Cossack Dancing

Like the young adventuress I diligently aspire to be, I have been fearlessly Trying New Things since I left Sydney. I have had many more stunning successes on the eating front than disasters but today the stars were apparently not aligned for eating well.

I stumbled into Dyzga, a café behind the main square, yesterday. One of the waiters spoke an English far less broken than my Russian and there was a menu in English on offer. They were playing Amalia Rodrigues; I drank coffee and ate a truly magnificent potato salad, crunchy with pickles. I earmarked the Snack Cossack’s Trick, surely a dose of bona fide Western Ukrainian fare, for today’s lunch.

The Cossack’s Trick was either a very nasty trick played on unsuspecting tourists or a dish just a little too genuine for a palate refined out of the fields. The menu told me that the dish involved Ukrainian bacon, pickled cucumbers, garlic toasts, cabbage. Fair enough, I thought, when in Lviv, eat like a Lvivski.

This is what arrived.
Note first the fluorescent plastic Cossack’s swords as they were the nicest touch of the whole dish. What I anticipated would be garlic toast turned out to be hunks of rye bread and slices of raw garlic. Rustic style, I guess. I wasn’t particularly heartbroken by the lack of cabbage on my plate but did wonder at the authenticity of the large olives. Enormous Caucasian olives, there you go, I thought to myself and speared one with a sword. It turned out to be a spicy salty pickled plum. My tastebuds were very confused, too confused to appreciate the plum which I might have otherwise relished. Half a jar full of slightly chlorinated pickles, I could have coped with under other conditions but, and here’s where it all gets really awful, the prevailing conditions involved Ukrainian bacon. That stuff that you might think is some sort of compressed chicken product or cheese or something, that stuff is Ukrainian bacon and it is a nightmare made of pure lard. Ukrainian bacon is slices of pork fat and really entirely unappetising. Wondering whether the bacon was just an unattractive delicacy, with the aid of a sword, I nibbled at one piece and needed to chew on a piece of raw garlic to clear away the taste and texture. I managed to eat most of the bread, a couple of plums, and only just dented the pile of pickles. I do not regret for a moment leaving the rest untouched: it was truly awful.

It’s turning my stomach just writing about this. I’m going to find a martini for dinner; I haven’t drunk a martini for weeks and I am convinced it will make everything better. Lviv, I sense, is just the city to deliver the goods. There’s a flashy deco hotel called the Grand Hotel up the road which has just had a paint job and that’s where I’m heading. With luck, I shall board an early train to Kiev tomorrow morning with my memory of the cruel plateful of Cossack bacon blubber erased.