Veselka
Volodymyr and Olha Darmochwal reached Little Ukraine as refugees in the late 1940s and opened Veselka on Second Avenue in 1954, first as a newsstand. Their grandson Jason Birchard runs it now. The kitchen makes 7,500 pierogi a day and gets through 15,000 gallons of borscht a year.
Why go
Veselka means rainbow in Ukrainian. The room took the storefront on East Ninth Street in 1966, went round the clock in 1990, and nearly doubled again in a four-month renovation in 1996.1 The kitchen cooks what the family calls Ukrainian soul food: pierogi and varenyky, stuffed cabbage, potato pancakes, blintzes, goulash. When Russia invaded in 2022 the restaurant put a borscht on the menu under the name Eat Borscht Stand with Ukraine and raised $400,000 off it in a year and a half, reaching $500,000 for humanitarian relief by 2024. The staff is Ukrainian and the money went to Razom for Ukraine, World Central Kitchen and the Ukrainian Habitat Fund. In 2024 the kitchen built a pastrami pierogi with Katz's Delicatessen and called it the Pastorgi, made to mark the Williamsburg opening.
Order this / avoid
- Order: a plate of pierogi and a bowl of borscht. The bacon, egg and cheese pierogi came out of the first community pierogi-maker competition in 2015 and stayed on the menu. Potato pancakes go out at 5,000 a week.
- Avoid: buying the freezer-aisle pierogi and calling it the same meal. The family sells them nationwide and they are a different product from the plate at the counter.
Good to know
- The door: this page is the East Village room at 144 Second Avenue. The family also runs Veselka in Williamsburg on Lorimer Street, a counter on the Grand Central dining concourse, pierogi bars inside Madison Square Garden and a Nashville residency.
- Booking: the East Village room takes reservations through Resy.
Verdict
should-visit — Go at an odd hour and eat at the counter. If you are working the deli circuit in this city, put Veselka on it. It is a diner, and what you are going for is the borscht and the seventy years standing behind it.