Now, with his city of Kharkiv under heavy bombardment, Mezencev is confined to his high-rise apartment. But using whatever ingredients he could find, he continued to cook and invent – he baked bread from unroasted buckwheat groats, cooked on his balcony and revisited children’s recipes. He says this has helped him deal with the horrors of bombing and airstrikes. “Cooking helps regulate my nervous system,” the 33-year-old said in a diary he shared with the Observer. “But there is this constant pain in the back of my head. “They say it happens during extreme stress.” Mezencev now lives alone with his ailing French bulldog, Yosik, after he and his girlfriend, Ania, decided to move to the safer city of Lviv. Immediately after the outbreak of war, with shells exploding around them, he made an inventory of his stocks of grain, fish and meat and felt well prepared. The freezer was full and he announced on Instagram that he was ready to start baking bread and cooking for the world. “But then,” he writes, “disaster struck. “One of the rockets hit the power station and our neighborhood was without electricity.” Ukrainian chef Igor Mezencev. Photo: Dima Bahta So he took out a camping stove he had used in nature for Topot, the mission chef’s job, and started cooking soup and coffee on the balcony with “a new way of life and survival.” When, on the sixth day of the war, their supplies began to run out, they took the meat out of the freezer and began to season it with a little salt and used the rest to make tushonka – similar to French confi. Traditionally in Kharkov, people have a barbecue under their windows in March, a “festive, welcoming spring cooking”. But this year, Mezencev said, instead of making traditional shashlik, people were using barbecues to heat canned food and water for washing. “It was so heartbreaking to watch it,” he writes. “It finally seemed to me: we live in a war zone.” In the following days, as soon as the curfew ended at 6 in the morning, queues of up to 1,000 people formed outside the stores and when the supermarket opened at 9 in the morning, it allowed 10 people to enter each time. Then they had to queue for another two hours to pay by card, because the cash registers are empty. After walking the 3 km long house carrying about 50 kilos of food, Ania and he saw more queues – for humanitarian aid – and shared the supplies between themselves and their parents. When the planes bombed the city center and exploded the windows of Iskra Bar, where Mezencev worked, he realized that he could no longer go to work and had to be able to help from home. Instead, he became a “couch activist.” He started helping World Central Kitchen charities by connecting them with logistics companies and supermarkets. When the flour and yeast ran out and it was almost impossible to get into a supermarket, he decided to make his own flour using unbaked buckwheat groats. “One of our local supermarkets sells a buckwheat baguette. “But I think mine turned out much better than theirs – I promised to share my recipe with the supermarket as soon as it was all over!” Now, he says, there is no more buckwheat but he has managed to get live yeast and make bread with wheat flour. On the 25th day, Ania decided to leave for Lviv and he would stay with Yosik, who would not survive a 24-hour train journey. They drove through the ruined city to the station, where they saw “a thousand abandoned cars”. Then they said goodbye. “We hugged and started crying,” he writes. “Again, unbearable. These things should not be possible. “War is so bad.” Mezencev’s parents live in Kharkov with his brother, in a neighborhood he can not reach, and Ania’s parents are nearby. After Ania left, he returned to their apartment, where he hugged Yosik tightly as the rockets hit deep down and cooked food his mother had been cooking since he was a child: borscht, boiled buckwheat and boiled chicken with garlic. “We will have enough food and product stocks for a month,” he told the Observer. After that, he hopes to be able to go to work. “I’m still a cook and I’m still a dreamer. “I am sure that soon we will win and we will become even better, definitely stronger,” he said.
