment,” he said.
So was he going to try and hit a Putin target in the shooting gallery?
“I’m not interested in taking the picture,” he said. “I have a real target.”
