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- One of our staples here is our homemade pierogi
or what we call varenyky in Ukrainian.
Every day, we start our day here at 8:00 AM.
Our team of six ladies who make the pierogies come in,
they start their prep of the dough and their fillings.
The rest of the team joins by 9:00 or 10:00,
and we will produce, on average, between two and 3,000
in the course of their workday per day,
with up to four or 5,000 on weekends.
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The ladies now are making our most popular filling,
which is our potato and cheese.
They are shredding boiled potatoes.
They're adding farmer cheese,
little bit of egg, little bit of sugar,
little bit of cream of wheat,
and then they'll do salt and pepper as well.
They all get blended together by hand.
That's the allure of what we do here.
I mean, everything's handmade and you know,
it's a labor of love.
These ladies come in here
and do this every day without complaining.
It's something that they love to do,
and that's something that's very typical
in Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian food,
it really comes from the heart.
This is the base of the pierogi or varenyky dough:
oil, milk, and water.
So now he's mixing in the flour with the wet mix.
So they keep adding a little flour to the right consistency.
This is a fuel process.
They make this every day so they know what they like.
And now they're gonna put it
on the sheeter to get the proper thickness for the pierogi.
Again, another key piece of equipment here.
They used to take the dough and just hand roll it,
but now this has proved indispensable.
It's brought onto the table.
They have these cutters that are premeasured
that we had made.
They're off and running and there's no waste.
All the cuttings, they'll reuse again,
when they sheet new dough.
It's no exact science, there's no weight measurement,
and they're just filling each pierogi
with the filling as they feel comfortable.
Some places might have this automated
to a scoop or to a measurement.
We don't have time for that.
You might have a pierogi that might have a little extra
or a little less, but in the end it,
it all comes out to the same.
We've looked at other options, you know,
there are pierogi-making machines now,
but once my father retired in 2020,
he told me, "Don't mess with the recipe.
Don't mess with what's gotten us here."
So we continue to do it by hand.
They're able to produce better than,
I would say, any automated process.
An automated process would take some mechanics
and if things break down, somebody has to fix that.
The women don't break down, you know,
unfortunately, they retire, they move on.
But I'm very fortunate that they love what they do.
The crimping's done and now she's par-cooking them.
She's just stirring them and they'll stay in here
until they float and then they'll get cooled down here,
'cause the great quantities that they made,
and then we'll finish these upstairs,
either boiled or fried per customers' request.
The varenyky pierogi that we serve here
are offered two ways, boiled or fried.
Pierogi or varenyky means comfort.
And through that comfort, there's love.
When the ladies are preparing that,
they're preparing something that you're gonna love.
Just reminds me of my grandmother.
My grandmother would say, "If you were to come eat here,
you're gonna feel like you're coming to grandma's house."
You're never gonna leave hungry.
Olesia Lew is our Executive Chef.
She brings a lot of expertise in Ukrainian cuisine
and its history.
- Annia Slava has been working for us.
(speaking foreign language)
15 years, Annia Slava has been making
our iconic potato pancake.
We make between 400 plus a day,
to make it through our service.
Slava salts in the beginning, and then she salts again,
because she wants the potato to get slightly softer,
but not to disinigrate.
- There's no problem in recipe.
The salt acts and that's it.
- [Jason] Slava is almost like
an extension of my grandmother.
She really loves what she does.
She's always in a good mood.
She loves cooking, she loves working as a team.
Her potato pancakes are divine.
- She has about four burners on
and she does about five potato pancakes per pan.
Just watch her hands.
It's like that perfect measure,
and that's just muscle memory in this hand.
So when I sometimes make with her,
she puts in my hands several times and tells me,
"Remember, remember."
But just watch her hands.
She knows exactly the amount.
People ask us, "Can you do this in a fryer?"
Absolutely not.
They'll get lost.
She spins 'em around to make 'em even.
She knows exactly when to flip.
It's crispy on the outside,
but it's still custardy on the inside.
There's that balance, you know?
And look at her utensils, nothing special.
(speaking foreign language)
(laughing)
- Enough.
(speaking foreign language)
A lot, she said.
(speaking foreign language)
- This color ready.
This not ready.
- [Chef] So I'm preparing the pans
to lay the potato pancakes in,
because there is a little bit of oil in them
and we want it to catch the oil when we send it upstairs.
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- Where we're located here,
was a much larger Ukrainian community in its heyday,
in the 50s and 60s.
This community was always a haven for Ukrainians.
I think there's a lot of history here, where we're at.
And for being here as long as we have,
people love to know that mom-and-pop places like us
are still surviving.
You know, food scene here is very diverse,
but I'm proud to say that serving consistent Ukrainian food
over the years has been our draw to all types of people
that want to come enjoy a home cooked meal.
Since the outbreak of the war, I've been an advocate
for raising monies for different charities,
but I thought, "What better way to give back,
if an employee had some family that was in an area
where they needed to get out."
So I've applied for more than 12 people,
that which 10 have got accepted
and several of them work here now.
Actually, these two ladies are sisters,
who came here shortly after the invasion started.
This was not their background.
They had a love of it doing it at home,
but actually, they're both in the medical field.
I helped sponsor both of these ladies here,
to come here with,
through the U4U Program.
I'm very fortunate to have them on board.
Since the the war broke out, we've changed our traditional
black and white cookies to our blue and yellow cookies,
which have been flying off the shelves,
to experimenting and now serving,
our most popular dish, the Medovik,
which is very labor-intensive, the honey cake,
with the variety of levels of sour, sweet, sour cream.
- This is a traditional Ukrainian cake.
This recipe is actually from Chef Dema,
who I used to work with here, maybe two years ago.
His mom, who lives in Ukraine,
sent him this recipe and now we make her cake here.
Can't get any more traditional than that.
For me, any recipe that comes from a mom is a keeper.
- Lisa's been on staff almost 25 years,
not of Ukrainian descent,
but she's been very open to learning new ideas
and understanding that Ukrainian foods,
they might be a little bit different
than your traditional American desserts.
She prides herself in creating the most authentic experience
that you'd want from a Ukrainian bakery.
- Put the honey and the butter together
to warm the honey up.
This just helps mix it, to mix the sugar in.
You don't get any lumps and it comes nice and smooth.
Smells so good.
Gently mix this and you just want the bowl
to feel a little warm.
You wanna make sure it's not hot.
We're gonna add the baking soda.
Then we pour the lemon juice in it.
Liquid and acid make reaction with the baking soda.
And this is just the way Dema's mom said she does it.
So I follow tradition.
I like to scrape this out onto a tray.
This way I can make sure it's thoroughly mixed
at the bottom of the bowl.
I'm gonna portion the dough out into 14-ounce pieces.
And then each piece gets rolled into,
we call it half a sheet tray size,
and you need six sheets for one cake.
So I just try to get to the ends of the paper.
It doesn't have to be quite perfect.
I'm gonna just trim as close
to the size of the paper as possible.
That's one layer.
So to store these,
we stack 12 sheets on one tray, that's two cakes.
I'm gonna put them in the oven to bake
and then we'll frost it.
I start the oven at 325.
They bake for about six minutes.
It takes a lot of room to bake the sheets,
one oven per cake.
So I'll lower this to 300
and set the timer six and a half minutes.
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I'm gonna mix the filling,
which is equal parts sour cream and heavy cream.
Confectioner's sugar.
So we mix this 'til it's soft peak,
so it's just thick enough to spread onto the cake.
We've had people come sit down for brunch
and order it, first thing.
Table of eight came in,
I think they sat down at 9:30
and they all ordered dessert first, then their meal.
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Now, we'll cover this with the crumbs.
The crumbs are graham cracker crumbs,
cocoa powder, and walnuts.
It's pretty dry, but the cream also soaks it up
into that and makes a nice texture.
As it sits overnight, the cream soaks
into the layers and becomes a great height.
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- This is Yodi, one of our lead line cooks.
He's gonna start doing the stuffed cabbage.
Right now, we're gonna do the meat one.
It's origins come from the Silk Road.
Ukraine was part of the Silk Road,
so if you're familiar with some
of the rolled types of vegetables coming from the east.
But once it landed in our soil,
we have an abundance of cabbage,
and it just seemed like the right vessel.
And notice the meat is raw because we want it to kick off
its natural juices and baste the cabbage,
and then it rehydrates itself.
There is a lot of fill here.
We have standard recipes, but you see how busy we are.
It seems simple, but there's many layers
of flavor in the food.
The name for stuffed cabbage in Ukrainian is holubtsi.
That literally means little dove.
It looks like a little dove's head tucked into the wings
and it's become like a classic.
They put it in a hotel pan, three layers deep.
It cooks for several hours.
Then we have to pull it,
and then we have to send it upstairs.
- [Jason] We've always had stuffed cabbage here on the menu.
It's something of a staple as well.
You know, cabbage being prevalent in Ukraine.
We make a great combination plate.
Get the full, you call taste of Ukraine,
with the stuffed cabbage, pierogies,
and a cup of soup of your choice,
which we recommend borscht.
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(food slicer roaring)
- We're super busy.
We're starting our lunch rush.
We not only do lunch, we're doing our takeout service.
We have catering going today,
and we're prepping out for dinner.
And there's always something going on here at Veselka.
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- Veselka translates to rainbow in Ukrainian.
But I like the adage that we have,
where it says, "Veselka is love."
The people who work here to produce the great quantities
that they do, really want you to feel the love
that they're putting into it.
I do this as a labor of love,
seeing people enjoying Ukrainian soul food.
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Please come, I want you to enjoy what I grew up on,
Ukrainian soul food.
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