The best Ukrainian restaurant you will find: Mriya reviewed

Mriya lives at the end of Old Brompton Road where South Kensington turns into Earl’s Court and, as if by some alchemy, becomes interesting. It is a Ukrainian restaurant, but something more touching too: a memorial and a retreat. It opened in August, in the sixth month of Putin’s war. Twelve of its 15 staff are displaced Ukrainians and their stories are common immigrant stories of renewal and loss. The kitchen porter is a mathematics teacher, the waiter is an English teacher, and the chef, Yurii Kovryzhenko, is one of the most famous in Ukraine.

Mriya is the name of the largest cargo aircraft ever built, designed by Ukrainian engineers, which was destroyed by the Russians at the beginning of the war. Everything there is to say about Putin, Sigmund Freud, who fled his own tyrant, said already, and the Battle of Stalingrad did the rest. Mriya also means dream, though not a fantastical one. It is less Putin’s dream than a version of Dorothy Gale’s: if you can’t go home, make an impersonation of it at the fag end of Kensington.

From the outside, Mriya is a common London shop winnowed out of a tall Victorian house. I am fascinated by buildings at the edges of fashionable districts: as London expands, they seem less destinations than passing places. The interior is subdued, with wooden floors and spotlights, and this is deliberate: Mriya is a gallery. There is a vast urn of dried wheat on a shelf, stiff and unrelenting, reminding us that Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe, and in normal times wheat flows from its plains. There is a single wall, whitewashed and rough, to impersonate part of an idealised Ukrainian cottage. There are bright, round modernist tables made by Ukrainian designers; low, fluffy chairs, also by Ukrainian designers, which convey the idea of sitting on small compliant sheep, which is pleasing; a grey metal candelabra shooting skyward, stern but not beautiful; a thick knotted monochrome rug on a bench; an antique blue kitchen cupboard from three wars ago.