A documentary about the fabled Ukrainian restaurant becomes a portrait of wartime valor. I wish the film had drawn a deeper connection between the taste of freedom and the taste of Veselka.
— It’s not every day I get to review a documentary about a subject I feel personally close to, so let me put my bias right out there.
“Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World” is a movie about one of my favorite New York restaurants — and, in fact, countless New Yorkers feel the same way. When you walk into Veselka, the legendary Ukrainian restaurant/diner on the corner of 2nd Ave. and E. 9th St., a vibe of warmth envelops you.
I’ve spent endless hours hanging out there, nursing a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, writing on my laptop, chowing down on the magically tasty dishes that the purveyors call Ukrainian soul food: the pierogis that melt in your mouth, the potato pancakes that are crisp salty heaven, the succulent meatballs and rolled cabbage, the high-octane borscht, not to mention all the sublime American fare, including a burger I’d put up against any burger in New York.
As Veselka devotees will tell you, the welcoming aura of the place — the lack of pretense, the gorgeous murals and knickknacks, the extraordinary friendliness of the staff, many of whom are Ukrainian — feeds right into the savoriness of the cuisine. Veselka is a place of love where the food is made from love; you can’t separate the two.
For years, the restaurant stayed open 24 hours a day, mostly to cater to the world of East Village night crawlers (it had to cut back on hours starting in the pandemic). One of the most memorable images I have of Veselka is when I sat down at around midnight to have a late dinner and write a piece at one of the back tables. I got immersed in what I was doing and didn’t leave, or even look up, until around 4 a.m. When I walked out, every table in the place was full; it felt not like a scraggly after-hours crowd but like a 7 p.m. Friday-night dinner crowd. At Veselka (the name is Ukrainian for “rainbow),” the deliciousness, the casual joy, and the love all go around the clock.
“Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World” pays enthusiastic tribute to Veselka’s place in the city, and to its 70-year history as a family restaurant. On some level, it’s a tale of ego, money, and real estate, and the details of how the restaurant runs are fascinating. Yet this was a documentary shot, for the most part, after the start of the war in Ukraine, and the way Veselka has confronted the war — raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in charity by donating all its borscht sales, acting as a sponsor for Ukrainian citizens to come to the United States — is more than just part of the story the movie is telling. It becomes the central story.
Some of this is noble and stirring. The neighborhood in which Veselka is located was once known as Little Ukraine, and though there are fewer Ukrainians living there than there were decades ago, the area retains its identity. Veselka, during the two years the war has gone on, has become a kind of beacon for the pride and fighting spirit of Ukraine.
Yet as moving as parts of the documentary are, I’ll be honest and say that I couldn’t escape the feeling that Michael Fiore, who wrote, produced, directed, and edited it, should have cut back on some of this stuff and done a more complete job of telling the inside story of the restaurant itself. Veselka is a place that would anchor a great segment of “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.”
There’s a 12-minute video on YouTube that goes into the restaurant’s kitchen and shows you, with a Guy Fieri-like eagerness, how the sausage gets made. I found it a little odd that I learned five times as much about the food at Veselka from that video than I did from a 106-minute documentary about the place. I’m not saying that a pierogi recipe is more important, in the grand human scheme of things, than Ukraine’s — and in many ways, by extension, the Western world’s — fight for freedom in this terrible and heroic war. But “Veselka” is a documentary about a restaurant. The movie should have given us a more detailed sense of why, exactly, people come there.
— Variety