Kosazka Sabava - Napoli

We found this restaurant using TripAdvisor when we were staying 10 minutes away; this is a part of town with few tourists and few restaurant choices. The staff spoke only Italian and Ukrainian; I have a bit of Italian and some Russian, and was able to order satisfactorily. They were delighted with American guests who could speak even haltingly in those languages. The food was fine. Most tables were arranged for parties of 8 or even more; I gather the expatriate community likes to congregate there. If you have some language capability or are adventuresome, pay them a visit!

We are big fans of Ukrainian food, and were delighted to find a Ukrainian restaurant in Napoli. Our visit went well: the service was good, the food was authentic if merely satisfactory, and the atmosphere was… exactly what was needed. The restaurant is decked out in classic Ukrainian restaurant style: pictures of Cossacks and Taras Shevchenko everywhere, TVs playing Ukrainian channels, a guy belting out Russian language pop classics from the 70s, 80s and 90s, and decorating choices that basically resemble what it would be like to live inside of a knock off Faberge egg. The place is big, as well; there are three or four large rooms with long tables. The service was polite and friendly, if slightly incompetent: in true Eastern European restaurant fashion, they just brought everything out when it was ready, and they got everything ready according to an illogical script of their own. Thus, we got our first dishes (soup, etc. at the exact same time our mains (meat, cabbage rolls were served. That is pretty par for the course if you 've spent any time in Ukraine, however, so it didn 't really bother us. The waitress seemed to speak only Russian and some Italian. The food itself had hits and misses the borshch was weak, more of a pork soup that happened to have some red coloring from a beet that accidentally fell into the pot, with none of the strong beet flavor that defines the dish. The deruny (potato pancakes with smetana (sour cream were crispy and delicious, however, and= the holubtsy (cabbage rolls were also quite tasty. Most disappointing was the pork shashlyk (grilled pieces , which was cooked dry as shoe leather, and the khachapuri (georgian cheese bread which competed with the shashlyk for dryness with the added bonus of having the taste of dirty cooking oil unchanged since the time of Khrushchev. I don 't want to be too negative about the place: you should go for the atmosphere and the nostalgia, stay for the kitschy music and the Ukrainian beer (they have Zhigulovskoye and 1715! , and just avoid ordering the borshch, shashlyk, and khachapuri. All in all, we were happy and we will go back. Decent prices as well!