Pokhmelye in Russian is one of the words for hangover. Thus, it seemed to me fitting to visit this restaurant near Pobedy ploshcha a day after I abused my liver with a vengeance. By the time I was sitting down to dinner, my condition had faded into a psychological ailment. While the physical effects had petered out sometime in the afternoon, my will to live was still suffering from the previous night's merriment.
I turned then to Pokhmelye for a kind of spiritual opokhmelitsya (a Russian word meaning: to drink a shot of alcohol to cure a hangover). But the cheap Ukrainian folk interior of the two-floor restaurant, coupled with the very cheap looking strip club on the first floor did not bode well. When we entered, the Sting and Bryan Adams background music was quickly replaced with a loud synthesizer and singer who tried to make up for her lack of talent with an overabundance of enthusiasm.
The service was atrocious. The waitress grinned when telling us that they had no Ukrainian beer, so we would have to order overpriced imported bottles. She also had the habit of handing us our plates, instead of setting them down.
Anyone who has ever eaten at a standard Ukrainian cafe knows the menu at Pokhmelye, with the only difference being price. For three slices of black bread, we paid an Hr 2.40, or more than the cost of two entire loafs in any store in Kyiv.
My salad Khmelnytsky (Hr 12) was a fairly standard rendition of a veggie salad. The shubo (Hr 11), a pickled herring and beet salad, was heavy on the mayonnaise, but no worse than usual. Pokhmelie's salads are a strong point – at least compared to the entries. The carp in smetana (Hr 28) was not so bad, but more trouble than it was worth. The only time it's worth putting up with all those bones in carp is when you catch and cook it yourself.
The stuffed chicken leg (Hr 38) was stuffed with hard, marrow like balls. But by far the worst were my potato-and-mushroom vereniki (Hr 25).
The ravioli-like nuggets inexplicably took more than 40 minutes to prepare, so my companions had long finished eating by the time my dinner came. The vareniki were swamped in tough globs of salo and several were actually filled with cabbage instead of potatoes.
Even the drinks were not quite right. Only foreign mineral water was available for Hr 10. My dry red wine was actually sweet, and a glass of low-end Ukrainian wine cost Hr 12.
By the end of our meal, after being bombarded by bad music, service and food, my condition had worsened. The only thing that became clear, in fact, was the reason for the name Pokhmelye. It wasn't an attempt to be cute, it was simply describing the state of the restaurant's staff.
18/24 Dmitrevska. Tel: 246-9996.
Open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.
