When a DJ in Ridgewood tells you he’s found local schnitzel that’s better than anything he got during his Berlin years, you go. It’s not as surprising as it sounds: Lately, all the noise-rockers, brand managers, and alt-comedians I know have ventured from Bushwick to Ridgewood, the wedge of Queens that has, and not by accident, been developing at the same time as a dining destination. Rolo’s set the tone. Il Gigante is its Il Buco. Hellbender has a serious menu with sloshing margaritas. And late last year, the newest comer came. Look for the crocheted curtains freshly hung in an old funeral home at the corner of Onderdonk Avenue.
This is the domain of the Pierogi Boys, a.k.a. Andrzej Kinczyk and Krzysztof Poluchowicz, partners in life and dumplings. The Boys are not new to pierogi, which they have been selling at the DeKalb Market Hall since 2017, and they are not new to Ridgewood, where they have lived since emigrating from Poland 21 years ago. But their 40-seat restaurant with a sizable grocery attached is the largest expression of their ambitions yet. Ridgewood has a significant Polish population — many Poles moved there after getting priced out of Greenpoint — but Kinczyk and Poluchowicz aren’t catering exclusively to their country-men. “Many of the Polish restaurants in New York are specifically built toward Polish people,” Poluchowicz told me. “And we did it the opposite way. We always wanted our place to feel very open. We wanted to promote Polish food.”
For the Polish-curious, and those unmoored since the 2015 closure of Greenpoint stalwart Lomzynianka, Pierogi Boys represents a comfortable entry point. Whereas the Boys’ first venture — the 150-square-foot food-hall counter — is “painfully authentic” and employs their grandmothers’ recipes, the new restaurant has a more fluid approach. For the first few months, visiting Poles complained the additions to the menu were not what their babcie, or grandmothers, would serve. Here, the schnitzel comes with a horseradish-prickled salad of hot-pink radicchio rather than a heap of mashed potatoes.
I found Pierogi Boys easy to love: charming, tasty, unself-serious, and filling, if not to the gut-busting extremes of yore. Kinczyk and Poluchowicz supervise the place, while the kitchen is overseen by Matt Oliver, a longtime local chef new to the cuisine when he came onboard. (The Boys gave him a stack of cookbooks, a trip to Poland, and a month to get up to speed.) The cooking is more contemporary than you or Babcia may expect. We are in a long designer-cabbage moment, with brand-name-drops of Caraflex and Sugarcone on menus and in bougier produce aisles around town, but one thing Poles don’t need to be told about is brassicas. Here, they abound — piquant sauerkraut in mushroom pierogi and sweetly grassy Brussels sprouts melted with onions and cream served over long rickrack-edged noodles for a take on the comfort food known as łazanki, a sort of collapsed lasagna.
Deviled eggs, co-owners Andrzej Kinczyk and Krzysztof Poluchowicz, an order of pierogi, and a look at dinner service in the dining room. Hugo Yu.
Deviled eggs, co-owners Andrzej Kinczyk and Krzysztof Poluchowicz, an order of pierogi, and a look at dinner service in the dining room. Hugo Yu.
Every meal here really should include pierogi, of which the restaurant churns out thousands a week, so many that a dedicated dumpling team handles the job. The savory options are offered in three fillings — braised beef and pork, potato and cheese, and sauerkraut and mushroom, which is my favorite of the bunch and worth getting with little lardons of Polish bacon — and only boiled, the better not to overwhelm their delicate dough. (At the Market Hall stand, they recently relented to fast-food tastes and began selling a pan-fried option. “We’re not proud of it,” Kinczyk said.)
The restaurant serves a small daytime menu, but the better move is to go for dinner. The pork schnitzel, though not bubbled in the Viennese style, is nevertheless as good as the DJ promised, hubcap-size and crowned with a thick pat of melting butter and a twisting clef of anchovy. Duck confit, served on a Christmasy pile of braised red cabbage and sauced with black currants, was as good as the confit I’ve had at many much fancier establishments. No Polish restaurant could get away with not making borscht — the hot Ukrainian version in the winter, the cool Lithuanian in the summer — or kielbasa, which has a garlicky snap, but I preferred starting with a simple platter of bread and butter, whose unassuming name belied a dense, seedy black loaf (very welcome in an era of declining pumpernickel!) with a sidecar of bacon-dotted butter.
“Cozy, cozy, cozy,” declaimed a guest of mine who lived in the neighborhood in the bygone days of 2009, when the pickings were far slimmer and she survived, she recalled without much salad-days nostalgia, “off of deli food — beans, hummus.” On a recent night in the lengthening daylight, a changing scene seemed far removed from that past era: stroller families feeding pierogi to kids, cute gay couples in gym shorts sipping pickle martinis. You might lament the gentrification, but with or without Pierogi Boys, Whole Foods will arrive on Myrtle Avenue this year. And the local Polish families, initially resistant, have started to warm to Pierogi Boys’ revisionist sensibility. “Even our harshest critics are starting to enjoy it,” the Boys told me.
Dessert.
Photo: Hugo Yu
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