When a DJ in Ridgewood tells you he’s discovered native schnitzel that’s higher than something he received throughout his Berlin years, you go. It’s not as shocking because it sounds: Recently, all of the noise-rockers, model managers, and alt-comedians I do know have ventured from Bushwick to Ridgewood, the wedge of Queens that has, and never by chance, been growing concurrently a eating vacation spot. Rolo’s set the tone. Il Gigante is its Il Buco. Hellbender has a critical menu with sloshing margaritas. And late final yr, the most recent comer got here. Search for the crocheted curtains freshly hung in an outdated funeral residence on the nook of Onderdonk Avenue.
That is the area of the Pierogi Boys, a.okay.a. Andrzej Kinczyk and Krzysztof Poluchowicz, companions in life and dumplings. The Boys usually are not new to pierogi, which they’ve been promoting on the DeKalb Market Corridor since 2017, and they aren’t new to Ridgewood, the place they’ve lived since emigrating from Poland 21 years in the past. However their 40-seat restaurant with a large grocery hooked up is the biggest expression of their ambitions but. Ridgewood has a big Polish inhabitants — many Poles moved there after getting priced out of Greenpoint — however Kinczyk and Poluchowicz aren’t catering completely to their country-men. “Lots of the Polish eating places in New York are particularly constructed towards Polish individuals,” Poluchowicz informed me. “And we did it the alternative approach. We all the time wished our place to really feel very open. We wished to advertise Polish meals.”
For the Polish-curious, and people unmoored for the reason that 2015 closure of Greenpoint stalwart Lomzynianka, Pierogi Boys represents a snug entry level. Whereas the Boys’ first enterprise — the 150-square-foot food-hall counter — is “painfully genuine” and employs their grandmothers’ recipes, the brand new restaurant has a extra fluid method. For the primary few months, visiting Poles complained the additions to the menu weren’t what their babcie, or grandmothers, would serve. Right here, the schnitzel comes with a horseradish-prickled salad of hot-pink radicchio reasonably than a heap of mashed potatoes.
I discovered Pierogi Boys simple to like: charming, tasty, unself-serious, and filling, if to not the gut-busting extremes of yore. Kinczyk and Poluchowicz supervise the place, whereas the kitchen is overseen by Matt Oliver, a longtime native chef new to the delicacies when he got here onboard. (The Boys gave him a stack of cookbooks, a visit to Poland, and a month to stand up to hurry.) The cooking is extra up to date than you or Babcia might count on. We’re in an extended designer-cabbage second, with brand-name-drops of Caraflex and Sugarcone on menus and in bougier produce aisles round city, however one factor Poles don’t must be informed about is brassicas. Right here, they abound — piquant sauerkraut in mushroom pierogi and sweetly grassy Brussels sprouts melted with onions and cream served over lengthy rickrack-edged noodles for a tackle the consolation meals referred to as łazanki, a kind of collapsed lasagna.
Deviled eggs, co-owners Andrzej Kinczyk and Krzysztof Poluchowicz, an order of pierogi, and a take a look at dinner service within the eating room. Hugo Yu.
Deviled eggs, co-owners Andrzej Kinczyk and Krzysztof Poluchowicz, an order of pierogi, and a take a look at dinner service within the eating room. Hugo Yu.
Each meal right here actually ought to embrace pierogi, of which the restaurant churns out 1000’s per week, so many {that a} devoted dumpling crew handles the job. The savory choices are provided in three fillings — braised beef and pork, potato and cheese, and sauerkraut and mushroom, which is my favourite of the bunch and value getting with little lardons of Polish bacon — and solely boiled, the higher to not overwhelm their delicate dough. (On the Market Corridor stand, they not too long ago relented to fast-food tastes and started promoting a pan-fried choice. “We’re not happy with it,” Kinczyk stated.)
The restaurant serves a small daytime menu, however the higher transfer is to go for dinner. The pork schnitzel, although not bubbled within the Viennese type, is nonetheless nearly as good because the DJ promised, hubcap-size and topped with a thick pat of melting butter and a twisting clef of anchovy. Duck confit, served on a Christmasy pile of braised purple cabbage and sauced with black currants, was nearly as good because the confit I’ve had at many a lot fancier institutions. No Polish restaurant might get away with not making borscht — the recent Ukrainian model within the winter, the cool Lithuanian in the summertime — or kielbasa, which has a garlicky snap, however I most popular beginning with a easy platter of bread and butter, whose unassuming identify belied a dense, seedy black loaf (very welcome in an period of declining pumpernickel!) with a sidecar of bacon-dotted butter.
“Cozy, cozy, cozy,” declaimed a visitor of mine who lived within the neighborhood within the bygone days of 2009, when the pickings had been far slimmer and he or she survived, she recalled with out a lot salad-days nostalgia, “off of deli meals — beans, hummus.” On a current night time within the lengthening daylight, a altering scene appeared far faraway from that previous period: stroller households feeding pierogi to children, cute homosexual {couples} in gymnasium shorts sipping pickle martinis. You would possibly lament the gentrification, however with or with out Pierogi Boys, Complete Meals will arrive on Myrtle Avenue this yr. And the native Polish households, initially resistant, have began to heat to Pierogi Boys’ revisionist sensibility. “Even our harshest critics are beginning to take pleasure in it,” the Boys informed me.
Dessert.
Picture: Hugo Yu
See All
