A local's guide to the 24-hour, Eastern European cuisine of Brighton Beach

Farideh Sadeghin is a chef and video host based in Brooklyn. As part of a new series, she is exploring New York City neighborhoods through their food and histories.

Stepping off the Brighton Beach Avenue subway platform can feel like arriving in another country. The Brooklyn neighborhood, which is between Coney Island and Manhattan Beach, is dense and buzzing with enough Eastern European markets, shops, and restaurants to distract you from catching some rays on the sand – or at least make a beach day that much better.

Brighton Beach is also referred to as Little Odessa – after the port city of the same name in Ukraine – due to it being home to thousands of Russian-speaking Soviet Jews who immigrated to the neighborhood, according to the Guardian. While some Eastern European immigrants began arriving in the area as early as the 1920s and again after World War II, one of the biggest waves was in the 1970s. It was then that the Russian government relaxed emigration policies for Jews and thus they arrived in Brighton, fleeing discrimination. The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought another wave of immigrants, according to the nonprofit New Women New Yorkers.

Jessica Quinn, the Jewish daughter of a Latvian mother and a Ukrainian father, grew up on Long Island but spent most weekends in Brighton Beach, visiting family and shopping at M&I International (now closed, but previously the premiere grocery store at the time) and dining at Tatiana’s. While her parents – who met on a blind date after immigrating here in the late 70s and early 1980s – settled on Long Island, most of their extended family was in Brighton Beach.

Jessica Quinn met her now-wife Trina Quinn in 2011 and by 2015, the couple began exploring Brighton Beach together, allowing Jessica Quinn to show off the world that she grew up loving. Trina fell in love with the area as well, and the two spend most of their time cruising Brighton Beach Avenue shopping for ingredients and snacks and lounging on the beach.

Both women were chefs at different restaurants in 2020, and Trina Quinn found herself furloughed from her job shortly after the start of the pandemic. As a way to occupy her hands, mind and time while at home, she began making pelmeni. And Jessica Quinn would come home from her job as pastry chef at Rezdora to find sheet trays full of the handmade pork and onion-filled dumplings that her wife had spent all day forming. It was Trina Quinn who suggested they begin selling the food full-time.

By October of that year, Jessica Quinn had left her job and together they started Dacha 46, a Eastern European food popup, out of their Bed-Stuy apartment. Dacha 46 serves everything from traditional dishes such as vareniki (potato-filled dumplings) and medovik (a honey-layered sponge cake) to spins on classics, like their khachapuri pelmeni (an herby, dill-infused dough surrounding a filling of mozzarella, goat cheese and feta), and its food is beloved in the community. I first met the Quinns while volunteering earlier in the summer and knew that I needed to get out to Brighton Beach with them sometime to explore the neighborhood that they knew so well.

We met on a sunny August afternoon and we grabbed a lamb samsa (a savory layered pastry cooked in a Tandir, or clay oven) from Brighton Tandir and a couple piroshki, a crescent-shaped yeast-risen dough that is either baked (if sweet) or fried (if savory). We got two: one filled with scallion and egg, the second with a mixture of cabbage and carrots, both from Home Made Cooking Cafe. Brighton Tandir and Home Made Cooking Cafe are located next to one another at the bottom of the stairs to the subway on Brighton Beach Avenue. The samsa and piroshiki are perfect snacks to grab before heading to the beach, which is exactly what we did.

The samsa was flaky and light, while the piroshki were doughy and slightly more dense, both incredibly savory, hitting perfectly as our first bites of the day. We sat on the boardwalk chatting about our plan, while Trina Quinn laughed and snapped pictures of Sean Sirota (our photographer) and I as we took pictures and recorded videos of Jessica Quinn tearing open the pastries.

You can find many spots selling homemade samsa and piroshki along Brighton Beach Avenue, but Jessica Quinn mentions that there used to be more. The younger generations are leaving the area to pursue “the American dream,” she said. Their parents want better lives for their kids, as is the case with most immigrants in the U.S., and a lot of these cooking techniques and recipes will be lost, she said.

We headed to Tashkent Supermarket, home of (in my opinion) New York City's best hot and cold 24-hour food buffet. If you enter the store, which is located on the corner of Brighton Beach Avenue and Coney Island Avenue, and wade through stands loaded with fruits and vegetables and cakes ordered by the pound, you'll discover two 50 foot-long, double-sided buffets loaded with over 200 trays of food. They’re filled with everything from salads and pastries to cutlets and noodles. Tashkent Supermarket opened in 2017, and there has been buzz of a Manhattan location opening in the West Village any day now.

I wandered the buffet, feeling overwhelmed and staring with my mouth hanging open. I was nearly drooling and wanted to try everything. Tuna, crab and seafood salads were piled high near more slices of cake, pastries, and chicken cutlets. Manti, pelmeni and vareniki steam from the trays, begging to be heaped into a container and taken home. While we didn’t get anything, Jessica and Trina often shop here for halal meats, fruits and chebureki (fried meat pies). I can’t wait to go back and load up on all the things.

We wandered a bit further down Brighton Beach Avenue to Kashkar Cafe, one of the only Uyghur restaurants in the city. The eatery is known for its lagman noodles (hand-pulled noodles with beef in a savory broth) and manti (large fried or steamed dumplings filled with minced lamb and onion), which we ordered alongside the lamb ribs. The noodles were perfectly chewy and the tomato broth was laced with dill. We ate the manti with both a tomato and hot sauce, plus sour cream. I washed it all down with Tarkhun, a vibrant green tarragon soda, and we headed towards Skovorodka for lunch number two.

Skovorodka, meaning “skillet” in Russian, is a Ukranian restaurant about a five-minute walk down Brighton Beach Avenue from Kashkar Cafe. A large, ferocious bear stands guard at the entrance. But upon entering the restaurant, you’re greeted by friendly faces and a stuffed Elvis serving as DJ. We enjoyed our first (and then second) round of vodka shots with a bite of pickle and kompot (a homemade cold fruit juice) to wash it down. The salad olivier (potato salad with vegetables such as peas, pickles and carrots, as well as mayonnaise) and the crepes with salmon roe and sour cream were light and honestly perfect with the vodka.

From there we walked a couple blocks to Vanilla Gourmet Specialty Foods. The term “kid in a candy store” has never felt so spot on. I love chocolate, and while you’ll find that a lot of the shops carry chocolates along Brighton Beach Avenue, Vanilla Gourmet (which was previously called Vintage until about one-and-a-half years ago) is the spot to really indulge. There are bins of chocolate and candies throughout the store, all priced by the pound. I have no idea how many kinds of confections they carry, but each is enveloped in the cutest wrapping with the most unique designs and illustrations.

Mishka Kosolapy, Belochka, and Alenka are famous Russian chocolates and were introduced in 1966. The iconic Alenka (flavored with praline, vanilla and wafer layers glazed in chocolate) wrapper shows a small girl with big blue eyes and a headscarf staring back at you, while the Belochka (hazelnut flavor) has an illustration of a squirrel, and the Mishka Kosolapy (layers of wafers and nutty chocolate) has bears on it. There are so many chocolates and candies, you could spend hours there sorting through and trying them all. Willy Wonka has got nothing on Vanilla Gourmet.

Next door is Gold Label, another gourmet grocery store with an amazing selection of sausages and dairy products, this is another spot the Quinns frequent for cold salads, dips and their frozen handmade pelmeni. I got a few smoked pork sausages, golubtsi (stuffed cabbage), and Dadu, a soft wafer cone filled with ice cream. These bars originated in Lithuania in 1997 and they’re now my new favorite frozen treat. Don’t miss out on the cheesecake bars; there are a ton of flavors and brands to try in the refrigerated section. They contain a mixture of farmer cheese and other flavors, and are about the size of fun-sized candy bars and coated in chocolate. I tried a poppy seed flavored one and was pleasantly surprised by how much I loved it!

We wandered around a bit more, then made our way back to the boardwalk to Tatiana’s. We were there on a Thursday, but I definitely recommend going on the weekends when there are live cabaret shows to go along with your meal. The atmosphere is fun and festive and the food is spot on.

Their handmade pelmeni (a combination of pork and veal-filled dumplings) arrived doused in melted butter and when they landed on our table, Jessica Quinn mixed in sour cream, creating an even more decadent sauce for them to bathe in. We sat outside on the boardwalk, the Atlantic Ocean our view, and gave a toast with our beers as we dug into the pork shashlik (grilled pork kebabs with sauerkraut, onions, salad, bread, and crispy potatoes) and solyanka (soup with meat, sausage, pickles, capers, olives, and lemon). For dessert, we ordered the vareniki (a traditional half moon-shaped dumpling that comes with a variety of fillings; ours were filled with sweet and sour cherries). We also got the smetannik (layers of moist cake with sour cream) and the crispy napoleon (traditionally puff pastry and pastry cream are layered and refrigerated overnight until soft, however the version at Tatiana’s is crisp and lovely), as well as a couple more shots of vodka to end a pretty much perfect day at the beach.

Shopping and dining here can often seem intimidating — most signs are written in Russian, which is the predominant language you’ll hear in the streets — but the people are incredibly friendly and inviting. When we ordered the sausages at Gold Label, the woman clapped her hands and excitedly exclaimed, “May you always be happy!” and immediately I felt just that.

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All the places mentioned in this article are in this Google Map, which you can save to your phone.