Lotta well-deserved hype around St. Catharines’ burgeoning food scene these days.
One of our favourite spots is a little off-Broadway: Barrel House Korchma. The kind of place where “something light” means the wood panelling.
On King Street, a short detour from the St. Paul circuit, the room gets straight to the point. Wooden booths. Substantial tables. Ukrainian art and historical portraits. Napkins cinched with little bands of folk embroidery. It’s a room with things to tell you, although first it would like you to eat.
The Barylko family opened the original restaurant in Mimico after moving to Canada from western Ukraine in 2002. The St. Kitts location followed this summer. The recipes, the habits, the understanding of what belongs beside what… dinner began long before you sat down.
A table like this has a way of changing your intentions. You came for lunch. Now you’re considering whether ordering both the pierogi and the pelmeni would be excessive, while quietly hoping somebody else makes the decision for you.
The Borscht makes a spectacular entrance for something generally understood to be soup. A broad bowl of deep scarlet… its surface broken by vegetables and scattered with herbs, with golden buns and sour cream riding alongside. Cabbage and potatoes give you something to pursue beneath the surface. The sour cream presents its own small dilemma: stir it through and watch the red turn pink, or preserve the contrast and negotiate one spoonful at a time.
Either way, keep the bread close.
The Varenyky arrive beneath a glossy congregation of onions, pale crescents overlapping until the bowl seems to contain more folds than empty space. There’s something absorbing about a plate of handmade pierogi. Before you even get to the filling, there are the seams, the little variations, the evidence that somebody stood there closing each one.
An awful lot of work goes into food that disappears this quickly.
Then there are Pelmeni… smaller meat-filled parcels gathered around a bowl of sour cream. They have a different shape, a different proportion of filling to wrapper, a different reason to occupy your fork.
Chicken, beef or pork… there are no wrong answers, only strong orders.
Across the table, the vegetables keep asserting themselves. Thick cucumber wedges gleam with their garlic-and-dill dressing beneath a wild little thicket of sprouts. The beet salad sets dark red chunks against generous blocks of Bulgarian feta, the colours so sharply drawn they almost look typeset. A plate piled with mushrooms (caps and stems tumbling together under green shoots) demands its own stretch of table.
These are dishes you keep returning to between everything else. A cucumber, another dumpling, a mushroom, a piece of bread. The meal develops a rhythm well before anybody considers the next course.
The Khachapuri requires a little more space and considerably less explanation. A long, exuberant expanse of browned cheese enclosed by a raised golden rim, with mozzarella and ricotta tucked into the dough. The crust gives your fingers a place to land. Everything inside it gives them a reason to stay.
Its appearance in the appetizer section raises an interesting philosophical question… if this is how dinner starts, what exactly have we committed to?
Shashlik answers with grilled meat ‘neath a loose tangle of red onion and herbs… ‘kraut heaped alongside. There’s an appealing lack of ceremony to the arrangement. Meat, onions, cabbage, sauce. Everything accessible. Nothing requiring a briefing before you put your fork into it.
The thin onion rings spill across the meat and onto the plate, catching bits of chopped herbs along the way. It’s the kind of presentation that makes reaching across the table seem entirely reasonable, even when the plate technically belongs to somebody else.
Gradually, the table becomes the best thing about the meal. Scarlet soup beside pale dumplings. Bright cucumbers beside grilled meat. Bread being torn, plates moving, sour cream acquiring the status of shared infrastructure. Every new dish changes what you want another bite of.
There’s pleasure in a restaurant that produces that kind of momentum. You order a few things, discover you’ve ordered a feast, and spend the next hour finding room for both the plates and the conversation.
St. Catharines deserves all the attention it’s getting. Save some appetite for the side streets.
