The Last Pierogi on Main Street   

December 19, 2019 Admin 0 Comments

America’s small-town, family-owned pierogi restaurants are handed down from generation to generation. How long can they survive?

My most vivid memories of my grandmother are of her rolling dough, cutting circles with the mouth of an empty jam jar, flour on the Formica, the smell of butter and onions slowly simmering. Baba stands by the stove, checking to see if the pierogies I pinched closed have come open while boiling.

The pierogi is a simple dumpling. But when the chemistry is just right, it’s more than a meal; it’s memory, heritage, and family — the ultimate comfort food. In my Ukrainian family, pierogi recipes survived the Holocaust and crossed the Atlantic by boat in the memories of refugees. But for whatever reason — lack of time, fewer traditional family gatherings, the slow death of cooking at home — none of Baba’s surviving daughters or grandchildren make pierogies like she did. My sister and I didn’t marry Ukrainians. We don’t speak Ukrainian. The way we feel connected to our roots is through food, and we seek that connection at mom-and-pop pierogi restaurants throughout the Northeast and Midwest. Often, these are homey, no-frills cafes where pierogies are served hot, and where recipes and techniques are passed down from matriarch to matriarch. These places, however, are fewer and farther between.

From the 1880s to the 1920s, and again in the wake of World War II, Eastern European immigrants poured into the U.S., creating vibrant, tight-knit communities where the culture and cuisine of the Old World thrived. The first place I found pierogies like Baba’s when I moved away from home was in the Ukrainian enclave of New York’s East Village, at the all-night cult diner Veselka. Started by Holocaust survivors like my own grandparents, it has been run by the same family since 1954. I felt assured, when I first discovered it almost 20 years ago, that I could always find pierogies like Baba’s out in the world.

Yet while Veselka appears unshakable, its pierogi-slinging neighbors Odessa and B&H Dairy have barely hung on through rent hikes, gas fires, and the wear-and-tear of the restaurant business. In Brooklyn, Baba’s and Pierozek have arrived on the scene in the past three years, while Lomzynianka, a Greenpoint staple for just shy of a century, closed its doors forever in 2015.

In the city with the most restaurants per capita and the largest Ukrainian and Polish immigrant populations in the U.S., when we lose a pierogi institution, we can hope another will rise up to fill the void. But the landscape for independent restaurants is increasingly challenging; while chains hold steady, thousands of family-owned and operated places close each year. Outside the metropolis — in smaller cities, suburbs, and rural areas where the flow of Eastern European immigrants has ebbed and once-thriving immigrant neighborhoods are being diluted and dispersed by gentrification — one or two family-owned, family-run pierogi restaurants may be all that exist. From where I sit in Rhode Island, the nearest such place is in Fall River, Massachusetts.

In 1900, Fall River, population 89,000, was a thriving hub of industry to which thousands of immigrants flocked from Europe — primarily Portugal and Poland — to work the cotton mills. But by the mid-20th century, the American textile industry had collapsed, and Fall River was in decline. In a wave of ill-considered urban renewal in the 1960s, the port city’s namesake river was filled in and re-routed around a highway, while its namesake falls were diverted to underground culverts, and the downturn worsened; local small businesses and ethnic neighborhoods, like the Polish enclave, faded. “We had the Ukrainian Club — ‘the Uke’ — the most popular restaurant in the city. That’s gone,” says Patti Geary, who opened what is now the city’s lone pierogi restaurant, Patti’s Pierogis, with her husband Ron in 2009. “We had a deli called Bronhard Deli where they made their own kielbasa. That’s gone. Then we had another deli with good Polish food called Johnnie’s Market. That’s gone. I don’t have any competition,” she says. “And if I do, God bless them.”

Like many American pierogi spots, Patti’s began with a grandmother and the food traditions she brought with her from the Old World. In 1905, Helena Skiba left Poland at 14 with a nametag and a single small bag. She traveled alone for 30 days across the Atlantic in a third-class cabin. After weeks of processing on Ellis Island, a Fall River couple arrived to bring Helena to their boarding house, where she would join the ranks in the city’s booming textile mills. She went on to marry the son of her host family Antonia Sliva, and had 12 children, including Geary’s mother, Nora LePage.

Geary learned to make pierogies, kapusta (Polish stewed sauerkraut), placki (potato pancakes), and golabki (stuffed cabbage rolls) from her grandmother and mother as a child, and she started working in restaurants — bussing tables at the restaurant where her mom worked — when she was 14. “I was in my late 50s when I finally opened this place,” Geary says. “But it was a dream, and I have to say, dreams come true.” Today, Geary serves her family recipes at Patti’s Pierogis virtually unchanged. The large, plump dumplings still come with classic fillings, like farmer’s cheese and potato, alongside Geary’s own innovations, from the steak teriyaki “Teriy-ogi” to the “S’more-ogi.”

The 44-seat dine-in restaurant and bar (which showcases a wide selection of Polish liquor and beer) is located in a renovated historic diner on South Main Street, near a car dealership and a used tire shop, and not far from either of the town’s two biggest tourist attractions: a battleship museum aboard the USS Massachusetts, and the childhood home of infamous accused axe murderer Lizzie Borden. A Polish flag flies from the restaurant’s facade. Inside, menus sport an anthropomorphized, grinning pierogi wearing booties and throwing up jazz hands. Geary’s husband decorated the bar alcove; it’s packed with Harley-Davidson memorabilia. Across the restaurant, the dining room is like a museum for artworks Geary’s patrons have gifted her over the years, like Polish dolls and pisanki (ornately painted eggs).

For a decade, Patti’s has hosted a constant stream of locals and seasonal tourists, my family included. “Whether they’re Polish or not, everybody that comes in here has a story, and it’s almost always the same: The way their grandmothers cooked, the food that they made for their children, the way they grew up ... Sometimes people will walk in here, with the aroma, and they’ll be, ‘Oh my God, this smells like Grandma’s kitchen.’ They smell the cabbage cooking, because I’m constantly doing that. And they’ll stop right there,” Geary says, indicating the black floor mat in front of the door, featuring a grinning pierogi illustrated by her niece Rachel. “And they’ll say, ‘Oh my God.’”

In August, Bill Murray traveled from Martha’s Vineyard to Patti’s for, as Geary puts it, the love of the pierogi. “I said: ‘Bill, what brings you to Fall River?’ And he said, ‘You! Your pierogi!’ I’ve been very lucky. I’m still loving what I do. I’m not sick of it yet. But you know, I’m getting older, too.”

Geary’s mother helped in the kitchen at Patti’s into her 80s (she’s now 91), but the future of Patti’s Pierogis is anything but certain. “Our next generation would be my son, but he’s not interested in this,” Geary says. “So, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m hoping I have someone in my family that’s going to carry it on. But it doesn’t look so good right now.”

On a recent Sunday at 5:30 p.m., the bar at Patti’s was wall-to-wall with patrons waiting for tables. Business is strong. But if Geary were to one day retire without someone to carry the torch, it could mean the end of Fall River’s pierogi tradition. “A lot of my customers don’t go to chain restaurants,” Geary says. “They’re looking for these mom-and-pop places, and these mom-and-pop places, they’re dying out.”

On Route 209 not far from my sister’s house in Kerhonkson, New York — right behind a U-Haul rental location and directly across the street from Gnome Chomsky, one of the world’s largest garden gnomes — is a family-run pierogi restaurant, also the last place of its kind in the region, also using recipes passed down from a woman named Helena. But this one does have a clear successor — at least for now.

Anna and Stefan Samko opened Helena’s Specialty Foods together in the mid-1990s, making pierogies with a recipe from Stefan’s mother Helena. Originally, they were set up as the IBM commissary, but when local IBM plants closed, the Samkos slowly built a business selling gallon Ziplocs of the Ukrainian-style dumplings (smaller in size with thicker, chewier dough than Geary’s) from a to-go window.

Anna Samko’s father was Ukrainian, her mother Polish. They arrived in 1949, fleeing war-torn Eastern Europe after surviving five years in Nazi labor camps. After some time on the Lower East Side, in 1966 the family moved upstate to the Eastern Catskills which were, and still are, home to a large Ukrainian community: The area surrounding the Samkos’ shop is home to the largest population of Ukrainian-born residents in the U.S. and among the largest populations with Ukrainian ancestry. Pierogies abound, but all behind closed doors: at Soyuzivka, Kerhonkson’s Ukrainian heritage center and camp, founded in the early 1950s; in local Ukrainian church basements; or at the festivals and camps in nearby Ellenville.

The region’s Polish and Ukrainian restaurants went the way of the region’s Borscht Belt resorts: Some are now Catskills roadside ruins, windows broken, signs hanging askew. Others have been reimagined: Tannersville’s Deer Mountain Inn was an old motor lodge and Polish kitchen; now it serves a world-class tasting menu from chef Ryan Tate, whose New York City restaurant Le Restaurant earned a Michelin star. A German pub called Schatzi’s across the river in Poughkeepsie does a pierogi night, although they source their pierogies from Helena’s. So, for anyone in the region (extending possibly as far east as Janik’s in Westfield, Massachusetts, and as far west as Petrosky Homemade Pierogies in Carbondale, Pennsylvania) who doesn’t have an in with the Ukrainian Youth Association, Helena’s is the spot for fresh, hot pierogies. Thus, there’s ample demand: In 2017, the Samkos expanded their operation with a dine-in space, where where Anna and the couple’s daughter, Alena, cook up cook up more than a thousand handmade pierogies daily.

At first, Alena Samko, 31, stepped in to help her mother part-time while working as a public school teacher. “But we were getting busier and I had to decide what I wanted to do,” she says. “Now I’m trying to make this my career. And I’m trying to do it in a way that doesn’t mirror how my parents did it, I want to change things a little. I don’t want to miss weddings, I don’t want to work weekends.”

Both mother and daughter want to make Helena’s Specialty Foods bigger by expanding into a new space and new areas of business, like catering and online sales. But, growing a small business in this diffuse, rural part of New York presents challenges. Alena Samko believes technology — social media, e-commerce, a point-of-sale system for tracking inventory — could help overcome those challenges, but she considers herself old fashioned. “I don’t even know how to text,” she says, indicating her flip phone. “I keep things basic. That’s what takes people back to the way it was. They remember their grandmother’s house, or their mother’s, or their aunt’s growing up. They didn’t have fancy stuff. It was basic. It was like this.” She gestures to the front of the room, with family pictures on the wall and a glass bowl of strawberry candies on the counter — the same kind I remember from my own baba’s house in Ohio, decades ago.

“A customer told me, ‘When I first took a bite, it brought tears to my eyes,’” Anna Samko says. When people use the term ‘comfort food,’ this is what they mean. “The way the world is now, everybody needs a little hug ... You could go to the city and get any kind of food, at any time of night or day, but it’s where you go that makes you feel at home and comfortable — that’s what brings people here.” The sentiment is echoed in dozens of reviews on the Helena’s Specialty Foods Facebook page, in which customers praise and thank Helena’s pierogies for reminding them of home.

Alena Samko has strong ideas for how to modernize operations at Helena’s Specialty Foods without meddling with the tradition and simplicity that keep customers crying tears of joy onto their plates, but if she decides to take a different path, her mother retires, and Helena’s Specialty Foods closes up shop, the only local connection my sister and I and all the grandchildren of babas like ours may have to our family food heritage will be the pierogies in the freezer aisle. I sit down for a small plate of potato and farmer’s cheese pierogies, and on my way out the door, I buy a Ziploc full to bring to my sister’s house for dinner with my niece. Traditions rely on people to keep them alive, and in that way, they are fragile. We’ll carry on this one for as long as we can.

Alexandra Marvar is a freelance writer based in Savannah, Georgia.
Copy edited by Rachel P. Kreiter