LVIV – They have created more bright and controversial brands in the restaurant business than anyone else in Ukraine. They have become a case study for business schools before they hit 30. They are a trio of restaurateurs in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv with global ambitions.
Andriy Khudo, Yuriy Nazaruk and Dmytro Gerasymov are the three young men, all in the early 30s, who own !Fest Emotions Holding. It started off in 2007, and by now owns several dozen restaurants and franchises (including one outside of Ukraine), a chain of grocery and souvenir stores, a pig farm that raises its own animals and produces ham, a catering service, a tourism agency and a few handfuls of ideas for other businesses.
They are the fathers of Kryivka (The Dugout), a famous restaurant in Lviv themed as an underground resistance base left over from World War II, which has been a must-see for tourists for years now.
They conceived Masoch, the cafe named after Leopold Masoch, a famous Lviv native who lent his name to the concept of masochism, deriving pleasure from your own pain.
They are the Willy Wonkas of the Lviv Chocolate Factory, a famous brand of shops and cafes that makes chocolates to its own unique recipe.
They are also no strangers to criticism for their bold ideas and fantasies they have turned into a restaurant empire that makes them a good buck.
On one of the last days of summer Andriy Khudo, the budgets man and the public face behind the chain, shows off one of those controversial restaurants with considerable pride. “So we’re at the executioner’s home. He knows everything about meat,” Khudo says at the First Lviv Grill Restaurant of Meat and Justice.
He talks about a medieval Lviv executioner who worked in the very spot upon which he is standing. But the tale, while captivating, is a tall one and the guillotine it features is merely a prop to stimulate dinner conversation. The meat, fortunately for carnivores, is very real.
For the last several years the land this restaurant partially occupies has been a subject of lawsuits. Mayor Andriy Sadovy accused !Fest of taking over a part of it illegally at a recent briefing in Lviv on Sept. 4. Others say the bold restaurateurs often lag with paperwork when they open restaurants, all of which are located in prime properties in the city center.
But thousands of guests that visit their chain each day seem to enjoy the food, the humor and the atmosphere in their restaurants. “Everything we do is about great hospitality toward our customers,” Khudo explains. “But it gets harder to invent and generate more ‘wow’ projects to attract customers.”
They have managed to wow some government institutions, too, most notoriously – the National Commission on Ethics and Morals that investigated their Masoch Café. “The commission came to find out what we offer our clients,” said Khudo. Apparently the interest was piqued by an item on the menu called “whip beatings.”
The chain’s very first offering was less controversial. The cafe Diana on central Rynok Square was among the first classy outdoor offerings in Lviv.
“There were some plastic tables under umbrellas where you get your beer in plastic cups. We wanted to bring a European atmosphere to Lviv, and we had everything we needed – decorations are on the Rynok Square itself. But good coffee, jazz music, weekend tango classes and a cozy atmosphere make it popular,” Khudo said.
Many of the !Fest restaurants exploit local myths, legends and heroes – a trait that many locals consider a little too cheesy, but the one that is equally loved by the city’s multiple visitors. In 2008, they opened Gasova Lyampa, a gas-lamp themed museum and restaurant to celebrate the invention of this lamp in Lviv. Predictably, it features an impressive collection of such lamps.
Kryivka, their second restaurant to open in 2007, claims to have about 1 million visitors and has been so popular that its brand name has even been adopted by a book store in Kyiv.
To get inside the patriotic pub, one must say the password (“Glory to Ukraine”) in Ukrainian, of course, to a guard at the entrance.
Khudo and his pals also came up with an idea to open Galician Jewish Kneipp “Under the Golden Rose,” which emphasizes the tradition of bargaining. Without prices on the menu, patrons must negotiate what to pay with their waiter. Those who win the waiter’s favor tend to come out ahead, Khudo hints.
The restaurateurs also figured out early on that creating a good concept for franchising is a real money-making idea. Thus the Lviv Chocolate Factory came about. It has now become popular in many cities, including Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Odesa, Zhytomyr and Kharkiv.
They tried to repeat their success in Krakow, Poland, only to discover that both the concept and investment projections have to be very different to satisfy the tastes of the neighboring Poles. This experiment has not stopped them from dreaming big.
They have now started cloning their second franchise idea, Lvivsky Plyatsky (Lviv pastry shop). After a hugely successful launch in Lviv, the trio opened one in Kyiv on Sept. 1 at 5 Spaska St. in the city’s Podil district. And it seems that they’re not going to stop there.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected].
