Johnny Clark's Letter to His Grandmother
No detail is too small for Anelya's Ukrainian cuisine. Not even the tile imported from his grandmother's floor.
Parachute was the restaurant that made Chicago feel like the right city. Beverly Kim's Korean-American cooking — personal, precise, deeply rooted in her own story — was the kind of food that makes you want to stay somewhere. When you find out that her husband and co-chef Johnny Clark has opened his own restaurant two blocks away, one that tells his story the same way Parachute tells hers, you go. Immediately.
Anelya is named for Clark's grandmother. She turned 100 this year. The restaurant is his gift to her and his way of putting Ukrainian cuisine on a map that has largely ignored it.
The tile pattern on the floor came from his grandmother's childhood home in Kharkiv. He pulled it himself on a trip to Ukraine. You're eating inside a piece of her house. That's the kind of detail that either feels precious or feels true. At Anelya it feels true.
Why we comes back
Allen's family is Czech. Ukraine and the Czech Republic are different countries with different languages and different histories. At the table, especially at this table, the distance is smaller than you'd think.
There's something in the fermented things, the root vegetables, the dumplings, the layered honey cake at the end that reads as deeply familiar to him. Not identical to his grandmother's cooking. Adjacent to it. The way Eastern European kitchens seem to have arrived at similar answers to the same questions about how to take care of people. You can smell it when you walk in.
Start with the Zakusky tower
A cart rolls to your table. You choose your bites. The menu rotates with the season so there's no guarantee anything will be there on your visit. On our visits the standouts were the salmon roe tart, the house pickles, and the chicken liver. Get all three if they're available. None of them will let you down.
The roast duck borscht is exceptional. Deep, smoky, complex. Not the borscht you're imagining if your only reference is the canned version. This one earns its place.
The bread is the kind you eat too much of and don't apologize for.
The chicken Kyiv is competent but I may suggest ordering something else. The other entrees outshine it.
The varenyky are worth your attention. Ukrainian dumplings, and the mushroom version was the favorite at our table. Earthy, substantial, the kind of dumpling that makes you want to understand the whole tradition it came from.
Then there's the Medivnyk. A layered honey cake. In Czech it goes by something close to medovník, the spelling shifting depending on whose grandmother you're asking. Allen orders it every single time. It's floral, dense, not too sweet. It tastes like someone figured it out a long time ago and nobody has improved on it since. It is the reason we keep coming back even after we've worked through everything else on the menu.
The context
Anelya sits where Wherewithall used to be, two blocks from Parachute, which is now Parachute Hi-Fi. If you know what Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark built over there, you already understand the level of care that goes into everything they touch. If you don't, that's a separate article. Worth knowing: this kitchen has a track record, and that track record is part of why Chicago is worth paying attention to.
Anelya is also Chicago's first Ukrainian Michelin-listed restaurant. File that under things that make sense once you've eaten here.
The bottom line
Anelya is where we go when we want to eat well and mean it. Not to be seen. Not to check a box. To sit down, order the cart, stay too long, and finish with the honey cake.
The food tastes like someone's grandmother figured it out first and the kitchen had the good sense not to fix what wasn't broken.
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