Stew Glechik
A peasant stew is my religion
The best meals of my life have been emotional experiences — moments that connect me to some place outside my current mode. I’m no longer sitting at a restaurant, I’m somewhere/sometime else, feeling the staggering gap of space and time. I’m transported. I wouldn’t say that I hunt for this when I select restaurants — transcendence is rare — but of course there has to be some element of hope that when I sit down and the food starts coming, that I’m about to time travel.
The furthest I’ve ever traveled while eating, was in one of the simplest and most unlikely places. Not a Michelin starred restaurant. No white table cloths. Rather, a homely little Ukrainian Cafe, off of Brighton Beach, at the sandy end of Brooklyn. The first time I ate the “Stew Glechik” at Cafe Glechik though, I was shot, no, catapulted to a shtetl in Eastern Europe. I was one of my ancestors, eating this rich stew with fried dumplings in a one room shack, staring out at the sun setting over a hard wheat field. It was a feeling of such intense contentment that it hadn’t been felt for generations, I had to step back that far to connect to the feeling.
It might have been the perfectly cool evening, or the stroll up the boardwalk, or the fact that Glechik is BYOV (Bring Your Own Vodka) and the bottle of Kettle One was mostly gone at this point. It might also have something to do with my own predilection for out of body experiences and spiritual awakenings in unlikely places (Ask me sometime about the night Dickie Betts guitar spoke to me at an Allman Brothers concert). That first bite and every bite after (the other guys I was with had to grab the plate out of my clutches) were ethereal. Now, thats usually a word left to describe delicate items, carefully prepared, Stew Glechik, however, is a peasant stew. Beef short ribs braised in wine and stock until you can pierce them with a spoon served on top of dumplings (“vareneki” — stuffed with more beef) and deep fried, then covered in the braising liquid. It’s the simplicity and humbleness that make it so easy to fall for it.
This was almost 10 years ago and I haven’t stopped going back. I started my bachelor party there (it continued to a rainy run along the beach, drinking 40's and standing in circles). We had another bachelor party dinner for my BFAM (Brother From Another Mother) there this weekend and there have been many visits in between. It’s a regular pilgrimage for a group of us, a mix of first, second and third generation Jewish Americans, all with family from Eastern Europe, all who grew up in Brooklyn.
There’s an aspect of a tradition (lower case t) that we’ve chosen this as a meeting spot, a place we have to go the few (and increasingly fewer) times we’re all in Brooklyn to drink and eat as much as we can. There’s also Tradition (with a capital t as in Tevya) about this place. Giant plates of pickles, dumplings, herring, potatoes, without any ceremony or need for flair. This food is what we have left to tie us to the fading idea of “The Old World”. None of us are religious, instead we carry our traditions through our appetites.
So we continue to return, to worship at the altar of varenki and palmeni, to stuff our faces and drink until we have to stumble out on to the boardwalk and think about the crazy series of events that must have brought all of our families to Brooklyn. We might have come from completely different homes, and live now in completely different places (Colorado, Nebraska, Saratoga) but we’re all here now and we can all agree that this food makes us feel like home.
