Kachka’s Legacy Surpasses the Eastern European Culinary Renaissance It Started

In the spring of 2014, chef Bonnie Frumkin Morales and her husband, Israel Morales, opened a hallway of a restaurant on Grand Avenue. Frumkin Morales built her career in Chicago, working for fine dining destination restaurants like Tru and Moto; this restaurant, however, had no tasting menu, no hefty price tag or super-serious approach. Instead, the couple served little carafes of vodka, colorful salads and pickles, bowls of dumplings, and dollops of roe and caviar. Plaid tablecloths sopped up spilled glasses of Georgian, Hungarian, and Slovenian wine before they became the hot bottles at natural wine bars. Toasts arrived with sprats and salted mackerel before chic tinned fish lists had their moment. The food was explicitly, unapologetically Eastern European — celebrating the cuisine of Frumkin Morales’s Belarusian family, but also the broader cuisines and tangled foodways of the former Soviet republics.

Between 2014 and now, Kachka has become a nationally recognized brand: a celebrated cookbook, bottled horseradish vodka, frozen pelmeni in grocery aisles. In 2018, the restaurant moved into a sprawling Goat Blocks space, opening a market and deli above the restaurant a year later. In 2024, it will open a Northeast Portland distillery and dumpling factory, with a tasting room for vodka flights. To celebrate its first decade in business, the restaurant host a large-scale, collaborative dinner with lauded Eastern European chefs from around the country. Considering where Kachka is now, it can be easy to forget that little hallway of a restaurant, and the risks that came with opening it.

Before Kachka opened, American stereotypes about the foods of the former USSR were defined by two main, broad-stroke stereotypes rooted in dusty, Cold War-era cliches: extreme poverty or obscene wealth. Off-color, pop culture jokes about herring or potatoes were juxtaposed with lavish spreads of caviar and blinis and ornate confections, straight out of the Russian Tea Room. The cliches extend beyond food: American media representations of Eastern European characters typically reside in the world of villains — Russian spies, Soviet caricatures of authoritarian evil — or pitiful victims, haggard babushkas and harrowing flashbacks for American refugee characters.

But, as is dangerous with any culture, these black-and-white portraits of a truly massive region buff out the color and nuances of the people who lived there, the families and the meals they shared, in Ukraine or Georgia or, in the case of Frumkin Morales’s family, Belarus. When Kachka opened, it offered a deeper, richer portrait of the foods of the former Soviet republics on the national stage, one that was joyful and approachable and personal. Ten years since it opened, Kachka remains a destination and trailblazer in the incrementally burgeoning, modern Eastern European restaurant scene — one that would not exist without it.

Dina Avila/Eater Portland

Dina Avila/Eater Portland

Frumkin Morales hadn’t always planned on opening a restaurant like Kachka. Her relationship with her own cuisine was complicated — growing up, she felt shame surrounding her family’s food, which leaked into her work in fine dining. It wasn’t until she met Israel, who fell in love with the flavors and liveliness of Frumkin family dinners, that she felt empowered to explore post-Soviet food professionally.

“In high-end kitchens, it was this embarrassing thing from my past,” the chef says. “At a different time, it may have seemed like a cool part of my background, but at that time, this was baggage. I always felt that way, and Israel was the first person to look at what was happening in my mother’s kitchen and said, ‘This is incredible. Why are you hiding this?’”

The couple very intentionally left Chicago and came to Portland to open their restaurant because of how the restaurant world appeared at the time: Aughts-era Portland dining seemed to celebrate the unconventional, particularly when it came to these deep dives into specific cuisines; Frumkin Morales remembered looking at restaurants like Pok Pok and thinking that she could do the same with her culture. “We didn’t want to dumb things down,” she says. “We felt very strongly that, at that time, in Chicago, we would not have been accepted. In Portland, we felt no concerns about acceptance. We didn’t feel like we would have had to put the proverbial burger on the menu.”

And accepted it was — not just in Portland, but nationally. Yes, Kachka raked in the best new restaurant nods locally, but former Eater restaurant critic Bill Addison also placed the restaurant on his list of the 38 essential restaurants in the United States. He remembers the tiny glasses of vodka, the rabbit in a clay pot, and the colorful gradient of arguably the restaurant’s most famous dish, Herring Under a Fur Coat. “It’s the Soviet equivalent of the messy Super Bowl dips that we make across America,” Addison says. “But there’s something really appealing when a chef, without ruining the essence of the dish, presents it really beautifully. It’s a great example of tidying up a presentation without ruining its essence.”

For former Eater restaurant editor, Hillary Dixler Canavan, that balancing act is part of the magic of Kachka — not just its celebration of the cuisines of the former Soviet republics, but also its ability to contextualize that cuisine in a way that felt true to the American dining scene at that moment, intimate but exuberant, casual but exceptional. “Kachka is proof of concept: Here’s a restaurant that opened guns blazing, proving this cuisine could hold the dining public’s attention,” Dixler Canavan says. “Bringing that modern restaurant sensibility to it, without being a tasting menu, I think that was part of what made Kachka such a hit.”

Bill Addison/Eater

After Kachka opened, restaurants around the country began venturing into this cuisine. A Georgian food renaissance emerged stateside, and cheesy khachapuri ended up on menus across Manhattan. A parade of “Dachas” landed in major cities like San Francisco and D.C.. Even in Chicago, where the Moraleses couldn’t picture opening Kachka in 2014, Johnny Clark opened his own culinary exploration of Ukrainian food and culture called Anelya. “He’s reconnecting with his roots through recent Ukrainian immigrants, so he’s more telling their story,” Frumkin Morales says.

So, to celebrate their 10-year anniversary, the team at Kachka felt it would be best to bring in this new vanguard of Eastern European chefs for a collaborative dinner. Clark will be joined by chefs like Emily Efraimov of the pop-up Little Dacha in Los Angeles, Anya El-Wattar of San Francisco Russian restaurant Birch & Rye, Trina and Jessica Quinn of New York pop-up Dacha 46, as well as Frumkin Morales. The menu is still in development, but the chefs have talked about things like duck borscht with smoked pears, panna cotta inspired by a cold yogurt-y soup known as okroshka, pork cheek dumplings, and honey cake. “There are so many different ways to reconnect with the cuisine,” she says. “It means different things for different people. I love the way that’s being expressed.”

While El-Wattar was preparing to open Birch & Rye, a friend gifted the chef a copy of Kachka’s cookbook, which has sat on the shelf of the restaurant since it opened. “When I got the email from Bonnie inviting me to contribute a course to Kachka’s tenth anniversary celebration, I didn’t even look at my calendar,” El-Wattar says. “I just thought, ‘I have to make this work, I have to be there for this.’”

The dinner, which Kachka will host at 6:30 on April 14th, serves as a fundraiser for #CookforUkraine, which is collecting funds for UNICEF UK; tickets are available now on Tock.