A Ukrainian Beacon in the East Village

New York Times ^ | January 5, 2010 | Julia Moskin

[nickcarraway]

ABOUT 40 years ago, Tom Birchard — a mild young New Jersey man of Pennsylvania Dutch and Midwestern antecedents — showed up at a fraternity party at Rutgers University, and was sucked unwittingly into the rest of his life.

“You meet a girl, you never know what is going to happen,” he said last month, gesturing around the bustling dining room of Veselka, an East Village restaurant famous for its garlicky, peppery Ukrainian dumplings and borscht.

Mr. Birchard married the girl, Marta. She was a daughter of Wolodymyr Darmochwal, an agronomist who, along with thousands of other professionals, was expelled from Ukraine after World War II, when it was under Soviet rule. After two years in a displaced-persons camp in Germany, the family settled in New Jersey and opened Veselka on the corner of Second Avenue and Ninth Street as a combined newsstand, canteen and community center in 1954.

The marriage did not endure, but the restaurant did. Mr. Birchard, 63, who went to work for his father-in-law in 1967, is now the sole owner. Over several decades that turned Veselka into a canteen for anarchists and artists as well as Ukrainians, he became many things he never expected: an honorary Ukrainian-American, a community leader and performance art patron.

His steady employment of pirogi-folders, sauerkraut-brewers and kielbasa-makers has made him an unlikely Anglo-Saxon Noah of a food culture that is fading in the East Village, though the neighborhood was a haven for Eastern European immigrants for more than 100 years.

[Jimmy Valentine]

Ukrainian food is outofthisorld. Pelmeini, blini, borscht, oh, boy!