Behind a Single Taste

We rarely stop to think about how much a single taste can hold. Sometimes it carries a fleeting moment, sometimes a person, a whole period of our lives, or a place. Taste and smell have a remarkable way of staying with us, tied to memory, and then years later suddenly bringing back something we thought had long been left behind.

For me, the taste of strawberries is the carefree feeling of childhood and the warmth of my grandmother’s hands. Deruny made with young potatoes bring back my grandmother’s stories, which I would listen to as I cooked for the two of us — stories about her life, my great-grandparents, and a time that has since become part of my family’s history. And there is the taste of yellow sweet cherries, which brings back a place that has now been devastated by war. In my memory, it becomes whole again — full of life and a future.

We all have thousands of these small triggers of memory. But they carry more than our personal memories. There are family stories, recipes and habits, ingredients that belong to a particular land, ways of preparing and preserving food, things passed down from one generation to the next. Our own memories become intertwined with those of our families, our places, and our cultures. Together, they shape our sense of taste and harmony, our understanding of where we come from — and, ultimately, something we recognise as the taste of our culture.

I have always loved cooking, but for many years it was simply something I loved to do, while my professional life was in a completely different field. I first came to Japan eighteen years ago, and it was here that my long-standing passion for cooking became my profession.

As I gained experience in professional kitchens, my role changed too. I went from preparing dishes to creating my own, developing menus, and thinking more deeply about the flavours I wanted to express. Things that had once been largely intuitive — my sense of taste, combinations, harmony — gradually became something I worked with consciously as a chef.

Working alongside chefs from different countries taught me something else: the same ingredient can mean very different things to different people. We each have combinations that feel familiar, our own sense of balance, our own associations. Technique can be learned. But what we experience as delicious or harmonious begins to take shape much earlier, through memory, environment, and culture.

That led me to a question that became increasingly important to me: what is it that makes a taste feel Ukrainian?

The more I explored the regional cuisines of Ukraine, the more clearly I saw the connections between ingredients and place, recipes and history, cooking methods and ways of life. I wasn’t interested in simply reproducing traditional recipes. I wanted to understand the thinking behind them: why these ingredients? Why these combinations? Why were they prepared in this particular way? Because I believe that only when you understand where a taste comes from can you take it somewhere new without losing what makes it distinctive.

Japan, too, has become part of the way I understand taste. Here I have discovered new ingredients and combinations, a different relationship with seasonality, and new approaches and techniques. None of this replaced what had already shaped me. It became another layer of experience.

Perhaps this is where things become most interesting for me. The Ukrainian food I create in Japan today can take on new forms, draw on contemporary techniques, and work with Japanese ingredients — while still remaining Ukrainian.

Language changes with people too. It finds new words for new experiences and still remains our language. I think of cuisine in much the same way. Memory gives it roots, but those roots should not become boundaries.

Food has become my professional language for talking about Ukraine. Through taste, I can share something of its memory and history, its traditions and ways of life. But I can also speak about the Ukraine of today — alive, contemporary, changing, creating something new, and engaging with the world.

Today I am also part of UKRAINE HOUSE JAPAN, where each of us shares Ukraine in our own way.

Taste can carry memory across years and generations, but it can also be the beginning of something new. A Ukrainian dish created here in Japan can become a place where two cultures meet. Sometimes that encounter begins with a simple curiosity about an unfamiliar taste, and then grows into curiosity about everything behind it — a desire to know more, to understand each other better, and perhaps to become a little closer.

And that is when a single taste becomes much more than just food.