Salateira closes all its Kyiv restaurants after 15 years

Salateira closes all of its restaurants in Ukraine after almost 15 years, its co-founders have confirmed, ending one of the first build-your-own salad chains in the country. The last 12 outlets, all in Kyiv, have shut and the company website is offline.

The closure was first made public by former co-owner Iryna Dobrutska in a post on Threads. Yevhen Ruban, who co-owned the business from 2011 to 2016, told Forbes Ukraine that the project had fully ceased operating, and co-founder and general director Oleksandr Savilov confirmed that he had left the business.

As recently as June the chain ran 12 company-owned restaurants in the capital and was preparing a first opening in Romania, with franchise growth planned for western Ukraine. Neither plan went ahead. At its peak Salateira counted about 16 locations in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro and abroad, according to KP.ua.

A salad chain built for mall food courts could not outlast a war that keeps emptying them.

Salateira closes after a year of air alerts

Savilov told UNIAN the reasons were “a large number of air alerts” and falling revenue caused by military risks. He told Forbes Ukraine that every hour a restaurant stays shut during an alert costs it between 10,000 and 30,000 hryvnias, while rent, salaries and utilities keep running. Revenue at mall locations was down 45% on pre-war levels and margins had halved.

Salateira LLC booked 78.7 million hryvnias in revenue in the first half of 2026, almost 26% less than a year earlier, UNIAN reported. The company had also taken a loan of 5 million hryvnias, according to Forbes Ukraine. None of the reports said what happens to the staff or to the brand.

Roma Pakeliani, owner of the restaurant group RestEmotion, pointed to the location model. “When most of your restaurants operate in malls, there are effectively no other venues to compensate for these losses,” he told UNIAN. Food-court operators elsewhere face a gentler version of the same squeeze, as Bark Barbecue's exit from its Dumbo food hall stall showed.

A salad counter born in a Kyiv mall

The first Salateira opened in December 2011 in Sky Mall, in the north-east of Kyiv. It was among the first chains in Ukraine to sell salads assembled to order from a counter of ingredients, a format that suited the food courts of the city's new shopping centres and has since become standard.

A Gradus study cited by the local outlet Tykyiv described 2026 as the hardest year yet for Ukrainian business. Salateira did not reach the end of it.