A well-dressed, smiling and attractive man walks between the tables of his newly opened Kanapa restaurant in Kyiv, peering attentively at diners. Dmytro Borisov, more often referred to as Dima, tries to guess whether they are happy with their meals.
The 33-year old restaurateur owns seven “homes,” as he calls his venues in Kyiv. “You are my guests here and my restaurants are my homes. I feed and entertain you and then you pay if you want,” he says, smiling.
People do pay him. Borisov says that his establishments are “one of the most successful restaurant businesses in Ukraine,” with all but his latest venture being profitable. The average bill at Borisov’s eateries is €25.
All of his food and drink venues offer different kinds of cuisine. Kanapa serves traditional Ukrainian fare, while Ohota Na Ovets has pan-Asian food dishes, for example. His eatery group also includes Pivbar Beer&Beef, GastroRock, Barsuk, Foodtourist and even a children’s restaurant called Baby Rock. Lately, Borisov made InvestGazeta’s list of best restaurateurs of Ukraine, and won the most innovative restaurant business owner category.
It all started in 2009 when Barsuk opened its doors, a high-end beer and food joint modeled after a classic New York gastro bar. It has a wide selection of tasty food, beer and wine, and is the most stable earner in terms of profitability, the owner says.
“With €50,000 invested, broke even in three months without any direct advertising. This is quick for Ukraine,” Borisov says.
Not all of his restaurants were so quick to turn a buck, though. Kanapa, known for “high-end Ukrainian national cuisine” that Borisov opened in partnership with Ukrainian folk-rock star Oleh Skrypka in June, cost over €600,000. After three months it hasn’t broke even, but the owner is sure that there’s nothing to worry about.
“When I open a place I don’t expect something or dream about something. I know exactly how many visitors a day and in a year I’ll have,” he says.
Borisov also has his own farm, which he started in the early 2000s as a small business venture, but now uses mostly for supplying his restaurants with fresh ingredients. It provides his business with 90-97 percent of their supplies, depending on the season. According to Borisov, the farm in Kyiv Oblast “has 500 hectares of organic farming, 40 marble beef cattle…my own pork.”
Before his foray into the restaurant business four years ago, Borisov owned a branding and marketing agency called Brainstorm. After selling it in 2006 he spent several years working in real estate. But Borisov says that his passion for cooking was with him all along, originating from the summers he spent with his grandmother as a child.
“It was normal to wake up to the scent of food cooking in the morning and run into the yard to check on our garden. We used to plant everything from roots to berries,” he recalls.
At the age of 10, Borisov says he was already able to cook many dishes, including dumplings in broth, his favorite then. “Only during my student years I found out that people eat dry dumplings for some reason,” he says, recalling his grandma’s recipe of the broth.
However, recipes are not enough. Borisov insists that at some point one has to just keep in mind the main principles of cooking and then get as creative as possible.
“Gastronomy is 100 percent art,” he says. “All these recipes that say you should take 134 grams of something and fry it at 165 degrees for 22 minutes is garbage.”
“When I create something new now it is mostly for a new menu of one of my restaurants to get that ‘wow’ effect,” Borisov says.
He says he divides his time equally at each of his restaurants.
“I have ‘mega-service days’ during which I make all my top managers work in the dining room including myself. We serve food, pour beer and bring it to the guests. I also cook,” he says.
That is what separates Borisov’s group of restaurants from others. It might just be his secret ingredient to success.
“Isn’t it funny that the owner talking to guests in my restaurants and bars is kind of our special thing?” he laughs. In every small town in Europe you go to café because you know the cook and the owner Akhmed, whose wife is a cashier, whose lover is a waitress and whose son is a bartender there. That’s just normal.”
Borisov believes that running a profitable restaurant business in Ukraine is not challenging because the market is nearly hollow. His main complaint is the lack of gastronomic culture among Ukrainians.
“This refers both for business owners and the customers,” he says. “On the one hand we almost don’t have restaurants, rather restaurant projects that invested all the money into decoration and barely remembered about food. On the other hand we have clients whose expectations for restaurants are much higher than normal, so that even good places can get subjectively negative feedbacks like ’this restaurant sucks because this borshch doesn’t taste like my grandma’s borshch’,” Borisov explains.
“My dream is to represent Ukraine as a new country on the big gastronomic map of the world. Now our country is a blank spot in the gastronomic sense,” he says.
After Ukraine, he hopes to open a string of restaurants in China and Europe.
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected].
Banush recipe from Dima Borisov
“Each national cuisine has a different name for this dish. For our Italian readers it would be polenta, for Moldovan readers it would be mamalyga and finally in Ukraine we call it banush.”
You will need:
One glass of finely ground corn grits
One glass of the richest 30 percent cream
A slice of butter
One glass of milk
Take a glass of milk and warm it up, but do not boil.
Pour a glass of corn grits into the warm milk and stir slowly until the milk is absorbed and then add a glass of cream. Stir it until the cream is absorbed and the grits start turning into a mass of single consistency.
Stirring it slowly to a boil and keep it at boiling temperature until it becomes puree-like.
Before serving, add some butter and of course Carpathian goat cheese or Chevre French goat cheese. If you can’t afford Chevre, there is an easy way to avoid it – make some pork crackling from classic Ukrainian salo or Spanish jamon, if you are more sophisticated, and enjoy the meal.”
How it works for Dima Borisov
1. Start a restaurant-home, not a restaurant project.
“How are restaurants usually started in Ukraine? A young lady asks her lover or husband to give her money to start a restaurant. He does and she starts one. Of course she puts in all her creative ideas: golden chandeliers, silk curtains and silver cutlery and then two weeks before the opening (she realizes) that this is a restaurant and there should be some food. Such projects are expensive and it is hard to get your money back, because what you end up selling is food.”
2. Make the best of social networks, no direct advertising.
“I am a friendly and open-minded person and my first clients were my friends. Now I have 13,000 friends on Facebook including followers and it works. Moreover, I believe that Ukrainian restaurants simply can’t afford direct advertising.”
3. Use fresh, high quality products.
“This is a standard. Use local and seasonal products located around 250 kilometers from you. The menu in my restaurants change five or six times a year.”
4. Be out there, talk to your guests and make your restaurant your home.
“The personality of a cook and the owner who actively communicates with their customers is considered to be a marketing thing in our country, while it is just normal everywhere in Europe.”
5. Bring up professionals in-house; take care of your staff.
“I have to raise both cooks and waiters myself. These professions are not prestigious in Ukraine. Waiters just come during their university breaks, while cooks go to culinary school just because they didn’t enter the university in any other major.”
6. Love what you do and do not search for a success secret.
“I just do my job. I am an expert in food, drinks, guests and I love what I do. That’s about it.”
