Best Car Wash: Zolotoy Lev

Post photo by Sergei Chuzavkov The Best-Of-Mobile glistens.

    The Best-Of-Mobile doesn't look like much on the outside. Nicks, dents and more than a few rust patches dot the body of the maroon '87 Opel Kadett. The inside is strewn with the trappings of our team's investigative efforts: receipts mainly, along with a few dozen empty coffee cups leftover from a recent and particularly grueling late-night quest to find Kyiv's best place to streak at 4 in the morning (more details on that later), and several plastic Coke bottles half devoured by the Best Of sniffer dog, a burly but even-tempered Rottweiler who once caught the scent of Kyiv's best hamburger from a distance of 6 kilometers.

    Run down though the Best Of vehicle may be, give it a good bath and it springs to life like a frisky colt. The V-4 purring with pleasure, the Kadett gallops through the cru-elest conditions, snow and mud whisking off its oily metallic shell, its paint relentlessly radiating the fiery red glow of its youth.

    Of course, to get that effect we need to find it a pretty good bath. Fortunately, in Kyiv there is no shortage of car washes. Most outdoor markets and Western-style supermarkets have a couple of entrepreneurial types hanging around the parking lot, ready to lube up and scrub down your vehicle using little more than a few gobs of spit and a pair of used underwear. Besides being surprisingly effective, such roadside car washes are as cheap as you're going to get. They'll usually try to get Hr 10 out of you, but we often bargain them down to Hr 7. Then we give 'em the 10'er anyway - the Best Of team thrives on generosity.

    Of course, you can always try doing it yourself, but if you live downtown you better have a few buckets handy, since Kyiv apparently has a city ordinance outlawing hoses. Some advice: If you're into doin' it yourself, you may consider inviting a date along to help you out, especially as the weather warms. There's something inherently naughty about bubbles and cars. Think Cool Hand Luke.

    Alas, we're all business. And besides, our sniffer dog objects to naughtiness. For a quality wash, we head to one of the many garage-style, drive-in jobs that dot the outskirts of Kyiv. These places are simpler than the track-roller mechanisms common in the States, which gobble up your car with you in it, feed you through a hallucinogenic wonder world of bubbles, brushes and kelp, and spit you back out into reality. While not quite as thrilling, Kyiv's no-nonsense car washes are more effective. Your car emerges drier and ends up with less streaks.

    The best car wash we've found, not least because of its relatively central location and its late closing time, is Zolo-toy Lev near Protasiv Yar ski area. This place combines sleek European technology with good old-fashioned human grit. When you drive in the garage, a team of three wash technicians jump to the task. They spray your car thoroughly with a soapy-water jet, then rinse and dry it with the aid of an Italian-made, automatic scrub-and-dry apparatus. Then they take the pains to hand-dry whatever the machine didn't catch. But they save their best work for the interior. Working like piranhas, the technicians polish and vacuum the entire interior of your car in about 10 minutes.

    The whole process takes a half-hour and costs Hr 40. But when it comes to making the Best-Of-Mobile happy, cost and time are not issues. Her purr tells us it's worth it.

ZOLOTOY LEV
32A Ivana Fedorova. Tel: 223-2848.
Open daily 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Exterior wash: Hr 20. Exterior and interior: Hr40.


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