THE FOUNDERS HANDED A UKRAINIAN KITCHEN TO A MAN WHO MARRIED IN

In 1954 two Ukrainian refugees named Volodymyr and Olha Darmochwal opened a newsstand on the corner of Second Avenue and Ninth Street and called it Veselka, the Ukrainian word for rainbow. The neighborhood around it was Ukrainian then in a way it is not now. There was a church, a national home, a scouting hall, a bookstore, and a stretch of Second Avenue where a person could live an entire week in one language.

The newsstand sold papers and candy. Then it sold soup. Then it sold soup all night. By the time the family had to think about who would keep it, the newsstand had become a restaurant, and the restaurant had become the thing the block set its clock by.

The obvious answer to who takes the counter is blood. That is not what happened here. In 1974 the family handed the reins to Tom Birchard, who had married their daughter. He was not Ukrainian. He had not grown up in the language or the church or the scouting hall. He had married into a family whose entire identity was wrapped around a cuisine he had learned at the table rather than at home.

He took it and he did not give it back for fifty four years.

The version of Veselka most New Yorkers know, the one with the line down Ninth Street at two in the morning, is not the one he inherited. He inherited a small operation in a neighborhood that was emptying out, and by his own account he came close to losing it.

What turned it was ordinary. The Village Voice reviewed the cheese blintzes in 1980 and people came for the blintzes. Birchard has described what he did next in plain terms: he tightened up the staff, he worked out that what people actually wanted from the place was simple homemade food at a price they did not have to think about, and he got to that conclusion before the money ran out. He has called the years that followed a grind.

So the changes were operational, not culinary. Hours. Discipline. Pricing. Volume. The parts of a restaurant that customers never see and that decide whether a restaurant is still there in ten years.

The menu. Specifically the spine of it.

Borscht. Pierogi, boiled or fried. Kielbasa and kraut on one plate. Blintzes under powdered sugar with sour cream and apple sauce on the side. Compote in a glass. These are not chef's interpretations of Ukrainian food. They are the founders' recipes, cooked in volume, at a counter, for seventy one years.

Everything around that plate turned over four or five times. The Ukrainian blocks thinned. The rents went up. There was 9 11, then Sandy, then a pandemic that shut the dining room. Through all of it the thing a customer could order at three in the morning stayed the thing the Darmochwals had made.

That is the part of a handoff that is easy to miss and is the whole point of one. Anyone can inherit a building. What Birchard actually inherited was a set of instructions about what not to touch, from people whose culture was not his, and he followed them for half a century.

During COVID he stepped back. The counter went to his son Jason Birchard, who is the founders' grandson and half Ukrainian, which means the restaurant returned to the bloodline after a fifty four year detour through a man who married in.

Jason did the thing his father never did. Tom kept his head down and ran a restaurant. Jason put the flag in the window, wore the vyshyvanka, and turned a Second Avenue dining room into a fundraising operation. Since the invasion he has raised roughly 750,000 dollars for Ukraine relief through the restaurant.

The retirement is documented, and so is the reluctance. Across the press cycle around the 2024 documentary about the restaurant, the framing every outlet used was the same one the film uses: Birchard retired reluctantly, and his son stepped into it under pressure. That is the third beat of every handoff, and here it is on the record before we even ask the question.

We have not asked it yet. What the father says about what the son changed, in his own words, to us, is the thing this piece still owes you. That is a phone call, not a search.

This is the first of a run. Every month we are taking three operators who took the counter when the founder stepped back, and asking three questions. What did you change. What would you not change. What does your mother or father still say about it.

We are not looking for the famous ones. Veselka leads because the handoff here is documented and both men have spoken about it publicly, which is rare. The ones we actually want are on Liberty Avenue, on White Plains Road, on Roosevelt, on Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park. The counters where a daughter took over four years ago and nobody has ever asked her about it.

If that is your family, or the family that feeds you, tell us. The bench is open.

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