First Taste: Veselka Expands to Brooklyn

Against punishing odds, Ukraine endures. So does Veselka. The Ukrainian-Polish restaurant has been in New York, in one form or another, for 70 years, most of them on Second Avenue in the East Village, many of them 24 hours a day. It is a potent symbol of perseverance through hospitable and inhospitable eras alike. It may not be the most authentic restaurant of its kind in the city, and I can’t claim beyond doubt that it’s the best, but I don’t know of any more identifiably, durably Ukrainian institution in New York than Veselka.

The original Second Avenue Veselka was a regular haunt during my attemptedly misspent Manhattan youth, where I went in the dark hours of the morning to imitate the punk-rock gods who had done so before me. (Richard Hell, one of the greatest of the ’77 punks, included Veselka on a map of local treasures in one of his romans à clef, Godlike.) In reality, the rank-and-file Veselkites could be more peanut gallery than rogues’ gallery — Lynn Yaeger once wrote about “the shabby guy across from me who had amputated fingers and seemed to always be there” when she went for a midnight snack of vegetable soup and rye bread to go with her early edition of the next day’s New York Times — but if they were freaks, they were our freaks. I would’ve been as proud to be a diner on Arnie Charnick’s Veselka mural as I could have been to be a Broadway baby caricatured at Sardi’s.

I’ve left my punk phase behind — you can only sneeze out your septum ring so many times before you get the message — but I’d like to think I haven’t changed, not on the inside. And Veselka, to its credit, hasn’t either. Its old frenemy, Kiev, a competing Ukrainian restaurant just down Second Avenue, cycled through owners and trends (at one point, it had a quasi-Asian-fusion run), but Veselka is Veselka is Veselka, even as it has explored, with mixed success, new locations. (A Bowery Veselka in the 2010s was a flop; a few Veselka pop-ups were temporary.) At its newest location, which opened this past spring in a former car wash on Lorimer Street in Williamsburg, things are much as they ever were. The architecture is a bit more dinette than it is on Second Avenue, but a new Charnick still beams down from a wall.

There may be more traditional Ukrainian restaurants, but there’s a particular comfort that Veselka’s symphonically beige specialties offer, at least to this wizened fan. Look at the $25 Meat Plate. The stuffed cabbage comes in a slightly gluey mushroom gravy, and even if the pierogi (two potato, two braised beef), boiled as wool, don’t look like much on the plate, they’re heavyweight comfort in two steaming bites, swiped through sour cream (good) or applesauce (with its sharper acid tang, even better), an afternoon nap waiting to be born. Real countrymen would probably opt for the hot borscht, but for sprightlier freshness, I prefer the cold, somewhere between soup and a chilly salad, with floating tendrils of beet, cucumber, and hard-boiled egg in a Manic Panic–magenta broth thickened, I learned from The Veselka Cookbook, with both buttermilk and half-and-half.

It’s a cheerful sight to see a grab bag of New York types in this Veselka as at the other: two students sipping lime rickeys, a woman placating a couple of screaming kids with finger food, an older man and his younger companion ordering potato and cheese pierogi (“This is his first time having Ukrainian food,” the older man told the waitress). These are uncheerful days for Ukraine, of course, yet Veselka hasn’t forgotten where it comes from. It is now in the hands of Jason Birchard, a grandson of its founder, and the Ukrainian flag flies. Since the war began, the restaurant has raised $500,000 for the effort, one bowl at a time. Slava Ukraini.

Photo: Courtesy of Veselka