One of the really nifty bits about living in a bigger city is that it is so full of things.
Not, of course, that the wilderness is not also full of things; everywhere except perhaps the bleakest Arctic landscape or the deepest ocean depths is full of something. Tangles of roots; fungi; bacteria; all the things that creep or swim or walk or fly. Those are all things. Wonderful and amazing things (even if they are also sometimes horrifying.)
But, specifically, I am thinking here of the things that happen when you get enough people together into a place, for a long enough time, that they begin to make things. Row houses and graffiti and artisanal doughnut shops. Parks and museums and inexplicable corporate art. Guitar lessons and omakase sushi houses and afternoon teas and those little shops that sell stationery too glorious to really write on.
And, in the basement of a Ukrainian church somewhere in the middle of town, marked only some of the time by a quiet sign, a mostly-hidden restaurant, specializing in (of course) Ukrainian food, particularly pierogies. We were in the mood for some, over the weekend, and so we went looking for it; we’d heard that in addition to dining in and takeaway there were frozen pierogies to take home and prepare.
You slip in through the side door, down a flight of stairs and then another, into a surprisingly large hall that, at this hour of the day, was dark and empty except for us and an array of those giant round tables one sees in hotel ballrooms for conferences and the like, decked out in simple white tablecloths, each circled by an eager little huddle of the chairs that usually go along with those hotel tables, the sort that will be stacked up and pushed aside to the walls when this room is next used for…whatever other purposes the room might serve.
Tucked into the wall, a single lighted serving window, a menu and a bell the only sign that there might be anyone back there in the kitchen at all. A little eerie, in a sort of cozy way.
Still, ringing the bell brought a brisk young woman to the counter, and it was a matter of moments from there before we had in hand a little bag containing three different kinds of frozen pierogies, ready to take home and warm up and eat with sour cream, half now and half some other evening when cooking just isn’t something we feel like doing. Perhaps when the weather has cooled off, a little.
And so we do. And they are delicious, which probably means they are terrible for me, but to hell with it, one cannot be virtuous all of the time.
Perhaps next time I’ll add bacon. And a fistful of green onions.
And perhaps another time I’ll go back to the little restaurant in the basement, later in the day, when it might be expected to be more bustling, more lively.
I wonder who I might meet there.
Delightful Things for today:
- One of my favorite games is getting a remake, and the story trailer landed today, and I am simultaneously hopeful it might be amazing and full of dread that they might fuck it up.
- In a completely different vein, another trailer came to my attention recently – equally delightful, though for different reasons.
- This is weird, right? It is? No?
- A longer read, about what it means to read – and to be a critic reading – Sylvia Plath.