A 50-Year-Old Ukrainian Icon Has Reopened With New Dishes
After a 50 year run, Streecha, at 33 East Seventh Street, near Second Avenue, shut down in the spring, and the closing seemed permanent. Lucky for us, the place reopened in the same space, a whitewashed basement underneath a chiropractor’s office.
A 50-Year-Old Ukrainian Icon Has Reopened With New Dishes
Streecha stretches its menu while keeping prices low.
It had been and still is a real old-fashioned refectory connected to St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church, just up the street, with many parishioners among the volunteer staff. In the new rendition, the longtime chef Dmytro Kovalenko moved on, replaced by a new crew, as announced by the church’s Father Johan Lubiv.
When I first started going years ago, the place was a well-kept secret; most East Villagers went to Veselka, its Goliath competitor. Streecha couldn’t mount a menu anywhere near the size of Veselka’s, and there were only four dishes regularly available — beet borscht, stuffed cabbage, potato and cheese varenyky, and kielbasa with sauerkraut — plus blintzes, apple cake, and other miscellaneous pastries and desserts.
Not much changed among the old dishes, the $8 stuffed cabbage now arrives coated with mushroom gravy, but I was surprised by the many new items that have been added, making Streecha more of a full-blown restaurant. The menu is now a colorful laminated document with pictures. The place has raised the prices, but the menu is still a spectacular deal.
The $16 “special plate” (up from $10) offers a choice of pork ribs, fried fish, pork cutlets, and pork goulash. The goulash is particularly great, with hints of cumin. On a subsequent visit I tried the pork ribs, which had been simply roasted with a light glaze, eminently edible if a bit dry. These mains come with a choice of mashed potatoes, rice, noodles, or kasha (order this). For a third dish, there’s a choice of shredded beets or garlicky carrot salad.
While the lone soup on the menu has been hot borscht based on beef stock and dotted with potatoes, now there’s lentil as well as chicken soup laced with egg noodles and plenty of pulled meat ($6 per paper cup). The cheese-and-potato varenyky littered with sauteed onions remain a bargain, at six for $9. But the most remarkable new dish is banosh ($10): This cornmeal porridge something like hominy grits gets cooked with broth and heaped with crisp bacon and dried cheese. A bowl makes a nice light lunch or heavy breakfast.
Streecha is open seven days from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Enter past the blue and yellow Cyrillic sign, at the low doorway that goes under the stairway. Inside find an all-white hallway with a half dozen unmarked doors. Figuring out which one is the right one is half the fun.
