Parovoz Speak Easy Bar Team in Ukraine

Please give what you can to support the displaced bar team at Paravoz Speak Easy in Kiev, Ukraine. Funds will be distributed by Dima Shovkoplias, bar manager of Parovoz Speak Easy, to team members who are currently unable to work.

Consider this passage from a recent article by Hamish Smith in Drinks International:

As air raid sirens sound across cities, the population goes underground. To basements, subterranean carparks, even Parovoz, Ukraine’s best-known bar. A mazy descent through the side access of a 1940s cinema, the plush, train carriage-like speakeasy is the hidden bar that now hides its staff. “It’s become a bomb shelter,” says Shovkoplias. “Some of the team now sleep there. One bartender has brought his mum as it’s safer there - it has electricity and food.”

With millions reportedly displaced across the country, Shovkoplias estimates that about half of the Kyiv bar community have left the capital, many to their home cities, to the relative refuge of smaller towns and villages. “Those that didn’t have a basement to shelter in have left. Some of the community has gone to the west, to cities like Lviv close to the Polish border.” Many others stayed, or under strict curfew, weren’t able to leave.

Shovkoplias left Kyiv hours after the first morning of bombardment. “I heard rocket attacks, so we decided to leave our home,” he says. “We took our beds and clothes and left. We closed the bar - all hospitality in Kyiv is closed; only now grocery shops are open.”