Tatar Bunar, a new Ukrainian restaurant in Shoreditch, east London, is styled as quaintly and charmingly rustic: wooden-fronted, with sage curtains, glass-panelled doors and stacks of higgledy-piggledy plates artfully arranged on shelves. Then there’s the food: sprats, potato latkes, varenyky, borscht and an abundance of wild mushrooms, and all of it influenced by chef Alex Cooper’s home town of Tatarbunary in southern Ukraine.
It’s no mean feat to take on a corner of Curtain Road just yards from the shrieking neon ballpit that is the Ballie Ballerson cocktail bar and a Simmonds “fun pub”, and somehow create Tatar Bunar’s nigh-rural ambience, or the odd sense that it’s been here since for ever. But then, Tatar Bunar is Ukrainian, so in recent years Cooper and his co-owner, Anna Andriienko, have faced down far bigger problems than tricky interior design.
Their new restaurant, the owners say, is an attempt to open up Ukrainian cuisine to a British audience. During the build and launch, Cooper remained in his homeland, where he uses the pair’s original restaurant as a food distribution point, while Andriienko was based in London. The result – featuring Ukrainian ceramics and materials from the Carpathian region in the country’s southwest, as well as putting the cooking in the very capable hands of Kate Tkachuk – certainly feels like a mini satellite version of their successful mothership, Tatar Bunar in Odesa.
What Tatar Bunar certainly does not feel like, however, is “a humble little restaurant run by proud people from a war-blighted country to keep their hope alive, etc”, or any other such patronising nonsense. This is a confident, expertly staged, rather sexy dining spot with flattering, soft peachy lighting, Bessarabian wagyu on the grill and Black Sea yafe nagar by the glass. In fact, it’s all rather glam: servers are clad in floor-length, rust-coloured gowns and the bill arrives with a postcard of a Ukrainian shepherd at twilight.
The crowd, when I visited, were in the main tall, sharp cheek-boned, model-esque types speaking Slavic languages, and within minutes of entering I muttered to myself: “This is going to be a terribly hard place to get into within a fortnight.” For a start, at a time when the London restaurant scene is awash with pricey European small plates that send you home hungry and angry, Tatar Bunar dishes up whopping great portions of sating carbs, cream and potatoes. Take the potato latkes with creamy wild mushrooms, which for £12 is a satisfying bowl of earthy joy. Or the £13 sprats “starter”, featuring roughly 10 fish, all boned, flattened, salted and served with a bowl of buttered boiled potatoes and a mound of pickled red onion. Or the truly delicious Bunar tartare: a semi-cooked lamb/beef tartare, if such a contradiction even exists, with a hunk of grilled bread. Similarly, there is nothing slinky or measly about the varenyky, or dumplings, offering. A varenyk, I have learned, is akin to a Polish pierogi that, aesthetically, verges on a Jamaican patty. They are big, plump and here stuffed with minced meat or cabbage, or more mushroom and peppery potato.
By the time we had finished those “small” plates and were moving on to mains, we were already well aware that we had chronically over-ordered. But who could blame us? I’ve spent 12 months being sold four small artichokes alone on a plate for £22. In modern London, no one actually expects to be fed any more; these days, it’s more about the experience. Then along comes Tatar Bunar and its luscious lamb chops with show-stopping spicy pickled tomatoes. Oh, those tomatoes … so sweet, so powerful. And chunks of grilled cod with soft flakes, crisp skin and a generous pile of buttered samphire. No faff, no fuss, no lecture with each course, no long-winded explanation as to the cooking techniques involved, and no hovering or unwelcome input at all. Just dinner, and lots of it.
Regardless of the lack of tableside lectures, I picked up a lot about Ukrainian cookery during the course of our meal, or at least Cooper and Tkachuk’s interpretation of it. Does the crisp-topped, generous, two-person portion of creme brulee strictly need to have an unexpected layer of pleasingly stodgy dumplings in the base of the dish? Well, yes, I rather think it does. And the crepes – short, fatly stuffed and folded, one filled with cheese, one with berries and a third with rich, black, fragrant poppy seed sauce – came in a bowl of glorious custard. Tatar Bunar is indulgent, delicious and a breath of fresh air. And it’s already most definitely a highlight of 2025.
Tatar Bunar 152 Curtain Road, London EC2, 07771 013190 Open dinner only, Tues-Sun, 6-10.30pm (10pm Sun). From about £50 a head à la carte, plus drinks and service
