No, you won't find this restaurant in Montreal, Vermont, St. Catharines, or Toronto. Ukrainian Restaurant has been located in Windsor, Ontario for almost 100 years (since 1929!). It was founded by Pearl Hawrylak, but it's been owned and operated by Anna Momcilovic since 1968. Momcilovic is now 91. She's still there preparing Ukrainian Restaurant's classic menu.
True to form, I had six pierogies ($6.00) and two cabbage rolls ($6.00), which came with bread and butter and a bowl of borscht.
There were only two other people in the restaurant aside from Anna: two foodies from Detroit who'd visited Ukrainian Restaurant once before. The first time was during the pandemic, when the restaurant's remarkable interior was closed to the public, and the food was brought to customers who waited outside the front door--takeaway only. They'd returned to try the food again the way it's meant to be experienced—in that pretty pink interior.
Yesterday, the food critic Tejal Rao published an article titled "That Restaurant You Love Will Close One Day. What to Do?" in the New York Times. She ends her article by writing about trying to get "outside of food's algorithmic hype cycles" and visiting old places instead. "In the past, if I’d neglected to go back to an old place, it was because some small, delusional part of me thought it would always be there. But restaurants, like people, aren’t made to last forever. And it’s not stars or reels or lists that give a restaurant meaning—it’s going back, again and again." She's writing about places like Ukrainian Restaurant.
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