I was in Chicago recently and I rang up an old friend from the audio industry to see if he would like to go out and have dinner. He jumped at the chance since A) we hadn't really sat down and talked with one another for quite sometime; and B) I offered to buy. He suggested a restaurant that I wasn't familiar with, a Ukrainian restaurant in Chicago's Avondale neighborhood by the name of Anelya.
Johnny Clark's grandmother moved from the Ukraine region of the Soviet Union after World War II ended. Clark was enamored with his grandmother's cooking skills making many dishes from her homeland and serving them to the family when Clark was a young boy. After getting out of high school, Clark attended the Culinary Institute of America getting his degree in culinary arts/chef training. Clark worked in a handful of restaurants before he and his wife Beverly Kim opened their first restaurant - Parachute - in Avondale in 2014. Kim had also gotten a degree in culinary arts from Kendall College in Chicago and had a background in Korean cuisine. Parachute became famous for its hybrid menu of Korean and American fare. The couple received a Michelin star for their restaurant in 2016, and in 2019 the couple received a James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef in the Midwest.
In 2019, the couple opened Wherewithall, a farm-to-fork restaurant that drew rave reviews from its inception. However, COVID hit and the restaurant business in Chicago took a major hit. With increasing competition in the farm-to-fork category, Wherewithall was hanging on making a meager profit for the couple.
Pictured right - Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark. Photo courtesy Chicago Sun Times/WBEZ.
Clark had visited his grandmother's homeland just weeks after the Russians invaded Ukraine in early 2022. He learned more about the culinary history of the country, how during the Soviet Union's existence traditional Ukrainian food had been suppressed and Russian dishes replaced generations of recipes on tables across the nation. When Ukraine gained their independence in 1991, the culinary culture slowly came back.
Sensing a deep nationalistic energy, Clark came back from Ukraine armed with a number of traditional Ukrainian recipes. Hanging on to those recipes, Clark knew he wanted to honor his grandmother by eventually opening a Ukrainian restaurant. And when a water pipe broke in early 2023, Clark and Kim decided to close Wherewithall and start over from scratch. That gave the couple the impetus to transition the restaurant to their new venture - Anelya - which was the name of Clark's grandmother. Kim also added some Korean flair to the Ukrainian dishes that were prepared by Ukrainian refugees in Anelya's kitchen.
(Clark and Kim closed Parachute in 2024 once again citing the dwindling profitability of the restaurant. The couple is hoping to reopen a new version of Parachute closer to downtown Chicago. But in the meantime, the couple opened a small, urban hip D.J. bar/small-plate restaurant - Parachute HiFi - just down the street from Anelya. More on that later in this post.)
We had reservations for 7 p.m. and I pulled up to Anelya on N. Elston Ave. about 6:45. (see map) I was able to find parking just down the street from Anelya and I walked up the street to the restaurant to wait for my buddy to show up. He had texted me and said that he was going to be a little late, so I waited in the bar for him to show up.
The bar was rather interesting. It only sat about six or eight people and sort of a "den" feeling to it. There were books on the shelf behind the bar and it was rather cozy. The bartender was a rather imposing man with a thick Eastern European accent and a full beard. But he was very hospitable. I took a look to see what kind of beer they offered and asked him for his recommendation. After describing what I liked in a beer, he pulled out a bottle of Opillia Koryfei, a Ukrainian-brewed lager that was reminiscent of some of the Eastern European beers I've tried in the past.
Off to the side of the bar was an outdoor patio. It was a great little patio with vines, flowers and plants with tables on a brick patio. There was a building in the back and while I was waiting for my friend to show up I noticed a handful of people walking through the bar and out to a small building at the opposite end of the patio. There was a "pop-up" sign on the window next to the door, so I figured there was a private event going on out there.
On a wall opposite the bar was a window that looked into the kitchen area. There was a serving window that looked out into the dining room. The kitchen was very clean and it was probably that way because people could look into the kitchen at any point.
The dining room was also somewhat cozy with a number of tables along a wall with banquette seating. Colorful mushroom-style light shades hung from the ceiling above a row of tables in the middle of the room. When my friend showed up, we were seated in one of the small booths that lined the wall on the opposite side of the room.
Menus were dropped off when we were seated and I asked my friend what he liked to eat at Anelya. He said, "I don't know. I've never eaten here before." I was sort of taken aback by that. It turned out that he had a business relationship with Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark helping provide them with their electronics for the Parachute Hi-Fi lounge. "I've promised them that I'd eat here at some point," he told me. "I figured that since you were coming into town, we'd both give it a try."
Our server that evening was a young lady by the name of Katie. She asked us if we had dined at Anelya before and we said we had not. She then explained that the items on the menu could be ordered a la carte or could be ordered as sharables. My buddy and I looked at one another, shrugged our shoulders and agreed we could share some plates just to try different things.
A bit later, she brought out a cart that showed each of the items they had listed on the menu. She explained each dish and if something caught our fancy, she just pulled it off the cart and put it down in front of us. We sort of got a kick out of that.
But some things needed to be prepared in the kitchen. We had ordered some pampushky - basically a Ukrainian-style challah only smothered in garlic. To go along with the pampushky, we ordered some sunflower seed hummus along with some egg mayo to put on the bread. The egg mayo was mixed with tarragon and anchovies. The mayo mixture was outstanding. As was the pampushky which I could have just sat there and ate that all night long.
We also ordered up the fried Crimean olives. The olives were surrounded by lamb sausage, then battered, then deep-fried until the batter was crispy. There were two to an order and they were served in a bowl of tangy tartar sauce. Frankly, I was hoping more from the deep-fried olives.
We also ordered a plate of the Vareneky dumplings. They were served on a bed of mashed potatoes and topped with huckleberry and a bacon-pecan praline. These were fantastic. The taste sensations were out of this world.
The next thing we got was the short-rib Bograch, a beef dish topped with bacon bits and celery ends in a paprika broth. Now, THAT was also excellent. The beef was tender and easy to cut with a fork and the paprika sauce gave it a bit of a spicy flavor. We also got a side of the potato pancakes - which were also wonderful - and a side of the beet salad. My wife loves a good beet salad and the one at Anelya was very good.
By the time we finished with all that, Katie asked if we wanted anything else. We were so stuffed at that point that when she tried to tempt us with items off their dessert menu, we had to throw in the towel.
After finishing up at Anelya, my buddy insisted that we walk up the street to Parachute HiFi to have a nightcap. "You'll get a kick out of this," he declared. "It's like walking into your cool uncle's basement den."
And he wasn't very far off with the analogy. Parachute HiFi is very small place - probably six tables and a few seats at the bar - with 1960's-style wood paneling, lights with mid-modern lampshades, and a kaleidoscope projection light above the bar. It was tight and cozy in the place. In addition to serving cocktails, Parachute HiFi also serves small plates of Korean/American fare.
The speakers looked like they were homemade and were using Altec Lansing speaker drivers. They straddled either side of a McIntosh amplifier and pre-amplifier that Johnny Clark got from my buddy. The D.J. was holding court over two turntables in front of the amp and pre-amp. For as big as the speakers were, they were blaring or thumping like one would think from looking at them. Actually, they didn't sound too bad. One D.J. was finishing up when we sat down at the bar, and another had just come in with a large bag of albums he was going to play. We heard music - good music - from the likes of German guitarist and composer Sigi Schwab, Estonian musician and composer Misha Panfilov, and Brazilian singer/composer/producer Arthur Verocai while we were there. We were listening to a track off Verocai's eponymous first album from 1972 and it sounded fresh and contemporary.
The other thing about Parachute HiFi were the vintage 60's and 70's loudspeakers they had mounted on the wall. As we were getting ready to leave, we made our way over to the speakers they have on display. It was like a blast from the past looking at all the speakers. "Oh my god," I exclaimed more than one time. "I had a pair of those speakers! These were the first speakers I had when I bought my first stereo! I sold those speakers when I was working at a hifi store in college!" We laughed about some of the speakers they had on display thinking how technology has evolved over the past 40 to 50 years and some of the gimmicks they used for loudspeakers a like number of years ago.
It was a fun night of laughter, stories, nostalgia and great food at Anelya, and then finishing up at its sister place Parachute HiFi. I was a bit apprehensive of trying a Ukrainian restaurant - even more so when I found that my friend who had suggested the place hadn't eaten there before. But everything was as delicious as it was unique. Katie was a wonderful server for us giving us great recommendations and being patient as we were trying to figure out what to get for shareable plates. I'd never had Ukrainian food before, but I would have no problem heading back to Anelya to try more of it at some point.