Reservations are down 60% and hate phone calls and emails are multiplying. The “Russian Samovar” restaurant, a Manhattan classic, is fighting its own war miles away from the conflict generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“From day 1 of the war, we began to receive hate messages, one-star ratings on Google with photos, calls for us to stop the war. Photos of children in Ukraine, messages that we cannot repeat; They call us fascists, Nazis, that our restaurant should burn,” its owner, Vlada Von Shats, a Russian with Ukrainian grandparents and married to a Ukrainian Jew from Odessa, told AFP.
When he was beginning to pick himself up after two years of difficulties due to the pandemic of Covid-19, the owner of one of the oldest Russian restaurants in Manhattan, located in the heart of the theater district next to Broadway and a dead atmosphere despite the live music, “feels that they are trying to erase our restaurant because it has the word “Russian”.
“Changing the name is not an option because we are the Russian Samovar (Russian Samovar) before there was a Russian Federation“, he angrily tells AFP.
“I didn’t name the restaurant, my stepfather and my mother named it (36 years ago) so I don’t have the right to change the name, nor do I want to,” he ditches.
Like yours, others russian restaurants New Yorkers are being harassed and boycotted by critics of the war in Ukraine, while waiting lines have risen sharply at Ukrainian restaurants in support.
From the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on February 24, the Von Shats family put a Ukrainian flag on the door and the sign “we are against war”.
“How do I explain to my son that he is 31 years old when he answers the phone and they call him a Nazi? He is Jewish! As a mother I don’t know what else I can do to express my anger,” she confesses, adding that before being owned by her family It was one of Frank Sinatra’s favorite places in Manhattan.
People, he maintains, “do not understand the difference between the Russians and (Russian President Vladimir) Putin. This is the war of Putinnot ours.” “We did not create it,” he repeats like a mantra, before specifying that “we are angry” with him as “Russians, Ukrainian Jews who live in the United States”, because “he is stealing our heritage , freedom”.
“We have nothing to do with him,” he blurts out before recalling his past as a “safe place for artists escaping from the Soviet Union.”
“I want people to understand that their anger is misdirected. We did not start this war. We cannot tell Putin to stop it,” he concludes.