Yahoo News Review: Anelya, where James Beard award-winning chefs have begun a new Ukrainian revolution in Chicago
When you see the zakusky carts at Anelya, the new Ukrainian-inspired restaurant in Avondale, they might raise an eyebrow. Even with the pedigree of James Beard award-winning chefs and spouses Johnny Clark and Beverly Kim, who also own Parachute just down Elston Avenue, I had to wonder.
I’ve seen Chinese hot pot robots in action, and these colorful creations are craftier cousins. But when the super sparkly tiers are filled with dishes, from tiny iridescent trout roe tarts to luminous flowing ribbons of pork fat, they transform the very space into something magical.
Anelya has risen not just as a grandson’s ode to his grandmother, but a culinary safe house to beautifully expand the borders of Ukrainian culture in Chicago.
And those carts? They’re not traditional, but they are intentionally excessive.
“I just wanted to be over the top,” said Clark, who worked with an artist to create them. “Like if Liberace was a cart.”
To eat like a Ukrainian at home, there’s always zakusky waiting on the table, he said, almost like hors d’oeuvres served on platters.
“I wanted to re-create that, because I feel like that’s a really important part of the Ukrainian eating experience,” the chef said. “It’s just there to welcome you to the table.”
They couldn’t do that in a restaurant setting though.
“I wouldn’t know how to leave food on the table when you arrive,” he said. So he brings the zakusky table to you. “I wanted it to be really exciting and flashy and a little bit weird. And I think that came through.”
That all comes through, and the trout roe tarts have become the first dish people tend to grab from a dozen or so options. A delicious pair, they’re fragile pastry piled high as if with orange rhinestones, heightened by a hit of fresh wasabi, hiding hearts of sharp scallion cream cheese.
Clark inherited a few recipes from his late maternal grandmother, but he doesn’t quite follow them, including one for an important beet red soup.
“Borsch is the main identifier of Ukrainian cuisine,” said Clark. “The way kimchi is to Korean food.”
It’s an insightful statement from the chef who’s cooked the Asian cuisine of Kim’s culture for a decade this year at Parachute alone.
Many countries claim the soup as their own (plus Hong Kong I might add!), but it came from Ukraine, Clark said.
The chef made his borsch deeply yet subtly different with tender shredded duck, cool cultured cream on the side and intensely smoked pears. It’s in the style of Poltava, he said, one of the more historic gastronomic cities in Ukraine.
“They traditionally made this borsch with game birds,” he added, like pigeon or squab, on a coal or wood fired heater turned stove called a pich, since kitchens weren’t allowed in most Soviet Union homes.
“Because they believe that revolution is spawned in the home kitchen,” the chef said. “So if you’re gonna cook, you have to do it in the community kitchen. The way that people got around that was cooking with their pich.”
They would carefully dry wild pears in their pich ovens over many nights until the pears turned dark black and hard as a rock, but not burned, he said. Clark dried Bosc pears from Mick Klug Farm’s last harvest in a combi oven with a smoker attachment over three days, as with a pich.
Anelya Ochatchinskiya was born in 1924, and grew up in Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine. A century later her grandson honors her with a namesake restaurant, and a dish from his first food memory, kholodets in the zakusky.
It’s a stunning mosaic of aspic and head cheese, earthy and ethereal, laid with pickled onion petals.
The dish is Clark’s offering, not to a taste memory, but his grandmother’s story about the famine she endured.
“Once in a great while, they would somehow get a pig’s head, and that was the most meat they could ever get,” the chef said. “I would make her tell me the story over and over and over as a kid sitting on her lap. I was maybe 3, 4 or 5 years old.”
She would tell him about how they would boil the pig’s head on the pich overnight, then pull the meat and put it into a big can where it sat on the cold floor until it all solidified.
“And it turned into this jelly and then they’d pop it out of the can the next morning and everybody was so excited,” he said. “It’s not that exciting of a food for most people, but that just reminds me so much of her.”
Also on the zakusky cart, you’ll find one of my favorite dishes, the salo, simply presented as silky ribbons of cold cured pork fat, spicy horseradish to spread and raw garlic cloves.
Clark had it that way in Ukraine during a visit last April, with toast to rub the garlic. For him, it fills the place of bread and butter.
You can order a bountiful basket of assorted Publican Quality Bread slices and crackers, but should definitely get the pampushky, a glorious hot clay crock of pull-apart Ukrainian garlic bread.
One of the other dishes that’s emblematic of Ukraine is the dumpling varenyky. Here it’s made golden with saffron, pillowy with roasted potato and nutty Comté cheese, then strewed with fatty soulful strips of bacon made from the jowl.
There’s more technique and ingredients than you might find in a traditional Ukrainian restaurant, including the holubtsi made with coconut milk. Softened Caraflex cabbage, stuffed with millet, mushrooms and Cahokia rice, all soaks in an extraordinary coconut cream sauce infused with garlic from Frillman Farms.
“I wanted to make something vegan that was substantial for people,” the chef said. “I think it took us four different iterations to get to this.”
The banosh, an unassuming yet outstanding dish with Carpathian grits, sheep milk cheese and mushrooms impeccably echoes the traditional porridge.
Drinks include house-made kvass, like a kombucha, with a lovely beet variation offered as a nonalcoholic alternative to wine, as is a seasonal spirit-free Golden Uzvar, similar to a mulled punch. But there are spirits and cocktails, alongside a list spotlighting exclusively Eastern European wines.
For dessert, Clark works with pastry cook Adelina Litvin. She previously worked in pastry at a luxury hotel and a forest resort in Poltava, her home city in Ukraine. Litvin was at Parachute for about seven months when she first moved to this country, but switched to Anelya, because she wanted to cook Ukrainian food again. She is among eight Ukrainians cooks in the kitchen.
Her Kyiv cake with layers of hazelnut meringue, chocolate gianduja and vanilla sponge is served in huge homestyle slices that crunch and crumble with joy.
As does her Napoleon, with perfectly crisp puff pastry, piped with fat dollops of black tea pastry cream. It’s finished with a pink dusting I didn’t fully appreciate until I got home with leftovers.
“It’s dried rose petals with powdered sugar,” Clark said. “Napoleon was my grandmother’s favorite thing in the world so I had to have that.”
I don’t know why, but I’m so moved by Anelya. Ukrainian food is a newer obsession for Clark. And yet each of his dishes seem as if he’s been polishing them, like jewels, his entire life. It’s his revolution spawned in his kitchen.
The chef credits his team. “I couldn’t have done this without them,” he said.
But it’s still a real challenge. “Because my Ukrainian language skills are like a 1-year-old child,” he added. “We do a lot of Google Translate.”
Yet the service is seamless, even with those outlandish carts, and two Ukrainians in the front of the house who can be a bit more refreshingly direct than their co-workers from around Chicago.
I was so surprised by how packed the place was, expected on a Friday, but on a Tuesday too. The dining room is cozy, filled with pieces perhaps borrowed from the collection of an eccentric artistic aunt. It’s unrecognizable from their former restaurant in the space, Wherewithall, which survived repeated pandemic closures, but not city deconstruction.
“It surprises me too,” said Clark. “And I couldn’t be more grateful.”
Anelya
3472 N. Elston Ave.
773-692-2192
Open: Tuesday to Thursday 5-9 p.m., Friday and Saturday to 10 p.m., closed Sunday and Monday
Prices: $8 (kholodets / head cheese), $11 (salo / cured pork fat), $12 (trout roe tarts), $18 (varenyky), $20 (borsch), $20 (holubtsi / cabbage rolls), $12 (Kyiv cake), $8 (Golden Uzvar / nonalcoholic hot drink)
Noise: Conversation-friendly
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible with restrooms on single level
Tribune rating: Outstanding to excellent, three and a half stars
Ratings key: Four stars, outstanding; three stars, excellent; two stars, very good; one star, good; no stars, unsatisfactory. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.
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