“Russophobia” at war with Russian restaurants in Manhattan

Reservations have dropped by 60% and phone calls and emails with hateful insults are multiplying. The restaurant “Russian Samovar”, a Manhattan classic, is waging its own war miles away from the conflict generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“From day 1 of the war, we started receiving hate messages, one-star ratings on Google with photos, requests for us to stop the war. Pictures 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 woman of Ukrainian grandparents and married to a Ukrainian Jew from Odessa, tells AFP.

When she was starting to raise her head after two years of hardship due to the covid-19 pandemic, the owner of one of the oldest Russian restaurants in Manhattan, located in the heart of the theater area next to Broadway and a deadly atmosphere despite the live music, “feels that they are trying to delete 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 says angrily to AFP.

“I didn't name the restaurant, my stepfather and mother gave it to them (36 years ago) so I don't have the right to change the name nor do I want to”, danja.

Like yours, other Russian restaurants in New York are being harassed and boycotted by critics of the war in Ukraine, while waiting lines have ostensibly increased at Ukrainian restaurants as a sign of support.

Since 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's 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 argues, “do not understand the difference between the Russians and (Russian President Vladimir) Putin. This is Putin's war, not ours.” “We did not believe it”, he repeats as a mantra, before specifying that “we are angry” with him as “Russians, Ukrainian Jews who live in the United States”, because “he is robbing us of our inheritance, freedom”.

“We have nothing to do with him,” he says before recalling his past as a “safe place for artists escaping the Soviet Union.”

“I want people to understand that their anger is misdirected. We didn't start this war. We cannot tell Putin to stop it,” he concludes.

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