Opening a restaurant was never in my plans.

Too much stress. Too many hours. Too much to worry about at three in the morning, when you should be asleep, and instead you’re doing math about freezer temperature. I started my cooking career with pop-ups, so I already knew the shape of that grind — and a restaurant is ten times harder, because a pop-up is a performance you give once, and a restaurant is a performance you give every single day, whether you feel like it or not. The mere thought of having my own place scared me shitless.

And yet….The idea of sharing my food, Ukrainian food, with people has always pulled at me like a thread I couldn’t stop tugging. So when I was invited to take over Rotation at Oxbow Public Market in Napa for the whole month of July, to run it as a guest chef with a real kitchen, a real team, and 125 seats, I couldn’t have dreamed up a better way to find out what it actually feels like. For one month, I effectively ran the only Ukrainian restaurant in wine country. I definitely learned a few things. Here they are.

THE MAGIC IS ALL PREP.

Everyone thinks the magic of a restaurant happens in the dining room, under the lights, when the plate lands on the table. It doesn’t. The magic happens hours earlier, in an empty kitchen, with a prep list as long as your arm.

Building a whole menu from scratch humbled me in ways I hadn’t seen coming. My recipes are written for a dinner party — six people, eight, maybe twelve if I push it. Scaling them up to feed a full dining room is a different animal entirely, because flavors don’t scale linearly. A pinch of this at home becomes a fistful at volume, and suddenly the balance you spent years perfecting has to be rebuilt from the ground up. We tested, and tested, and tested again. And then there’s the choreography of service itself — a dozen dishes, each with its own timing, all of them somehow needing to land at the same table at the same moment, hot where they should be hot and cold where they should be cold. The dream is maybe ten percent of it. The prep list is the other ninety.

LEADERSHIP IS EVERYTHING.

In a kitchen, leaders lead by example — there is no other kind that survives contact with a Friday night rush. But this month taught me something more specific than that. It taught me exactly what kind of leader I want to be.

Warm, but with high standards — because kindness and excellence are not opposites; they’re partners. Calm under pressure, always — I never want to be the chef who screams, because fear makes people freeze, and a frozen line is a broken line. And a teacher, constantly. When I ask someone to do something, I want them to know why: why the beets get roasted and not boiled, what herbs go on at the very last second to finish the plate, why we do it this way and not the easy way. A cook who understands the reason will carry it into every plate for the rest of their life. A cook who’s only following orders will drop it the moment you look away.

I’m still learning. But I walked out of July knowing who I want to be at the pass, and that clarity was worth the whole month.

ONE TEAM, OR NO TEAM.

Front of house and back of house are not two departments. They are one organism, and what keeps it alive is communication.

I watched it happen in real time, the near-invisible ballet of good service. A server reads the room and tells the kitchen table twelve is running slow, so we hold their mains. The kitchen calls out that the kholodnyk is about to land, so the runners are already moving before the bowls hit the pass. Timing, flow, a constant low hum of information passing back and forth between the dining room and the line. When it works, the guest feels none of it — they just feel taken care of. When it breaks, no amount of beautiful food can save the night. There is no good meal built on great service and bad food, nor on great food and bad service. It’s a combination of both, or it’s nothing.

A RECIPE FEEDS YOU. A STORY MAKES YOU REMEMBER.

People don’t only want to eat. They want to know what they’re eating, and why it matters, and who made it before you did.

My shpundra was a hit every single night, but it landed differently once people learned it was inspired by an old Ukrainian dish described in our burlesque poem Eneida, written in 1842. And my duck cabbage rolls made grown adults teary at the table. Not because the flavor was so new and strange, but because it wasn’t. The taste still resembled what their grandmothers made — familiar, deep, comforting — but the look is entirely modern: squash, duck, and wild rice tucked inside, wrapped in savoy cabbage, dill oil pooled around, pickled onion bright on top. Familiar and new in the same bite. That collision is where the emotion lives. Tell someone the story of a dish, and it stops being food and starts being memory. It just does.

THE CUSTOMER IS NOT ALWAYS RIGHT. SMILE ANYWAY.

Working in service is difficult, and I have stories, too. Someone once asked why my hot-smoked salmon was cold and was extremely upset about that. Someone else was completely convinced the beets in my kholodnyk (cold beet soup) were raw. I tried (very patiently) to explain that the beets weren’t raw at all—they’d been roasted, then puréed with homemade kefir—and that the crunchy veggies on the bottom of the plate weren’t beets but icy-cold cucumbers and radishes. It made zero difference. None.

And that’s where I learned one of the most useful lessons of the entire month: some things you simply let be what they are. Smile. Nod. Walk back to your kitchen with your dignity and your recipe intact. Some battles can’t be won — but almost all of them can be avoided, and knowing the difference is its own kind of skill.

GOOD NEIGHBORS EAT FOR FREE.

During my residency, I fed people from Fatted Calf, Ritual Coffee, and the new doughnut shop getting ready to open down the way. Nobody billed anybody. That’s just what good neighbors do — you feed the people who feed the people.

But here’s what I didn’t expect: that’s how you build a community. Not through marketing, not through some clever campaign, but through a plate of food handed across the way with no strings attached. Because the neighbors you feed today are the ones who show up for you tomorrow — who send their friends, who spread the word, who stand with you on the hard days when you need them most. Generosity isn’t a cost of doing business. It’s the whole foundation.

BUILD A TABLE, NOT A TRANSACTION.

This is the lesson that holds all the others — you are not selling meals; you’re making people feel something: welcomed, cared for, remembered, so that they don’t just come back; they come back with friends, and their friends come back with friends. Be warm. Be kind. Cook like you mean it. Do that, and you haven’t built a restaurant. You’ve built a table long enough for a community to gather around.

Here’s the thing nobody warned me about: I loved it.

I loved the chaos and the pressure, and the open wood-fired oven. I loved a team that started the month as strangers and ended it as something close to family. I loved standing in a dining room in Napa, watching people from all over taste chicken Kyiv, shpundra over banosh, a sunflower semifreddo pulled straight from my childhood in Ukraine — and fall a little in love with a country most of them will never get to visit.

And that last part is the piece I can’t stop turning over. My country is fighting for its existence right now. Russia would like the world to believe Ukraine isn’t a real place with a real culture and a real, distinct, glorious cuisine. So every dish I serve under the word Ukrainian, every story I tell tableside, every teary guest who tastes their grandmother’s flavors reimagined on a modern plate — that is not just dinner. It’s my way of saying — We are here. We are not Russia. We are Ukraine.

Somewhere in the middle of all that heat and noise and joy, a thought I’d been avoiding for years finally said itself out loud: I want my own place. Not for a month — for good. A place where Ukrainian food and Ukrainian culture are celebrated every single day. A place where I can spread my wings all the way.

I never wanted a restaurant.

Now I can’t stop thinking about one.

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