A Ukrainian chef and a Russian chef, making nostalgic music in the kitchen

Even in a city blessed with a seemingly endless influx of pop-ups — from California-inspired Lebanese to saucy chicken parm sandwiches to Swedish hot dogs — newcomer Take Me Back is a bit of an oddball. It’s rooted in fine dining but shies away from fussiness. The menus are ambitious, but the events are intentionally small. And, finally, there’s the unlikely duo behind it: a Ukrainian sous-chef and a Russian private chef, who are drawing inspiration not just from their warring home countries but from Italy and France. 

During Take Me Back’s first pop-up April 28 at the raucous Spanish wine bar El Chato, co-chef Alina Prokopenko delivered plates of raviolone carbonara to diners’ tables. Turns out, a massive raviolo’s best friend might just be soft evening sunlight, which seeped through the windows to give the Parmesan-covered pasta disc an angelic golden halo. With her sharp, blond pixie cut and white eyelet blouse, Prokopenko, too, looked rather otherworldly.

Prokopenko, who moved to the U.S. from Ukraine in 2022, and her creative partner, Aleksey Kvasov, who moved from Russia to the Bay Area via Seattle in 2020, met two and a half years ago at the San Francisco fine dining restaurant Anomaly. Kvasov started as a line cook and advanced to a sous-chef role, while Prokopenko was hired as chef de partie. She still works there, though Kvasov now works as a private chef. 

“The idea of a pop-up was born a few months after we met,” Prokopenko says. “We knew we were going to create something one day.” Eventually, they landed on an escapist concept, drawing from their experiences living and working in Europe: Prokopenko had a seven-year stint cooking in Italy, and Kvasov had traveled through France, studying the cuisine and tasting everything he could get his hands on. 

With Take Me Back, they decided to tap into food memories, rather than their respective origins. Still, some of the dishes at the first event had a distinct Slavic vibe. The seafood doughnut, a fried ball topped with a mix of crab and shrimp, featured dough that was akin to yeasted pirozhki, and the potato puree accompanying a dish of lamb and morels was buttery like a Russian babushka’s. While the Russia-Ukraine war is, of course, on their minds — Prokopenko is from Kryvyi Rih, a Ukrainian city that has suffered many missile attacks — the duo prefer to focus on the bright side. “We are not politicians or activists, and we are not trying to turn our project into a public statement,” Kvasov says. 

Instead, he says, the pop-up celebrates creativity and “the belief that even in the darkest of times — in moments of fear, uncertainty, and pain — you can still find a way forward, a sense of solace, in the simplest things: in the crisp toast with duck confit, in homemade tarragon butter, in a shared meal.”

For the pop-up’s next installment Sunday at Chapel Coffee Roasters in Chinatown, Kvasov and Prokopenko plan to experiment with brunch, offering a menu that jumps around Europe with gusto. Dishes will include that duck confit with tarragon butter, served on sourdough bread, as well as roast beef and caramelized figs on ciabatta and poached salmon with fermented shiitake mushroom on milk bread. 

If this seems like a departure from their first event, which followed a fine-dining format, that’s intentional: Take Me Back’s appeal is in its charming lack of strategy. Prokopenko and Kvasov are aiming to simply enjoy themselves, cooking in the city they call home. “Where else would a Russian and a Ukrainian cook French and Italian food, if not in a city where you can be anyone?” Kvasov says. “As long as you know how to make a proper sabayon.”