Let’s say someone opens a restaurant where the menu consists of fried chicken, collard greens and watermelon, served by people dressed as African-American slaves, with ankle chains, maybe. And “slave owners” with whips occasionally coming by and striking the servers and/or patrons?

Or, maybe a watering hole set in an old West’s miner’s camp, where they hand you a long, fake pigtail attached to those phony glassed that make your eyes appear slanted,

How do you imagine that would go over?

Well, some clever entrepreneur in Ukraine has opened a “Jewish” themed eatery there where they hand patrons a yarmulke with fake ear curls attached, and require them to barter for the price of the meal when they’re finished.

Some in the remnant of the Ukrainian Jewish community aren’t amused, according to a JTA report.

The restaurateur, Yurko Nazaruk, has opened several themed places, including a bar in a basement simulating the underground bunkers where the Ukrainian Insurgent Army hid while fighting Soviet invaders in World War Two.

Getting into this place requires getting past a burly guard in fatigues who cracks open the door and asks for the password – “Glory to Ukraine” – before handing you a shot of vodka and opening a false bookcase, leading downstairs to the secret bunker bar, the report notes.

Old black-and-white photos and guerilla army memorabilia are displayed and musicians play as diners eat “typical Ukrainian fare like pig ears and pig fat,” it says.

I can’t help wondering how accurate is that old saying, you are what you eat. Just saying.

Anyway, in back of this bar is a BB gun range, where one can shoot at a portrait of Stalin, the story says.

Nazaruk also opened Café Masoch, “a kinky bistro with leather-clad waitresses,” named for  Lviv-born writer Leopold van Sacher Masoch, for whom Masochism is named, according to the story. Patrons can be chained to their chair and whipped on the back, it says.

Nazaruk’s restaurant dedicated to Ukraine”s Freemasons, has upset some modern Masons – particularly because its toilet is shaped like the throne which figures prominently in Masonic rituals, JTA reports.

But, the story says that of all his enterprises, Nazaruk’s Jewish restaurant, Under the Golden Rose, is likely the most controversial. There, diners are offered black hats with curly artificial sidelocks attached — like traditional Eastern European religious Jews. The menu features Jewish dishes like gefilte fish and tsimmes – “and also not-at-all-kosher pork sausage, and a cocktail named the Funny Jew.”

Not on the menu, the story notes, are the prices.

“It’s Jewish restaurant,” a waitress says. “You eat…and after, bargain. It’s Jewish tradition.”

How special is that?

At least one leading figure in Lviv’s small Jewish community, “is furious,” the story notes.

More appalling, still, “is that the restaurant overlooks the ruins of Lviv’s once-famous Golden Rose Synagogue, which the Nazis blew up.”

“This is a mockery,” he reportedly said.

Before WWII, a third of Lviv’s population were Jews. Nearly all were destroyed in death and labor camps during the war. And afterwards the Soviets took the city, and closed down synagogues, “burying whatever was left of Lviv’s once-vibrant Jewish life,” the story says. The same thing happened all over Ukraine, it says.

So this Jewish leader “goes out nearly every day to forgotten, destroyed Jewish graveyards around the country and works to preserve them” as a way to honor Ukraine’s Jewish past, he says.

But Nazaruk says his restaurant also honors his city’s Jewish history.

“I am making a restaurant about my city. And it’s not only your history. It’s the history of my city. And I want to show it,” he’s quoted as saying.

Nazaruk defends his restaurants, saying they teach history and that without the controversial gimmicks, nobody would care to learn.

Is he right? Or are the Political Correctness police in this country and elsewhere closer? Is there a happy medium somewhere between exploiting age-old, troublesome stereotypes and, say, divesting Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn of the N-word, like they’re doing here?

I don’t know. I’m asking.

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