NEW YORK — For more than six decades, the Veselka restaurant in Manhattan has provided New Yorkers with a taste of Ukraine.
In keeping with New York’s boast about being “the city that never sleeps,” Veselka operates round the clock every day of the week in the heart of the east village section of Manhattan and caters to thousands of customers each week.
The area is where many early Ukrainian immigrants to America first settled around the start of the 20th century in what were then considered cheap “brownstone” houses. A Ukrainian church, school, political, civic and youth organizations, and businesses sprang up and the bustling area was dubbed “Little Ukraine.”
However, in the 1970s, as elsewhere in Manhattan, economic downturn, violent crime, narcotics dealers and vagrants gave the area a shabby, broken, graffiti-daubed, sometimes dangerous, feel and the increasingly successful, middle-class Ukrainian-Americans moved out of the city into greener, pleasanter suburbs with modern houses.
Despite the exodus of inhabitants, the area remained the hub of Ukrainian community life in New York City and Veselka faithfully persevered at its location on the corner of East Ninth Street and Second Avenue.
Eventually politicians funded efforts, spearheaded by tougher policing, that cleaned up and economically revived their city making Manhattan, including Little Ukraine, again an attractive place to live in. Property prices recovered dramatically, new businesses and residents poured in, and those who had never moved out found their previously humble homes were now worth many millions of dollars each.
As the neighborhood recovered, Veselka prospered and today it employs 85 people and serves thousands of customers each week.
Veselka’s current owners are Tom Birchard and his son Jason and they explained the restaurant’s history when the Kyiv Post met them earlier this month.
The family
Birchard is an American who barely knew Ukraine was a separate country when he met his future wife, Marta, when they were both students in the 1960s. It was her parents, Wolodymyr and Olha Darmochwal, post-World War II immigrants from near Lviv, who founded the business in 1954.
Birchard explained that Wolodymyr began very modestly by buying a tiny newspaper and candy vending store not much bigger than some of the newspaper kiosks on Kyiv’s streets. It also sold hot and cold drinks and snacks. But as other adjoining premises became available, Wolodymyr bought them up and customers were able to eat at a counter and then, as the space grew, he was able to offer an increasing number of tables and expanded his menu to full meals – breakfasts, lunches and dinners. But it was never fancy fare and revolved around core, hearty Ukrainian dishes like borscht, varenyky, potato pancakes and sweet crepes-type pancakes.
Tom, who had studied business, began working part-time at Veselka and initially never thought of it as a full-time career. Wolodymyr Darmochwal, by this time his father-in-law, continued to grow the business and it evolved into not merely an eating place but an important component of Ukrainian community life.
“My father-in-law was a very patriotic man who supported many of the community organizations working for Ukrainian independence and to keep Ukrainian identity alive,” Birchard said.
Wolodymyr, born in 1903, had been a member of the Ukrainian Plast scouting organization in his homeland and contributed to its growth in his new country. Plast bought the building above Veselka and its New York branch still operates there.
“For a long time the restaurant didn’t serve alcohol because Mr. Darmochwal wanted the place to be somewhere for community members to meet,” Tom said. “He wanted the scouts and their parents to come there after the scout meetings and didn’t think it was appropriate to have alcohol around.”
Mafia story
Although Veselka has always promoted its Ukrainian menu, it attracted customers from all the diverse backgrounds that make up New York. “This area always had a Bohemian character with many artists and actors living here,” Tom said. “They used to come in and other service workers from the restaurant industry would come here after they finished work late at night. There was a Hells Angels chapter (branch) nearby and members of the mafia would come in. They never tried to extort money from Mr. Darmochwal but once the mafia, as a joke, kidnapped his dog, Bora.
“There aren’t many people you can really complain to if the mafia steals your dog. They kept it for a day and Mr. Darmochwal was very angry. They sort of apologized and they kept coming to the restaurant but I don’t think he ever forgave them.”
Tom said New York has a large Jewish community many of whose dishes are similar to traditional Ukrainian food. So Veselka has always had a large number of Jewish customers.
In 1974, Wolodymyr died suddenly of a heart attack and Tom started running the restaurant – he believed only temporarily – while the family worked out the business’s future. At the same time, Tom’s marriage to Marta was running into difficulties and when the two split up he ended up in charge of Veselka and she eventually moved to Hawai.
Their son, Jason, started working part-time at the restaurant as a young boy and then as a student to earn spending money. “I did every job at the restaurant from washing dishes, cooking and being a waiter to the business side of it,” he said. He studied economics at university and it wasn’t a surprise when in the early 1990s he joined his father in the business.
Difficult times
Tom said that as New York declined in the 1970s “our business model started to fail, especially as the older, regular clients moved out of the city. I thought that we were close to bankruptcy.”
Veselka employs 85 people and 800 to 1,000 people come through the restaurant’s doors each week day and 1,200 on Saturdays and Sundays.
He said a number of developments averted the restaurants’ closure: In the early 1980s the local prestigious newspaper, “The Village Voice” published a great review about Veselka’s pancakes. The restaurant also became one of the first businesses allowed to sell lottery tickets, which boosted its income. The neighborhood, said Tom, steadily improved and younger people moved in.
In 1990, Tom turned Veselka into a 24-hour operation emphasizing its breakfast offerings and hired more professional staff. In 1996, the premises were completely renovated.
He said that for a time he experimented with changing the menu to more American mainstream fast foods like hamburgers. “We tried to de-emphasize the ethnic foods but we found those were the dishes people wanted. New Yorkers, even if they’re not East European or Jewish, know and like the food from those cuisines. So we came full circle and emphasize the traditional Ukrainian food. And we have gained a reputation over the years as an informal place serving homey dishes.”
Booming business
Jason said the successful formula of good, simple food served in an informal setting means that the restaurant employs 85 people and 800 to 1,000 customers come through Veselka’s doors each week day and 1,200 on Saturdays and Sundays. Many of the customers come late at night after finishing their own jobs in theaters, bars or restaurants.
The restaurant attracts plenty of famous faces like movie star Robert De Niro, James Bond actor Daniel Craig and his wife Rachel Weisz, and TV personalities like Jon Stewart.
“Some restaurants take photos of famous customers and put them on the walls,” Jason said. “But we don’t disturb them and tell our staff to treat them as ordinary customers. They appreciate that and return.”
Although the dishes are relatively simple, chef Olesia Lew, who works as a consultant to the restaurant, said: “They are all of very high quality. Everything is handmade. It is prepared and cooked fresh on-site and people can taste that.”
Ukrainian chef
Lew used to come to eat and hang out with her friends at Veselka years before she became a chef herself. She worked in the kitchens for ten years and has helped train the current head chef, Dima Martseniuk, who came from Ukraine in 2009 to the U.S. originally for a few months to improve his English and then return to Kyiv where he worked at a bank.
Dima Martseniuk, who came from Ukraine in 2009 to the U.S. originally for a few months to improve his English, is now Veselka’s head chef.
Living in New York, he heard about Veselka and applied for a part-time job. But the longer he worked in the restaurant’s kitchens, he found himself enjoying the job more and asked to stay on. He worked his way through the various cooking jobs and then the restaurant helped him pay for a professional cookery course.
In time he became the chief chef with some 15 kitchen staff under his supervision. He said: “I like the idea of Veselka and its history. I like the opportunity to create something new in the kitchen. I have been lucky to have Olesia’s tutelage and everyone at the restaurant is friendly. I feel like they are my second family.”
Although the most popular dishes are still the ones that were being served when Wolodymyr Darmochwal started the place, Lew and Martseniuk are constantly thinking of new tweaks to traditional favorites like innovative fillings for varenyky and stuffed cabbage “holubtsi” or other items including “bigos” hunter’s stew, beef stroganoff, meat balls, schnitzels and a variety of smoked sausages and hams sourced from another nearby old Ukrainian business, Baczynski’s meat market.
Earlier this month Martseniuk won a competition for the best potato pancakes in New York City. In a city where the delicacy is adored by millions with Jewish and Eastern European backgrounds, it’s a fiercely-contested title to win.
So although it’s adapted and expanded over the years, Veselka’s success is rooted in basic Ukrainian dishes which sell in astonishing volumes. Martseniuk said his cooks have a dough-mixing machine for the varenyky but prepare the rest of the delicacy by hand – some 3,000 of the stuffed dumplings daily. They also make 2,500 potato pancakes and around 380 liters of borscht every day. That’s a lot of happy customers.
