Well, we've done the German fest before and when I presented the choices to the kids they actually were most interested in a Redmoon Theater-like performance thing about birds in Wicker Park that was part of the Around the Coyote fest--
Note that the man in the red shirt has
brought his parrot to see a show about birds. I am not kidding.
Around the Coyote was kind of fun, in its Wicker Park kids-not-really-welcome way (even though Wicker Park is now overrun with hipster kid clothing stores and the like), but it left me feeling like I'd missed some fantastically cool vanishing ethnic experiences today. (I'd just been reading my 1983 Chicago Magazine guidebook, full of old German places in Roscoe Village which mostly closed two minutes after I moved here in the early 90s, which always makes me desperate to do whatever's left.) So when dinner rolled around, I grabbed one son and we headed to the Ukrainian fest.
I like the German fest but all the food is catered by the same place in the burbs and there's no actual German spoken anywhere any more. I didn't know, frankly, if there'd be any actual Ukrainians at the Ukrainian fest, either, and the only surviving Ukrainian restaurant, Saks, was recently reported by Erik M. to be pretty dire, but it didn't take long to figure out that this is NOT a festival celebrating a way of life that's already extinct and just on show for the tourists.
Middle aged guys in suit coats with drooping mustaches, young guys with sleek black hair and black T-shirts talking on their cell phones, packs of blonde young girls chattering away in Ukrainian-- this is a fest for the community, outsiders strictly optional.
Little English was spoken at the food stands but I actually didn't have a hard time picking out things, partly thanks to a passable on-the-fly facility with Cyrillic picked up watching Soviet movies, and partly because so much of this food was familiar by name to me, things like pelmeny and varynyky (varenike) having been passed down in my family from the Mennonite side (the Mennonites, though mostly ethnically German, spent about a hundred years in Russia, where they picked up the hardy winter wheat which is the reason why the two main wheat-producing regions in the world are Kansas and the Ukraine). The first stand, sponsored by a Ukrainian Cultural Center, served me up this all-white plate:
The bigger dumplings in the middle are potato pierogi, which were excellent; the smaller ones at top are pelmeny, basically meat dumplings, which had a rich and wonderful organ-meat flavor which I frankly didn't want to know too many details about; and the cabbage roll-looking things in front she called something like holubka, though that's a dance rather than a food, maybe it's a food too though. Anyway, they had chicken and rice inside and tasted like chicken soup, also quite good.
Will Ferrell, in the costume of his cameo from the Borat movie.
If you go, I highly recommend that stand, the Ukrainian Cultural one. All the stuff tasted homemade and really good, not as generic as the Polish equivalents often can be around town (indeed, would be at the fest, as you'll see.) That cabbage roll-like thing, holubka or whatever it was called, was miles above any similar one I've had in a Polish restaurant, and the pierogi and pelmeny were first-rate too.
Anyway, there were three other stands. I skipped this one:
Another small Ukrainian one had only one really interesting looking item, which it took two or three tries to finally learn was the second item on the list below, a "cheborek"-- in other words, yet another variant of our old friend the borek/byrek/bierock/boreg, the ubiquitous meat-filled pastry known by some version of that name from pretty much Germany on eastward. (Actually, wouldn't "pierogi" be another example?)
This one was quite interesting, though not freshly baked, filled with some ground meat-- pork, maybe, who knows?-- and a lot of dill, which was different.
The last stand was the most ambitious-looking-- a Polish ringer brought in no doubt because they had the equipment to set up and cook sausage and kebabs in quantity:
As well as pierogi and a steady stream of potato pancakes:
The pierogi and cabbage rolls weren't a patch on the Ukrainian Cultural Center ones, but the sausage was plenty good, and the potato pancakes-- oh man, that lady looked like she knew how to make potato pancakes, hell, she looked like she knew how to make potato pancakes for the entire Polish Army without breaking a sweat, and you know what? She did. They're great.
Armed with enough food for eight people, we sat down in the tent and watched the entertainment. Here some traditional dancers watch...
Some tango dancers. Is tango big in the Ukraine? It seemed to be big here.
Then, stuffed unmercifully on white food, we wandered and played carny games, blowing even more money even more quickly.
Good food, great people-watching, a total out-of-Chicago experience-- I highly recommend a visit on Sunday, on Superior just east of Oakley, next to Saints Volodymyr and Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church, 1 pm to 10 pm Sunday.